Branding and awareness via Vanity URLs
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ May 8th, 2009 in Search Engine Optimization
Post Highlights
- Increase your brand presence in social media
- Increase your organic ranking on search results by having a search term in the domain name
- Make your brand stand out from the crowd
- Be in the top-of-mind of your current and potential customers, make it easy for them to find you
If you are a company or marketer, (early adopter or not), looking to optimize your brand’s presence on the different social media, ie- Facebook, perhaps you’d like to consider setting up your own Facebook vanity URL.
In some cases companies fear that if they don’t register their trademarks under several domains, their brand names could be hijacked, leading to mistrust of their brands and lack of credibility. However, apart from getting your brand name stolen, it could also be the case that random people can manipulate information, images, videos and important brand data that only YOU should be handling.
It is also true that brands, specially big brands, have a massive fan base, from which a given fan may create a brand’s Page on its own initiative as did the two Coca-Cola devotees who were then rewarded by the soft drink giant.
Nevertheless, these cases may not always have a happy ending and some brands prefer to takeover the ‘unofficial’ channel to make it their own, which is not a simple thing to accomplish either, maybe rewarding fans could really be the easy way out.
In any case, whether it’s your fans, friends or Company X, who launch a dedicated brand channel through any given social media (Facebook, YouTube), I’d say it’s quite useful to have your own corporate vanity URL.
For example: www.facebook.com/dimensionedanza or www.facebook.com/energie. Note: Facebook only disposes of such URLs to media partners who spend over $50,000/yr on Facebook advertising or preferred partners.
Ordinary Facebook URLs are not catchy at all and people tend to forget them or will just not bother to look you up on the search field. On the other hand, without a vanity URL, you’re not really making that extra effort to differentiate your brand from the cluster of brands existent on Facebook or perhaps even from the unofficial Pages or Groups created by other Facebook users.
In terms of SEO, vanity URLs have either a keyword or your company name at the end of the address which is one advantage point. There’s a higher chance your vanity URL and top-level domains will deliver significant clicks and higher CTR rather than a non-descriptive URL.
What are your views on vanity URLs?
Last 5 posts in Search Engine Optimization
- Keep SEO in mind when doing Content Marketing - February 2nd, 2010
- Get found online! - September 14th, 2009
- Google's got a secret - August 20th, 2009
- Information Architecture and Search Engine Optimization - August 6th, 2009
- Google PageRank: Brands surviving the Web - July 15th, 2009
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