Brand mentions are one of the strongest ranking signals. The quickest path to ranking for any product is increased search volume for [brand name] + [product]. It is a direct signal to google that you should rank for [product] alone.
— Robert Ramirez (@ramirez_robert) November 23, 2020
Brand Laddering / Positioning
“Tim Cook led the iPhone 12 event with privacy.
If you walked around the Apple HQ and asked what should Apple lead with in their marketing, I don’t think anyone would say “privacy”. But they are leading and have led with privacy.
Why?
It comes down to a basic concept in brand strategy called “laddering”.
When you make a marketing statement, when you promote a feature of a product or service, you are not only highlighting a strength, you are immediately raising that dimension for public scrutiny and thereby ideally depositioning your competition.”
Also, “…we can say anything we want.“
“The Biggest Threat to DTC”
One Impression At A Time…
“We anecdotally know that Google is continuously testing content and shuffling the search results, but it’s tough to find hard data about it.
Google tests new content on different positions for all queries it deems relevant. Interestingly, this understanding is very imprecise at first and then gets better over time. Content first ranks for many queries on lower positions, and then for fewer queries at higher positions if the content is of high quality.
Competitive and high-volume queries often have a sort of “probation period”. About two weeks after publishing, the article starts to rank for high-volume queries. Sometimes, they start on page 10, sometimes on page one.
For some queries, Google can identify the relevance and authority right away and rank a page high.
Once they “grooved in”, rankings don’t fluctuate as much anymore. Google has made a decision where the page fits in for a keyword and sticks to it until the page gains more links or someone else published a piece of content that competes with it (or Google updates its understanding of entities).
I observed that It takes Google 3-4 days to figure out where content should rank initially. From there, Google keeps testing how the piece of content would perform for different keywords throughout its lifecycle, one impression at a time.
Content needs to prove itself; nothing is guaranteed.“