In a world with hundreds of major sites all competing for the same keywords it’s often hard to make a profit based on SEO & PPC alone – what you need to do is figure out how to get people searching for you and in order for that to happen you need to build a brand.

Forgetting even about the recent Google brand update the main advantage of being a brand is that thousands of people will search for your website every month. Take into account the fact that these visitors might convert at for example 5% rather than your usual 1% and your brand status can literally make the difference between success and failure.

For example a site which gets 500 brand visitors a day will make 750 sales per month from brand search netting £15,000 profit on a modest £20 profit per sale. This same site could do the same with traffic from SEO but that would need 5 times the traffic to generate the same sales figures.

There are a load of different ways to build a brand from TV/press advertising, social media and offline PR but the easiest way is using the clients website and online marketing strategy to help visitors believe that the site is a big brand, even if they’re not quite there yet.

Put simply, everything you do and every message you convey on your site has to say that you are the experts, the number one company in your industry and can be trusted and relied on 100% to offer great service and great products.

One of the great ways to do this is with SEO – most people think the most reputable sites are at the top of Google so the more traffic you can send the more trusted you become. Of course first impressions count which is where the onsite branding comes in. There are two types of site, ones which are happy just to shift products and ones which have a quality feel to them. The difference might not be obvious initially but once you spend some time on the site and have a good look round a brand site you can see the attention to detail, design and usability.

Of course not every brand has a decent website but if you want to compete on a higher level within your industry then building an amazing website which has more content, more features, more tools and a better design than every other site in your industry is essential for you to become a brand and take over.

Anybody can knock up an ecommerce site for next to nothing but without the attention to detail required to actually build a brand that site will never become an industry leader.

How would you like a 38.6% conversion rate? Well that’s what ProFlowers has managed for May 2009 according Grokdotcom and Nielson Panel data.

Here are the top 10 converting websites for May 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. ProFlowers 38.6
2. Office Depot 28.0
3. Online Retail Total 25.6
4. Vitacost.com 25.0
5. Quixtar 23.4
6. Blair 23.4
7. Roamans22.6
8. 1800Flowers 20.5
9. Woman Within19.6
10. Spiegel 18.20
*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Google Suggest is a great feature and works perfectly but I’ve never been convinced that it will change the way people search in a measurable way. Most of the people I watch performing searches (even tech savvy ones) tend to look at the keyboard as they type rather than the screen so they never see the suggested results.

Latitude has carried out some research to see whether search volumes for a host of suggested terms have increased since Google Suggest was launched in the UK towards the end of March.

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An interesting case has been reported today with Amazon apparently refusing to honour commissions on affiliate sales generated via Twitter.

It seems they are relying on TOS that say any link has to be from “Your Site” in order to be eligible for commission and Amazon is keen to enforce that.
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This October I will be speaking alongside some of the industries biggest names at the first UK edition of the SEOmoz Pro Seminar series.

The focus this year is on “instantly actionable Tips, Tricks, and Tactics. Two days jam-packed with priceless hints and secrets to give you the edge over your competitors” – personally I think it’s going to be a great event and well worth the entry fee.

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This weeks brand update has left a lot of people trying to figure out exactly why Google is boosting the ranking of certain top brands. We know they aren’t boosting sites just because they are owned by a big brand – the boost comes from a number of authority factors that Google is giving greater trust to and the net effect of this is that brands are getting better rankings for major keywords.

One of those authority factors is likely to be search volume – if one of the biggest keywords in the travel insurance industry is “post office travel insurance” then Google gives the Post Office a boost for that particular keyword. I would be amazed if Google wasn’t including this data in the authority & relevancy part of the algorithm for major keywords, the only unknown aspect is how much it’s being used.
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Some of you might have noticed a few changes with how we handle comments on Blogstorm and I wanted to explain things in a bit more detail. I will discuss the features first and the reason behind the changes at the end of the post.

In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.

The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link.
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When Google carried out the brand update on Google.com in March we carried out a study to see where Britains most trusted brands ranked on Google. The idea being that if Google was boosting brands either on purpose or as a side effect of a change in the authority algorithm we would be able to see in the search results.

At the time we concluded that brands were ranking where we would expect based on normal SEO factors but in view of the recent Google.co.uk brand update I thought it would be interesting to see the changes.
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Back in March Google performed an update which effectively boosted the rankings of big brands in the search results. At the time I commented that the update hadn’t appeared in the UK – until this weekend.

The Google.co.uk results have been moving a lot in the last few weeks but without any real patterns (other than US results appearing for UK specific queries which is probably just an error). Today the results are full of authority websites which seem to be ranking higher than one might expect for competitive keywords.
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