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Google has recently made the decision to start displaying brand suggestions on its search engine results page (SERP), a decision which will no doubt affect even the most powerful ecommerce sites in myriad ways. Fortunately, there are ways to benefit from this new feature. The below recommendations will enable you to leverage on the strength of your brand or company.

You should start the initiative by compiling a list of all the brands for sale on your website (if you run a shoe retail company, that means writing down “Reebok”, “Nike”, “Callaway”, and “Fila” among others). Then get a list of all brands (other retail stores) that sell similar products. Both lists are essential once you do the following:

• Conduct a giveaway contest for a certain brand. When you use something as a giveaway, make sure that the links it generates uses the product name as the anchor text. 
• Create a product group called “brands” on your website, similar to how Amazon use it’s “Brands” page.
• Use company blog to raise awareness. The next time you write a blog post, try to integrate brands as the keywords to be used in the title, description, and body.
• Do comparisons with other brands. If there are well-known shoe brands that aren’t available on your store, do comparisons like “Why Brand X (the brand you carry) is better than Brand Y (the brand you don’t).
• Associate your brand with more searches. There are several ways to do this including obtaining more anchor text that includes the brand + keyword phrases. Another method is to hire usability testers to determine if your strategy is working.

Google will continually change the way it displays search results. The key is to quickly adapt to the changing trends to avoid getting left behind. The brand suggestions that are starting to appear on the SERP page is a relatively minor change. However, responding to it early can help ensure the long-term viability of your business.

At the end of the day, no one knows what decisions Google will take in the future. Certain features on the search engines will be more prominent than others. If the dominant search engine decides that the top brands should be given more attention, you’ll be well-poised to benefit from it even more.

Author Byline:

Ed Riley has been an experienced search engine optimization speclalist for over 4 years. He currently works in the search engine marketing department of Premiere Tree Services of Raleigh, which focuses on tree removal, tree trimming and more throughout North Carolina.