James Dooley: Hi, today I'm joined with Luis Salifa Herado and today's topic is about does branded clicks help you rank for more query augmentation terms. So not just branded mentions or branded anchor text. Does branded clicks help you rank for more query augmentation?

Luis Salifa Herado: That's it. First of all you need to have a decent or enough search volumes about the brand. Out of the brand terms on the brand searches, users themselves are going to search your brand in different manners. That's the first variation of query augmentations which means in all the brands I've worked with there is a decent amount of misspellings about the brand. That's the first query augmentation that and the user themselves are going to do the query augmentation for you. So they are going to create different terms and going to feed a bot that is a virtual cycle about your brand. This is the first bucket misspellings about your brand.

Luis Salifa Herado: Then they're going to search your brand plus the product or the service you sell. This is the second bucket. All of that is going to feed a crawler about that is going to expand the semantic terms about your brand. For instance, I work with the online jewelry company and people the first bucket is the brand itself which is the terms that people search the most. Underneath them if if I check in search console are the misspellings and then the brand plus the product they sell earrings bracelets rings etc.

Luis Salifa Herado: After that, let's say the third bucket is promotions, which means marketing campaigns, special offers, special prices. And then in the third packet could be either social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns, or pay-per-click campaigns where you can expand the brand terms plus related terms about the products or service you offer. All of that give you query augmentations because Google bots are going to come to your site and are going to trigger the LLM's algorithms and all the related terms about the brand that semantically make sense are going to be connected to the brand searches and then the algorithm themselves as long as they have more and more historical data brand signals links and so on so forth are going to create a kind of trust that are going to expand all the terms you rank and the more trust you have and the better structure is your content, the more query augmentation you're going to have, the more terms you're going to rank for.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for my example, initially I used to just think of query augmentation as being like so one of my brands fat rank. I people used to type in fat rank fat space rank even though it's all one word fat rank location so like fat rank Wilms fat rank wigan then they'd also search for like fat rank company fat rank agency and then it would be stuff like fat rank leads and then in time they started to expand upon that like fat rank realtime leads fat rank high quality leads and stuff like that and I used to think that that was always the query augmentation until I started to learn from you lot in the semantic kind of groups that I'm in about the different attributes as well and like you're talking about there like different products for your jewelry brand.

James Dooley: For me it was like things like me trying to then for me to try to expand upon ranking for is fat rank legitimate. It was like fat rank reviews, fat rank testimonials and stuff like that. They've also branded searches but appended with like say like reviews and them reviews and them testimonials are kind of what kind of on query fan out especially was kind of showing up within he's a legitimate company and the more and more I could get those branded clicks built up the more I started to realize they started to expand the ring so to speak of how many more searches it would then start showing up for but also from a semantic content network myself for how many more I needed to make certain I had the documents that was covering those searches. So there's always a saying that you always bring up to me and it's always about the users the documents and the queries. Can you expand a little bit on the users documents and queries and why that's important to make certain that you're not obviously getting the branded clicks but you've got the documents to kind of cover those branded clicks or those branded searches that's happening.

Luis Salifa Herado: Absolutely. I'm going to answer your questions covering two angles. First of all, you can expand your query agmentation and your semantic network based on the documents you have in your site. Let's say let's use the example fat rank. A few terms you mention is fat reviews, fat rank testimonial, fat run location, so on so forth. This is terms you can expand based on the information and documents you already have in your site.

Luis Salifa Herado: However, this is one option. But is there is a second option which is this is a recent case study I shared with a client. It's an insurance company. They have over 10,000 reviews alone on Google and they have feed the pot so massively over the last six, seven years that all that citations, reviews and answers have created its own data and they're feeding the LLM for a third party sources. in this case is a Google source but all that data is another query agmentation let's say satellite about the brand. So you can do that or anybody can do this which is create honest reviews in different sources like try spy a lot reviews and so on so forth and all that data are going to also feed LLMs and I'm going to create query augmentation about your brands.

Luis Salifa Herado: Another example are forums because people type queries and type answers, ask questions and expand the network of information about the brand from a from a third party sources. And that is going to create an extra boost not only for terms related to your brand but also with new terms because people are going to ask new questions and are going to search for new terms and that way you can expand your networks about your own brand.

James Dooley: Yeah. I'll give you a great case that I don't think I've ever spoken to about this. It was a law firm in the UK and when when you basically talking about all the reviews that you mentioned, you had like a lot 10,000 reviews for your insurance company. This company had so many reviews similar to yourself. They had thousands of reviews and majority of them was five star and was brilliant reviews. However, there was maybe 50 or 60-star reviews, right? And what was happening was when you started to search for on the branded searches and the auto suggests came up when you started to search the brand name one of the dropdowns came up with complaints as being an attribute that was showing up.

James Dooley: So very cleverly what they ended up doing was there was like we want to control that SER. So when someone searches for let's say Duly lawyers complaints that we're going to own it and we're going to show some of the complaints but what we're going to do is we're going to give our side to the story of why this happened. and they ended up on some third-party websites, going doing ranking for their brand with complaints, showing some of the complaints that had been on the one-star reviews, but then reacting to those one stars, not just like that you can do on a Google business profile and commenting. They give their side of the story like this client wasn't happy. It took us 12 months for us to settle the case, but they're the standard lengths of time. This is how long it takes.

James Dooley: they've just presumed it would be fast. But now what we've done is we've learned to make certain in our terms and conditions and as we on board the client to make them aware it takes 12 months for these type of cases. So there was changing the negative onestar reviews putting their finger on it and then when the AI now starts to answer it like does douly lawyers have bad reviews? What complaints are they about duly lawyers? the AI now talks positively about those complaints and they've ch they managed to change the narrative about why that is and I think that's a great way not just for when we're talking about branded clicks for for expanding query augmentation but also from a reputation point of view with branded clicks is making certain if there is any negative sentiment you can try and turn that into a positive and I don't know if you if you've ever seen anything like that yourself.

Luis Salifa Herado: Yes, absolutely. And you provide an excellent example of query augmentation and corroboration from a third party source. how using is kind of jiu-jitsu technique which means you get an input of data from a third party sources and you own that data and you feed the LMS and the bots to the user when they search you are triggering a learning process for the bots and you change user perceptions and uses and the sentiment of the information on the internet based on your own data. So definitely worth it. and as you mentioned both from our reputation management but also for the querymentation.

James Dooley: Yeah. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on with regards to branded clicks. I mean I love brand personally. I think brand is becoming more and more important with regards to trust signals. If anyone's reaching out and anyone wants any ideas of how they can increase their brandy clicks, how could they reach out to yourself, Lewis?

Luis Salifa Herado: Well, they they can reach out to me in three manners. Going to seotechnico.com and just contact me by email. The second option is to search my name on Google Luis Salazar. They can contact me on LinkedIn. And the third option is they can subscribe to daily semantic seo.com. Every day I write an email about semantic seo and contact me.

James Dooley: I love your second way of being able to contact you there by searching your name and getting those branded clicks. That's clever. I like it. That's exactly what we're talking about. So, anyone who's Yeah. Anyone who's watching this, branded clicks is becoming more important. Brand brand branded anchor text, branded mentions, brand brand for the win. Brand is becoming more and more important. And you should be certainly concentrating on trying to expand your third party sources about everything related to who you are and what you do because it is going to help you expand and start ranking for more keywords with query fan out and query augmentation. Lewis, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having.