What Should your Brand SERP look like?

Educated, polite people shouldn’t care about what other people think about them. It would be vanity. That’s most usually true, but there’s an entity whose opinion you should care about. That’s Google. When someone googles your brand name (or personal name), Google shows the results that it feels are most valuable and relevant to its user, meaning that your Brand SERP reflects Google’s perception of your brand in the context of your audience.

That means there is no such thing as a typical Brand SERP – the variety is HUGE since each brand is unique, its digital ecosystem is unique and its audience is unique. Then add to the mix that the geolocation of the user plays a major role in not only the results themselves but the anatomy/layout of the search results page… and you get an unimaginable variety.

1. What should your Brand SERP should look like if you’re an International, National or Local Business?
2. International Brands
2.1. Blue links
2.2. Rich Elements / SERP features
2.3. Right Rail / Knowledge Panel
3. National brand
3.1. Blue links
3.2. Rich Elements / SERP features
3.3. Right Rail / Knowledge Panel
4. Local bricks and Mortar
4.1. Blue links
4.2. Rich Elements / SERP features
4.3. Right Rail / Knowledge Panel
5. And the Grand Finale…
6. Don’t Leave Your Brand SERP to Chance

What should your Brand SERP look like if you’re an International, National or Local Business?

Kalicube has a database of almost 5 million Brand SERPs for over 75,000 brands that cover 11 countries and 626 industries, so we can provide you with a good idea of what a typical Brand SERP might look like.

In this article, I’ll present schematised versions of what you can expect as a major international brand, a national brand or a local bricks and mortar business. Expect another article soon that covers what a Personal Brand SERP (i.e. your name) typically contains. As a preparatory exercise, have a look at mine.

Iconography used in the examples below

International Brands

Importantly, the Brand SERP for an international brand will vary significantly from country to country. Here is the example of Adobe Systems across the 6 anglophone countries we track at Kalicube. As you can see, not only the results, but also the anatomy can change significantly.

Why is that? Because, as we saw at the start, Google shows the brand’s audience what is most relevant and valuable for them and in different countries the audience engages differently with the brand. It is logical that the results are very different (and a good user experience).

Blue links

Blue links remain the backbone and foundation on which every SERP is built, as Frédéric Dubut from Bing makes very clear in this interview.

At the top, logically one expects to see the brand’s own homepage, followed by rich sitelinks. At this point, many marketers think “job done”. But ranking #1 for your own brand name is just the start, as we’ll see.

The number of traditional blue links varies – between 4 and 10. The exact number depends on the presence of rich elements (SERP features), the range of brands and products owned by the company and the ambiguity of the brand name (more ambiguous names will tend to have longer SERPs, as Nathan Chalmers from Bing explains here). The choice of blue links varies enormously depending on the brand’s digital ecosystem in the given country.

Typically, one or two of the brand’s social profile pages will rank (localised if the brand has a dedicated social account for the country). If one exists, the brand’s Wikipedia article will be present more often than not. After that, the list varies a lot, depending heavily on the brand’s industry and its offers and services: a review platform, an app platform (if they have an app), an article from a media platform, a company profile (Crunchbase, for example).

***Percentage of total blue links occupied by specific sites in Brand SERPs for international brands***

Rich Elements / SERP features

The presence of a rich element will often eliminate a blue link. For larger brands, the average number of rich elements (Video Boxes, People Also Ask, Twitter Boxes, Image Boxes) in the left rail is just under 1.5. This average seems to me to be low given that, to trigger these, a brand simply needs to have an effective, well focussed and engaging content strategy. As a prospect or client, to be convincing, I would expect the Brand SERP to contain at least two, and preferably three rich elements.

There is obviously enormous variation here. Some extremes: in the USA, CNN (who have an amazing content strategy) has 6, whereas Spanfeller Media Group (who have a non-existent content strategy) has none.

Right Rail / Knowledge Panel

Just under 45% of brands have a knowledge panel. When Google shows a knowledge panel, it is confident it has correctly understood who the brand is and what it offers. Two-thirds of those (so 30% of all brands) have People Also Search For / Related Entities in their knowledge panel. These tend to be either other brands that are part of the same business group or brands that Google sees as being in the same market. Since the competitors are often different in different countries, these entity boxes often vary from country to country. But that is a story for another day 🙂

Here are some ‘typical’ Brand SERPs for international brands. You might not be CNN (see the example above) but, as an international brand, this is the very minimum you should expect.

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National brand

Although there is significantly less variation than international brands, national variations for Brand SERPs is also a fact of (marketing) life. Here is the example of Preston Baker (a national UK Estate Agency chain) across three towns. Once again, not only the results, but also the anatomy changes significantly.