Key Moments in episode 115 of the Daily Brand SERP series:
00:00 Brand SERP for Bonham’s
00:08 Bonhams’ perfect left rail
00:25 Bonhams’ knowledge panel and GMB profile
00:37 One glaring problem in this Brand SERP
00:49 What prevents Google from extracting a snippet to their site?
01:29 Practical tip: Give Google something to grip on 😉
When a website owner doesn’t provide meta titles and meta descriptions, Google has to create a snippet from the text content of the page.
But what happens in the extreme case that Google can’t get a grasp of any textual content in the homepage to generate a title or snippet? Will Google simply leave the homepage on the Brand SERP with nothing but the brand name? The answer is YES.
This is the case for Bonhams’ homepage. Often overlooked, the meta information of a website is important both for SEO and digital branding. It helps search engines understand the brand’s identity and indicates what message the brand wants to communicate to its audience… Most importantly the message to show right at the top of the Brand SERP.
This content gives the first impression to your audience when they google your brand name. And that first impression can make-or-break your brand’s credibility in the user’s eyes.
Watch until the end!
Kalicube’s #DailyBrandSERP October 31st 2021 presented by the Brand SERP Guy, Jason Barnard.
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Jason Barnard. I’m the Brand SERP Guy and today, we’re looking at the Brand SERP for Bonhams. I didn’t know who Bonhams were, but they’ve got a great Brand SERP. If you look down here, we’ve got these sitelinks. We’ve got the People Also Ask, Twitter boxes, Wikipedia, Facebook, invaluable.com, whatever that might be.
And then some reviews, an incredibly relevant review site. Perfect! On the right hand side, we have the Knowledge Panel. Lots of information in there, People Also Search For, incredibly relevant. They could probably claim or they should claim that knowledge panel, while we’re about it. Then we’ve got a Google My Business, but there is one big glaring problem here.
They don’t have a description or even a title for their home page. Now, if we go through to the site, we can see here that Google’s struggling. To get any kind of grip, any kind of text that it can show as a snippet. And then I looked at the source code and we can see here, they’ve got incredibly clean source code.
Somebody has gone through, and they’ve really optimized this. They’ve made a lot of effort, but if we look here, they don’t have a meta title. So Google can’t use that. They don’t have a meta description, so Google can’t use that either. So Google is looking in this page and thinking, what can I use to represent this company?
And all it’s come up with is the brand name and that’s it. So Bonhams like Coca-Cola last week would do well to give Google at least a meta title and description so that it can use those. Or preferably a little bit of content, a chunk of content in that homepage that Google can use. Google can get a grip on what they want it to show its users when they search Bonhams’ brand name.
Thank you very much and I’ll see you soon.
