Google changes search algorithm to favour brands

Google has recently updated it’s algorithm to give more weight to strong online brands in the organic search results.

There’s a great technical analysis of the changes here, but essentially this means that brands are ranking higher than before even for non-brand searches.

Google of course regularly updates it’s algorithms, but this change is particularly interesting in the way it seems to be promoting some quite different ranking behaviour to previous updates.

Motivation? Who knows. Brands are a safe bet in terms of relevant results for a given keyword, and that’s great in terms of usability. However, the changes do somewhat trample on their own core paid search business.

Let me explain.

A question I often hear from my clients goes something like this: “If our brand is ranking anyway for natural search, why invest in PPC?”

Although there are some compelling arguments to invest in both paid and natural search, it’s still a much more difficult sell than PPC for a client who has no pre-existing visibility on the search pages.

Will be interested to see the impact of this going forward, both in terms of SEO and PPC.