Brands Vs Products - Google Trends Test
While flying into Sydney today there was the usual announcement to turn off electrical equipment including mobile phones, laptops and iPod’s. This made me think where the word iPod was chosen by the announcer rather than MP3 player would this also be a more commonly used term in the search engines?
Using Google Trends I’ve compared several well known brands with the actual product name, with some interesting results:
Some of the results weren’t too surprising such as iPod being more popular than MP3 player, but others I found a bit of a shock, for example Ford being just as popular as a search for cars, with BMW not too far behind. It’s no surprise that websites are cashing in on these popular searches, with many competitor pay-per-click ads and branded e-commerce/affiliate websites for brands such as iPod or Sony etc appearing frequently.
This goes to prove how popular branding has become in the search engines, especially for already well known names, it’s important for companies to control the search results as much as possible for their own brand name and is also an opportunity for competitors to potentially steal leads by gaining traffic from branded keyword searches. Here are 5 steps to successfully branding searchers from SEOmoz last month which gives some excellent tips about how to brand a website.
