The Power of a Brand

One thing I wrestle with on a daily basis is the lack of measurablity of the power of any particular brand.  It’s obvious that having a powerful brand is valuable, but how does that translate into dollars and cents?  When a company is budgeting out time and money for things like logo development, social media expedition, and traditional marketing expenitures, how will they know how successful they’ve been?

Because of these burning questions, I was beyond excited when I read an SEO Book report today that cited good evidence that Google is now taking ‘brand power’ into consideration when delivering search results.  

 Radioshack.com recently started ranking forelectronics and Hallmark.com just recently started ranking for gifts. The illustrations do not list all brands that are ranking, but brands that just started ranking. Add in other brands that were already ranking, and in some cases brands have 80% or 90% of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords. There are thousands of other such examples across all industries if you take the time to do the research, but the trend is clear – Google is promoting brands for big money core category keywords.

The first question that this raises is ‘how are they measuring brand power?’  My guess would be that they take into consideration the number of times a particular brand name is entered into the search box.  Wouldn’t that be great information to have!  Sure, you can tell how many hits your website is getting via search traffic from your brand name, but there is currently no way to tell how many times your company name has been entered into the search field.

What does this mean to you and me?  This changes the game significantly for social media evangelistas because brand power, which can be influenced heavily by social media, will affect your search strategy.  It also suggests that Google might be evolving its algorithm to match the increasing activity of social media users.