How To Rank Top Of Google For Your Brand In 7 Days

Don't Settle For Less Than #1

Every DTC brand should have their own brand name in the top spot. The people Googling you are already brand-aware meaning you've paid for their attention to some extent already - probably through paid social, influencers or other top-of-funnel activity.
If some other company is above you and is siphoning off clicks then it's a constant hole in your funnel where traffic - and sales - will leak out every day. Annoying! (And entirely avoidable).

7 Steps To The Top

Choose A Low-Competition Name

This is the biggest one. I understand a founder wants their brand name to look and sound cool, but you should also see who else has already set up their shop on these search terms.

It's worth spending the time finding something relatively uncontested.
Ideally, you want to see a hodgepodge of different results that are kind of fringe and neglected.
It's a good sign if the top results are some random Youtube video, Reddit post or things like that. Those are easy to outrank quickly.

Here's what the results for 'DTC Forever' looked like: 

Google has ranked De Beers there, which is obviously a huge company.
But that's not necessarily a problem. You can see Google has just stuck their homepage up there, who's domain, page title and meta description don't match the search term at all.

Get The Exact Wording & the .com

There are increasing voices in the SEO circles that in a world where .coms are in limited supply, Google is becoming more tolerant of the more obscure domains. The SEO game is driven by a heavy dose of superstition as Google plays the role of God and releases limited guidance on their top-secret algorithm, often in  riddles. So call me old fashioned, but I'd rather get the exact brand name with a .com and be done with it.

Recommended: Buy An Expired Domain

A lot of people miss this, but this is something super simple I'd recommend to everyone to check first before getting a fresh domain from GoDaddy.

An expired domain is simply a website that Google already indexed but it has since fallen out of use. The previous owner would have failed to pay to keep it and so it falls back into the public arena for others to buy.
Google tends to like domains with a long history. This makes sense as new domains with no track record could be scammy.
I use this website, aptly called Expired Domains.
Just ensure that it wasn't a scammy site in it's previous life! 

You can use The Way Back Machine to see historical screenshots of what was on there. And all the SEO tools out there will show you the backlinks pointing to it.
Don't expect the backlinks to be great - unless you want to pay a few hundred/thousand bucks for the domain. Just ensure they're not actively problematic.

And by the way, I'm aware 'DTC Forever' is a bit goofy, but there weren't too many valid options for expired domains with 'DTC' in them. And I expect it'll grow on me over time :)

Annoyingly, I didn't take a screenshot at the time, but the Last Crawl date was originally a few years ago.
(Now it's been crawled so the date has updated).

Setup Google Search Console

Head over here as soon as you have your website live and sign up for Google Search Console. You have a few things to do here which take a bit of time so get started asap.

Submit Sitemap

A sitemap is an easy-to-read list of your website's content which helps Google to crawl it and add it to their index.
Your website publishers (Wordpress, Webflow, Ghost etc) should make a sitemap for you.
I use Webflow and mine looks like this.
Submit it in this section.

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Request a Manual Index

Next, we're going to ask Google to index the site now rather than wait.

Go to 'URL Inspection' then put your domain name into the search bar.
Important: you need to get your URL exactly right. There's technically a difference between 'https', 'www.' etc URLs.
So If you're unsure, load up your website, then copy and paste the domain directly from the address bar into this search field.

Hit 'Request Indexing' and follow the instructions.

Give It a Few Days

Once the request goes in it will need a bit of time.
Hard to predict, but I saw that the pages changed to 'Page is Indexed' in about 3 days.

Initially, my site was ranked in the 4th or 5th spot.
But a few short days later and it's number 1.

I'm pretty sure this was helped because the landscape was particularly clear for this search term, your results may vary if you choose something more competitive.

That's it! 

It doesn't take long but your brand can be #1 much faster than you'd expect.

Extra Note: you can (and should) set up paid Google Ads for your brand name too.
If your domain is clear of sturdy competition, this won't cost much at all.
Paid search ads will start serving usually by the next day if not sooner after they go live, so it's a great way to 'claim' the top spot quickly if you're going ahead with your brand's launch.

Even so, Google doesn't always show ads for every search and getting more real estate is always beneficial :)

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