There is an always returning complaint whenever big updates or changes in the SERPs shake the visibility of thousands of websites: Google always favours the big brands.
This complaint is then followed by a corollary of attempted explanations (It’s the links! or Google only cares about brands that can spend thousands of dollars on AdWords! are classics) and accusations against Google for its inability to recognize the value of the content that the affected websites produce daily.
I don’t mean to say that Google is perfect (there are hundreds of evidence to the contrary), and if some of the accusations against it are correct, the majority of them remain on the surface of the problem, which is usually not only on Google’s side but also on the websites’ side.
The brand bias.
Before I start explaining the nature of the problem and how we can work on solving it at the SEO level, I ask you to do a little test.
Let’s say you’re looking for sneakers, does your attention (and eventual click) instinctively go to Nike or Ultralon?
Or maybe you are exploring the idea of
Chances are you instinctively chose Nike and Mercedes, and that wouldn’t be surprising. In fact, there are dozens of studies that explain how people naturally tend to choose brands they recognize over brands they either don’t know or know very little about.
This bias is also reflected in how people search for information on the Internet.
On the one hand, 44.19% of searches are for brands, as Rand Fishkin explains well in a study recently published in Sparktoro on how people search on Google.
On the other hand, this bias towards recognized brands has a direct effect on the engagement signals in the SERPs (specifically the CTR), which we know have an important value in the initial phase of “filtering” the results to be shown as a response to a query (Navboost):
Source: Natzir Turrado.
Attention! This bias is also registered and has an important weight also at the level of AI Overview (and possibly other similar systems).
In fact, according to the SGE patent (which has presumably been largely translated into AIO), AI responses are dynamic and context-aware, meaning that the AI
Google learns from how users interact with the search results. If certain responses are consistently overlooked in favor of others, or if user clicks suggest a preference, the AI modifies future responses to align more closely with user behavior.
This is interesting, because not only does Google put a lot of weight on engagement signals in the SERPs, which are influenced by the brand bias of the searchers, but these biases are reinforced by the personalization of searches, as Google will tend to show us a little more those sites on whose results we have clicked.
This is evident in environments such as Discover or YouTube but is also clearly making its way in Search.
Meeting the mentor. A simple definition of Brand.
The first thing to do is to have a clear definition of “Brand”, even if simple:
A brand is a distinctive identity that includes the name, symbol, design, values
Do you believe that a machine like Google can understand this series of concepts on its own as we could?
The answer is: “No!”. It cannot do so for the same reason that it is incapable of understanding whether a piece of content is of quality simply by indexing it.
Google needs signals, which can be translated into factors of recognition of the existence of a brand, its value, its popularity, its authority and its relevance.
A possible translation in search terms could be this:
A brand (product, service or organization) is a named entity with:
- Distinctive characteristics such as the name, the logo (and the design).
- Clear values
(entity attributes). - External trust signals.
- Authority signals.
- Associations with other named entities (branded queries), which indicate the existence of a “psychological and emotional” bond between the brand and those who search on Google.
If we are not able to effectively transmit these signals, then we will fail to translate our brand not only for Google but also for Bing, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
Passing the threshold and starting the SEO brand adventure.
In our “hero’s journey” toward translating a brand for the machines, we SEOs will need to count on allies aka marketers in other fields of digital marketing (or simply marketing) and be prepared to deal with enemies (internal and external), who will difficult our passing the trials.
The need to count on allies is also a warning to avoid a rather common mistake in SEO professionals: isolating themselves in a self-referential bubble and ending up considering SEO the center of every marketing action that even has to “guide” the entire online marketing strategy.
The first trial: Knowledge Graph and structured data.
Is our brand in the Knowledge Graph?
If so, how? Is the data complete or not? Is it correct or not?
We should ask the same questions for all those “entities” that are an essential part of the brand’s identity:
- Important people such as management or people who sign the contents, for example, of the website’s magazine/blog.
- Products.
- Services.
- Brands associated with the main brand (for example, the cultural foundation of a bank, which normally has a different legal and corporate name than the bank itself).
We can use a tool like Serpapi.com for this type of analysis.
Then, we should also check that there are other entities in the Knowledge Graph, which can lead to disambiguation issues, and see if they are more relevant than ours.
For this, we can use the Knowledge Graph APIs as explained by Gus Pelogia in his blog or the Knowledge Graph Search tool of Audits.com:
If we are not present in the Knowledge Graph or if our confidence score is weak, we can improve it by creating profiles/pages on websites that Google may use for obtaining information for the KGraph.
Even if it is always a desirable thing to have, it is not an obligation to own a dedicated page on Wikipedia/Wikidata.
Google also uses other sources for updating and expanding the Knowledge Graph:
- Its ecosystem (Google Business, Merchant Center, Manufacturer Center, YouTube).
- The major social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn).
- Trusted seeds (i.e.: the Amazon ecosystem of Amazon.com, IMDB.com and Amazon Music).
- Second-generation tiers with websites like Crunchbase and Glassdoor.
- The index itself (this is the case, for instance, of websites like Wookiepedia, which is sometimes referred to as a source for the Knowledge Graph of Star Wars entities).
Finally, if the Knowledge Panel for our brand already exists or has been created thanks to our activity, we must reclaim it:
The process is not complex and relatively like when you claim the property of a Google Business page for a local business.
The main node, however, is our own website and, at this point, we need to talk about structured data.
Structured data must be considered as the semantic mapping of all the relationships existing between the entities of our website (note: a page is also an entity) and of these with the entities cited in the site and pertinent to its or other “domains”.
It is important not to be superficial in the use of structured data and to make a basic implementation.
For example, if we are a local business, localBusiness indeed is enough. However, if we are a dentist, we could use schema.org/Dentist, which offers the possibility of labelling the specific data of our shop in a more effective way.
This invitation to avoid superficiality is something that Google itself does precisely in the case of Organization structured data.
In its guideline, it tells us: “There are no required properties; instead, we recommend adding as many properties that are relevant to your organization.”
The properties that Google indicates to us are 28, while Schema.org presents 40 properties directly associated with Organization (i.e.: slogan or founder) and other generic Thing properties, which can be used.
Of all of them, the most relevant property at the Knowledge Graph level is ’’sameAs’’:
However, do not limit yourself to using it only to associate the site with social media profiles, but also with other profile pages your business company may have.
Be aware that sometimes things can be complicated.
For instance, here below you see the use of parentOrganization and subOrganization to indicate the hierarchical relationship between a holding company and two companies belonging to the holding company:
The philosophy that we SEOs must adopt is to think about structured data beyond obtaining Rich Results.
As Jono Alderson explains well in “What if Schema.org is just… Labels?“, structured data is a system of labelling the contents and elements of a web page and creating coherent semantic relationships between these elements so that both classic search engines and, if not especially, new systems based on LLMs can understand, parse and “label” our content, therefore considering it more relevant for certain answers in a determined domain.
In the case of brands, in the general sense given in the explanation offered at the beginning of the post, we can use data to translate the relationships that exist, for example, between a product manufactured by a company and sold through a distributor, which is something quite common in the B2B world:
Product > manufacturer > Organization > brand > seller > Organization
Other examples are:
- CollectionPage > ItemList > ListItem > Product > brand > Organization, in the case of the new carrousel.
- Author > worksFor > Organization > CreativeWork > publisher > author, to label the page of an author who writes for a newspaper, which has other authors in its employ.
- Person > works For > Organization, for bio pages of people who work for a company.
Other properties, which should be used much more than they are, are “about” and “mention”.
Thanks to them we can indicate which entities are the main object of a page and which ones, even if relevant, are only mentioned.
Of course, thanks to their NLP algorithms, the “machines” can understand this type of information, but only if the written content and its context are such as to be unequivocally understood, however strengthening (or guiding) this understanding is always advisable, because they contribute to the association between the Brand/Organization entity with other entities, which are nothing else if not those that then come to compose the “generic” element of the branded queries:
The second trial: Branded Queries.
Very often branded queries are taken for granted since generic queries are those on which much more attention is paid.
Yet, they should not be taken lightly because, even if in many cases our site will rank in a more than evident way, they can offer us insights on how and what people are searching for in association with our brand.
In the context of international SEO, then, the analysis of branded queries can be an important source of the interests of the local market that we are targeting.
For instance, in the case of Games Workshop’s branded searches in Italy, it is interesting to see how many of them are related to the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game:
By obtaining this type of insight through the monitoring and analysis of branded queries, we can then conduct a specific analysis by analyzing the SERP Features (see this guide of mine on how to do it) to discover its details and act accordingly.
For example, in this case, actions that we could propose to better target branded searches in Italy could be the following:
- remove the link to the “Middle Earth” section from under “Other” and immediately present it in the main menu.
- prominently present the Sauron minis (The Dark Lord Sauron and Sauron the Necromancer) in the PLPs.
Beyond the branded searches that we can identify through the Google Search Console Performance report and/or tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, let’s not forget to consult the queries that Google Trends presents to us and the questions that are listed in the People Also Ask of the branded searches (if present).
Furthermore, let’s not forget that under the concept of a brand, we must include all the names of our products such for example, “Nike Jordan 1” if we were Nike:
But what if there are no branded queries because we are a new brand or have poor visibility online?
In cases like these, what we can do is conduct an analysis of our competitors’ branded searches, and identify common patterns, which could therefore also occur in our case.
In this way we can create ad hoc content capable of targeting branded searches from the very beginning.
The third trial: Branded Awareness.
With Google rapidly transforming from a search engine to a portal, the competition for visibility is increasingly fierce.
Now it’s not just about getting “visibility” but getting brand and distinctive visibility capable of not only attracting clicks but also generating impact in the memory of those who search.
What is certain, for example, is that continuing to create content for a blog that is then indistinguishable from a thousand others by doing a “read-only” test is not the solution to getting this type of visibility:
We must remember that all our content must not only respond to a search intent but also, once the click and visit from Search have been obtained, respond positively to the beneficial purpose, which the user expects to satisfy by visiting our page.
In other words, if a page does not satisfy the beneficial purpose implicit in the query, it will start to lose visibility.
A machine like Google must calculate whether a page satisfies the beneficial purpose implicit in the query through hundreds of signals ranging from language analysis to entity and context analysis, engagement signals in SERP and on page and on signals such as backlinks and link graphs (and shopping graphs), mentions and co-occurrences.
In the case of systems based on LLMs, we will then also have to consider the “Monosemanticity” factor, or the ability of the words (“neurons”) that make up a text to conform to an unequivocal context at a lexical level and, consequently, conceptual and meaning level, regarding the topic we wish to communicate and target (to learn more about Monosemanticity, read this article by Andrea Volpini and this study on Claude 3 Sonnet).
In short, we must understand (and make others understand) once and for all that the “quality” of content is not based on subjective and “human” values
Here above, we see the framework that should guide the content strategy. It is not that complex to understand, and it is based on the branded assessment of the content strategy.
When we create content that stands in the “winning zone”, we will have content that will resonate with our audience (buyer personas) and with the people/websites that can influence it (audience persona), hence keen to amplification in the sense of mentions, co-citations and backlinks, which will empower the awareness of our brand and its visibility.
Let’s see two examples.
Asics has an informational section that responds to a very common pain point casual, semi-professional and professional runners have: what is the right sneaker for me?
As you can see from the screenshot above (or directly from the page), the content is meant to be indeed informational but useful.
We do not have a dissertation about the supinator feet posture, but an animated image that explains it in an obvious way.
And because Asics is not Wikipedia, and it must sell sneakers, it presents a button with a call to action for buying shoes that have been designed for the supinator posture.
The content is informational, actionable, clear, uniquely distinctive and able to smoothly guide the users down in the conversion funnel.
As a plus, it is evergreen and does not decay as also the most successful blog post does. And never stops to earn backlinks and mentions and co-citations:
Idealista.com, probably the most important real estate website in Spain, has a section devoted to data-driven reports about the real estate market, which very rich in details and data points.
The quality of the information is such that has become a source of reference for journalists and professionals of the sector, and since when it was published for the first time many years ago already, it was key in helping the brand Idealista becoming synonymous with real estate.
And it works, obviously, also as a magnet for backlinks from the most authoritative Spanish websites:
However, there is another way to earn brand visibility: using Google as showcase.
Let’s imagine that we are a website selling paints for mini painting hobbyist and professional painters.
Instead of creating another article about the correct use of washes, we could design a guide like this:
A well thought and executed guide of this type can easily dominate the targeted “search sphere” and give to the website publishing it to be visible in hundreds if not thousands of query variables.
The same constant visibility will ultimately drive click and discovery, and if the quality of the content published pairs the quality of the content hub/guide, then backlinks will come naturally.
This is what Polygon has done with its guide (albeit not so complex as the one I would do):
But many of these backlinks are nofollow, some SEO will probably say.
Honestly, I would not care that much about it.
Are they placed on authoritative website and able to drive referral traffic, therefore fulfilling their brand awareness and amplification purpose? If the answer is yes, the follow attribute of the link would be a great add-on, but it wouldn’t not be a tragedy if it was tagged a nofollow.
Moreover, co-citations and cooccurrences still have a great influence for visibility on search engines and, even more, LLM-based search environments.
The fourth trial: repurpose and amplification.
If we create content also for brand awareness, then it is fundamental to share its creation and amplification with our allies aka the marketers of other channels:
Repurpose and amplify using both your means and of website/persons that we know influence our target.
Repurpose and amplification, if well executed, will create a virtuous flywheel of branded searches, entity associations, mentions and backlinks that will generate even more branded searches, entity associations, mentions and backlinks.
The relation between brand awareness on channels like YouTube, social media et al is something that we all say exists but let’s see two examples.
The Wrapped campaign has this effect on the branded search for Spotify (see the spike at the beginning of December.
You may say that this is an obvious case story.
So let’s see the second, and I will use again Games Workshop as an example.
The web ecosystem of Games Workshop is very complex, but its YouTube channel is probably one of its more important assets, and YouTube in general it’s very important in general for the visibility of its brand also thanks to the many collaborations with creators.
So, the announcements of new products are made first – albeit not only – on YouTube.
In September 2024, Warhammer announced the launch of the new box sets for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, and this was the effect on branded searches on Google of the announcement on its channel and in the channels of dozens of creators:
The ordeal.
We’ve overcome challenges, but the hardest test still lies ahead.
The greatest obstacle in SEO often isn’t external — it’s our own mindset.
Many SEOs work in silos, with limited and sometimes conflicting communication with developers. Collaboration with other marketing disciplines is often superficial, lacking the coordination needed to truly maximize the potential of an SEO strategy.
Let’s be honest: SEOs have often seen themselves as central to online marketing, sometimes believing that SEO holds a higher importance than fields like social media, paid advertising, or content marketing. This perspective has led to an attitude where SEO is seen as the foundation of every strategy, regardless of context. However, this mindset can alienate peers and hinder progress, creating a disconnect between SEO and the broader marketing ecosystem.
This insular approach damages the perception of SEO. If it’s viewed as an overly technical or “mystical” discipline, misunderstandings with stakeholders and other teams will persist.
This not only limits collaboration but also contributes to the perception that SEO is hard to integrate with other marketing functions.
The way forward is clear: SEOs need to prioritize collaboration and integration. When supporting brand-focused initiatives — or any marketing objective — the first step should always be understanding the brand itself.
Request the Brand Bible or equivalent documentation and study it carefully before crafting an SEO strategy. This ensures alignment with the brand’s voice, identity, and overall goals.
By adopting a more collaborative and brand-centric approach, SEO can shift from being seen as a standalone technical practice to an integral part of the broader marketing strategy. Respect and teamwork, not isolation or arrogance, are what will drive long-term success.
In other words, we will need to know this:
An excellent example of an SEO tactic aligned with brand strategy is the methodology developed by Caitlin Hathaway, who used ChatGPT to create detailed, tailored briefs.
It is also advisable to understand the concept of the Product Network Triangle.
I recommend you read the article I linked, but a very synthetic definition can be this:
The Product Network Triangle is a strategic framework that highlights the interplay between three essential components of product success: the Business, the Users, and the Technology.
At the core of the triangle is the Product, which acts as the central point where these three elements converge.
The framework underscores the need to balance business goals, user needs, and technological capabilities to create a product that is both viable and impactful. Alignment across these dimensions ensures the product delivers value while remaining sustainable and scalable in the long term.
SEO is present in the vertex between Users and Business, and it shares with other marketing channels the objective of translating the Users’ needs that the Product should satisfy and communicating these insights to both the developers (owners of the Technology vertex) and highlighting to the Users the unique selling points of the Product as it has been defined by the Business (and convince it to properly budget the SEO strategy through business-oriented forecasts).
For instance, explaining to the “technologist” the need to invest efforts, time and a budget in creating a tool because more effective for satisfying the beneficial purpose the users expect to obtain using our website and explaining to the business side the advantages in terms of improved and more positive brand perception the users will have thanks to the creation of the tool, hence a higher number of returning users and increase of potential conversions.
Quite different than trying to convince our bosses or clients using jargon and vanity metrics like “ranking for keyword X or Y”.
The reward and return home.
If we successfully pass the final test and, with the support of allies from other disciplines, translate the brand into signals that machines can easily understand, we will achieve the desired outcomes. This effort will make our brand more visible and increase its association with relevant entities and keywords tied to our business.
As a result, search engines like Google and systems powered by large language models (LLMs) will begin displaying our brand for generic searches. These systems will associate those searches with our brand entity, ensuring our visibility in contexts that matter most to our business goals.
Do you want to see an example? Below are a few screenshots of a client of mine who is visible in Google Search, AI Overview, SearchGPT and Copilot.
Google Search.
AI Overview.
SearchGPT.
