Britains Most Trusted Brands & How They Fare On Google
Every year the Readers Digest produces a list of Britain’s most trusted brands and in view of Google’s recent algorithm change favouring brands we thought it would be interesting to see how they are positioned on Google.
This isn’t a test of the brands SEO (which in almost all cases was quite poor) but a test of whether the Google algorithm is clever enough to know that Kelloggs, for example, would be a fantastic result to have at the top of the page when somebody searches for “breakfast cereal”.
You can probably conclude from the table below that Google certainly hasn’t figured out how to rank brands yet, in the small number of cases where a brand did rank it was a result of either anchor text links or on-site SEO.
Note: a ranking of 0 was given to sites ranking outside the top 20
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 9 comments below, or add your own!
Great idea for a post Patrick, I think anyone who is from the UK certainly agrees that almost all of those brands are the number one over here, or at the very least the top three. A lot of different opinions flew around with the brand updates but I think it’s becoming more and more obvious it just wasn’t that broad at all.
I do think some of those keywords are a little against what people type in, not that that should make any difference but I am not 100% everyone looking for a supermarket would use “food retailer”.
Out of interest do you think that these brands deserve a place on the first page regardless of the quality of their site?
I think the fact the keywords are not the usual ones is a good test to see if Google *knows* what these brands are. A brand should always rank even with a low quality site as long as it isn’t all Flash or something.
Yeah I agree brands of this size should rank, I was speaking with a friend the other day and we were suggesting their should almost a be a universal search slot for brand, it may suck a bit for SEO but it would make more reliable SERPs especially for these super generic search terms.
Nice observation. Part of the issue is that some of these brands perceive themselves differently to how they’re actually perceived by consumers. As such, the labelling on their homepages often doesn’t contain the keywords listed above. Why bother with layman’s terms when you can dive into the murky world of PRspeak and related guff?
For example Canon doesn’t do ‘cameras’, but positions itself as “a world leader in imaging products and solutions for the digital home and office…”. Kelloggs doesn’t mention ‘cereal’, etc etc.
Yeah but the point was to test whether Google was clever enough to rank these brands in spite of their lack of SEO. Clearly they have some way to go.
Interesting post. I’m still amazed though that considering the amount all of these brands spend each year on advertising that they can’t invest a little bit (tiny amount in comparison) on SEO.
A little bit of keyword research on their part and few changes to the and eadings would probably be sufficient considering the amount of inbound links these sites already have.
Yes Google should be doing all they can to improve their SERPs but it’s a little sad that many of these big brands are so behind the times.
isn’t this the point of SEO though?
why should a brand rank for a related term if they have not optimised their site for this term? and if there are, for example, 10 very well known brands within a niche, why should they automatically be ranked with low quality SEO above a site that has done it’s utmost to be optimised for that term?
perhaps Google and the brands themselves are of the opinion that if someone wanted to find them on the web, they would look for them by name anyway as opposed to a related term? I certainly don’t think brands should be ranked well on the basis that they are a well known brand in a particular area.
I agree, why should a brand rate top if it is not usefully presented on the internet? For example, if Kelloggs just puts up a single page saying “Kellogg’s tastes nice” (and nothing else), then it should perform poorly on Google no matter how big the brand is. What is the point on finding a page that has no usefulness.
I agree with Dave & Chris. The ranking has to be based on a sites SEO effectiveness, don’t think Google can second guess.
At the end of the day it depends on the business value that SEO generates. Business es that derive a large part of their turnover from their website have to be good at SEO to survive competitively i.e. Direct Line, The AA, & P&O.
I don’t believe I can buy soap powder directly from Persil’s website….yet.