Google Just Killed Your Online Business
Google has been making a lot of changes to the SERPs, and it seems they are pushing a lot of well known brands to the top of the listings.
One of their recent updates which I will coin as “Google Brand Links” can have a negative impact on online businesses.
Online traffic visitors will generally search for keywords (not brands) to find a product online, and online businesses rely heavily on these ‘unbranded keywords’.
If you were to search for ‘underwear‘ on Google, you’ll notice the first listing is freshpair.com. You’ll also notice that this company is not trying to go after branded keywords like “Victoria Secret”, “Joe Boxer”, “Hanes”, “Fruit of the Loom”, and “Calvin Klein” (even though they probably sell these brands)
Before, if I was looking for ‘underwear’ online, I would’ve probably been checking out freshpair.com before looking at the other sites on page 1. Now, Google has added these Google Brand Links to the top of the SERPs which will grab a person’s attention before they even see freshpair.com.
If I was a woman looking for underwear online, then I would probably click on the Victoria Secret link. If you click on the link, you’ll see that the Victoria Secret’s home page comes first which is no surprise. The problem is that Victoria Secret has an ECommerce site just like freshpair which means that fresh would more than likely lose the sale.
Now that’s just the first part…..it gets worse.
Let’s suppose you’re an ecommerce company that is selling a brand of an electric blanket that is not well known. Before the Google Brand update, you relied heavily on the organic visitors. Now that Google added the branded links, your chances of getting your product noticed has become very small. Not only have the big brands taken over the Shopping Results, they are now in the top under the Google Brand links .
That poor guy ElectricBlanket.net will probably lose a lot of traffic to Sunbeam, Beautyrest, Martex, Sealy, and LL Bean …and of course the Shopping Results. Sunbeam and other companies may not sell products directly, but when you click on their links…..guess who shows up? Amazon and JC Penney.
Now the online visitor will probably end up with one of these 2 companies, and electricblanket.net will never see them come to their site.
If you search for TV Wall Mount, you’ll notice that the brands are at the top again. If I were to buy a tv wall mount online, I doubt I will look at the brand as they’re probably all made in China by the same manufacturer. Since more than 50% of the online traffic click on the first link, they’ll probably end up click on the Sony Google Brand link.
Does Sony have it’s own Ecommerce store? Yep. I probably won’t buy their $899 TV wall mount, but since I’m already on that page….I’ll probably buy it at Amazon or hdtvsolutions.com. Amazon doesnt lose anything but standsandmounts.com which was part of the first query will lose a lot of visitors.
The only recommendation I can probably offer may not be the best possible solution since you may get slapped with a cease and desist letter.
Either way I’ll offer it and you can do it at your own risk.
If I were the TV Wall Mount company, I would try to offer the Sony brand and the other brands of wall mounts. I would also look into optimizing the Sony Wall Mount product page to rank on page 1 right next to the Sony website. Even if Google takes down the new brand links, you would still get the visitors who search products by brand name.
Update: Google posts about the Brand Refinements here
