Ranking Your New Startup Domain for Your Brand Name

Speaker A: So you just started a new company and you're trying to get the domain to show up on the front page of Google. This is entirely what this episode is going to be covering. It's a super tactical episode and again, just another solo one. I got great feedback on the last one that I did. So gonna start doing more and more of these. So I just went through this process for my new company, graft.comgraft is a seven word domain and it took about two months to get it to show up on page one. You can do this way faster. But just sharing that for the transparency and today I just want to talk through the process of actually how do you do this? How do you get the domain to rank for or the brand name? And this is one of the most high trust signals that you can create. When you're an early stage company, if they can't go and Google you, they're probably going to think that you're untrustworthy and that you don't exist or early. All right, so let's dive into it and talk through the actual process of how do you get this to happen. So first off, pick a name that you're not competing against other people with. So for graft we spent $10,000 on the domain before we even made that purchase. We went and looked to see if there's other companies that had that name that we would have to compete against to basically show up higher than them. And if there are companies that, that exist that have that name that look like they are active, do not pick that brand name, full stop. You see first time founders do this all the time. It is such a rookie mistake to do because you're going to spend so many of your resources fighting, educating the market which company you are. So you want to look for a composition where it looks something like this. Just a bunch of random search information, just a bunch of random search results. So no other companies that you're really competing against. Google's just trying to serve something is basically the signal that I'm seeing here. And if you don't know what domain to buy, buy a two word domain with the least amount of syllables that a fifth grader could spell. That's my rule for every domain that I go and purchase or every company that I've ever started. All right, so if you go and you search graft, we now come up in position one graph.com comes up there. It didn't used to be like this. Go search this. Now you can see and how we get there is you follow A process. And I'm just going to define what this process looks like. I wrote a tweet about this and so we're just going to use that as the reference. So the first thing that you need to do is build backlinks to the website. So the first thing that you need to do is build backlinks to the home, where the anchor text of the backlink is the brand name. So you don't want to focus on target keywords that you're trying to rank for. You just want the brand name. These should be your foundational links. Your first, like I personally do like, my first hundred links are the brand name being linked back to the homepage. And the reason that you need to do this is you have to show Google that this is a company. You have to basically connect those dots for them. And as those links on other websites get seen by Google for that brand name, people are going to understand, oh, this is the brand. Google is going to start to understand what you are and be able to map you and place you within those search results. And so the next thing that you need to do is have people go. And if you're unsure how to build these initial links that have that brand name that's being linked out to, all you have to do is just go and submit your tool to all these directories. There's tons of services that provide this where they submit you to like a hundred for five hundred. This is going to be the easiest way to do this. You can also just do this manually, but again, just giving you options that are available. So that's one way to do it. The other way is cold email other companies that are listed on these directories. You can go and find the founder emails super easily for a lot of these and ask them to do a guest blog post exchange. Super easy way to build this out. Go write that content, get it indexed, get it seen by Google. I typically do some type of combination of these. And then we have like a PR strategy that we run in the background with podcasts, but that's an episode for another time. But once you have these links, the next thing that you need to do is you need to go and do organic social posts to get people to actually search for the website. So without people searching for the company and then clicking on the URL, we can't train Google to understand that when people search X, they're looking for Y website. So for graph, this is what I did. I basically went and I did posts across all social. I did it in newsletters I talked about it on podcasts, and this becomes easier and easier. And I just want to come back to the name piece. The less competitive that name is, the easier this process becomes. This is why choosing the name is such an important thing when you're defining your brand. So what's going to be happening in the background is that Google is going to be testing, showing your website for that branded keyword phrase. And as people click on it, it's going to rise the ranks, rise the search results for that branded phrase. So how do we know that this is happening is because we can see this in the data. We can actually see where Google started to rank us for the brand names. So I'm going to isolate any keyword that contains graft, and you can see this increase here. This is when we rose into that position. So was doing all this testing, testing, testing, finally decided that we should be there, and then put it into that position. All, uh, right. So finally, the last thing that you need to do is you set up Google search ads for the brand name where you're bidding just on that exact match for that brand name keyword, and then you put the bid min, so the minimum bid at $5. So basically what you're saying is, I'll pay more money than anybody else to show up in that top position for that branded keyword that people are searching for. As people click that URL and you send them to the homepage, goog. Google takes this into consideration as a signal. The same strategy can actually also be used as a way to do what I call brand protection. So you can put your minimum bids super high. Say you have competitors that are bidding on your brand name. You put your min bid at like $10. What will happen is that the CPC will be so high that Google will automatically stop serving their ads on your account because it's just not profitable. So if you somehow end up as a keyword as search term within their marketing mix that they're bidding on, that's a way to protect against that. You're not having to fight for your own branded traffic. Another trick there is put as many site links as you can. You want to take up as much space on that front page as possible. You can also use other ads accounts to bid on that same keyword phrase. I've done that in the past as well. It's a little murky with the TOS there, but it just depends on how much risk you're willing to take. And to conclude, when you do this all together, you can basically teach Google to understand what your brand is. I've taken websites from non existent to position one for their brand name in like 24 hours. Doing this. You can also use the same strategy with exact match keyword domains for example like jobdescription Generator. Com is one that we own that I'm playing around with right now. But the final thing I'll leave you with is just always buy the dot com. Pick a brand name that the dot com exists for. There's just so much more trust that's built into a dot com. More than an IO, more than a dot co, more than an xyz. Do not follow the trends. I'm begging you it is. The best decision you can make is to pick the dot com. Think about the most normie person. They have so much more trust for a.com than any other domain type all right, that's today's episode. If you liked it, please subscribe on whatever platform that is, whether it's YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts. If you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, leave a review. All that keeps the lights on. And if you want a free trial of graft.com, click the link below. Graft is an AI agent for marketing analytics. You just connect all of your marketing data with a couple of clicks and then you just chat with it to build charts, reports, and fully interactive live dashboards. You can learn more at the link graft. Com. Thanks again for listening.