How Shopping Comparison Sites Use Tribal Content to Boost Brand Marketing

Tribal content is content targeted at specific tribes or sub-cultures and promoted to them for the purposes of increasing the power of the brand. Which usually means links and social signals.

We know that Google still likes links, and that it does take notice of the data generated on social media, but more importantly, I think it likes the Brand more and more.

When I talk about Google increasingly considering brand as a factor of ranking, I don’t mean they have a knob on the “Google Algo Dashboard”, that says “BRAND”, and they are turning it up to 11.

I mean that when they consider the keywords people associate with the business it is these that Google give the most weight to and if you look at most websites you will see the anchor text of the brand far outweighing the anchor text of any product or service it sells.

It may be obvious but the brand is the domain name. The domain name used to rank as a keyword with a lot more power, things have now changed and that favourite of the affiliate marketers, “get a domain with the keyword you want to target”.

Hoping that this would give it a boost in Google, and it once did, but that technique has been dialled down. You still see targeted keyword domains ranking in the SERPS, but is that because of the anchor text that is pointing links to the home page?

Confused.com is I think most would agree, a brand and a domain name. People who want cheaper car insurance may type in that specific keyword because they want cheaper.

We see in the SERPS that Confused.com is at 4th

With keyword rich domains such as www.verycheapestcarinsurance.org.uk/ ranking at 19 and www.mycheapcarinsurance.co.uk/ ranking at 21

If we look at the traffic of these sites through the prism of Alexa

From the POV of Alexa these non branded websites do not even rank. There are of course many reasons for this, but I think we can safely assume that these websites do not have a strong branding factor.

Both of these sites could be considered as targeted keyword domains, rather than domains that have built a recognizable brand.

Obviously we cannot define causation specifically, as we do not have a complete picture of all the variables at work here. However, if I had to give an informed opinion it would be that a strategic content marketing plan has been adopted to raise the links and social signal profiles for these websites and their brand.

We have to acknowledge the TV and offline advertising spend of these brands being a factor, but for the purposes of this blog post we are going to stick to the online factors.

If we look at Confused.com we see that it ranks for the keyword “Confused”

Rather than a webpage describing “being in a state of bewilderment”, a car insurance company ranks.

We see from Google trends that the term, “confused” is a highly searched for term, with “cheap car insurance” coming above “confused.com”. What’s interesting is that “confused.com” manages to get searched for at all. But lets put a more powerful brand into the mix and see what happens.

We see search terms for the brand “nike”, obliterating all other search terms. I guess this is what $2 billion in marketing spend can get you.

However, if we look at “nike.com” as the keyword.

We see that it drops considerably, and when you add the .com and when you further consider that in all the searches for “confused.com” are UK based, whilst only 24% of the nike.com terms are.

What this means is that that the brand of Confused.com is very strong and is associated with the car insurance, and as we saw from our earlier search, “cheap car insurance”.

This may seem obvious to anyone who has been on the receiving end of the company’s marketing strategy, but this has only been created because of the company’s marketing strategy.

Crunching the numbers you can see the power of the brand.

One specific technique which sites likes this use is one I like to call Tribal Content, which is the art of targeting specific sub-cultures who are active online and who sometimes get picked up by mainstream media.

Examples of these sub-cultures include:

• Lego
• Zombies
• Star Wars
• Kim Kardashian
• Game of Thrones

Plus many more.

A tweet I made earlier summed this up in terms of the perfect content.

It’s easy to be dismissive of such subjects as you may not find all of them your cup of tea. But by using such content, we can take a boring subject, such as car insurance and create links and social signals.

Using the cogntiveSEO tool I am going to look at the confused.com website and see how such content is working.

We see that 7 pieces of tribal content is in the top 24 pages ranked for number of backlinks, the content being titled:

• The 10 most dangerous driving songs
• TV goes social: The rise of the second screen
• The social media zombie apocalypse
• Blogger contest: Share your best pancakes and win!
• The ultimate driving songs playlist
• Hangover cures and the calorific cost of booze

We can note by using the cognitiveSEO, Backlink Explorer that each piece of content continues to get links after the initial promotion. I blogged about the importance of evergreen content in an earlier blog post.

The 10 most Dangerous Driving Songs

http://www.confused.com/car-insurance/articles/top-ten-most-dangerous-driving-songs – link profile

Number of links 174

TV goes social: The rise of the second screen

http://www.confused.com/news-views/infographics/tv-goes-social-rise-of-the-second-screen – link profile

Number of links 88

The Social Media Zombie Apocalypse

http://www.confused.com/news-views/infographics/social-media-zombies-are-you-one – link profile

Number of links 80

Blogger contest: Share your best pancakes and win!

http://www.confused.com/gas-electricity/articles/pancake-challenge-competition – link profile

Number of links 52

The ultimate driving songs playlist

http://www.confused.com/car-insurance/ultimate-driving-songs-playlist – link profile

Number of links 52

Hangover cures and the calorific cost of booze

http://www.confused.com/news-views/infographics/hangover-cures-and-alcohol-calories – link profile

Number of links 51

But I sell “plumbing supplies”, not zombies, your client may say to you as you propose a Walking Dead infographic. But links and social signals build brand and Google still uses links to rank websites. The more mentions your brand has on the Web, the better and using Tribal Content means plugging in to very active groups of people who will talk about your brand if given a reason to.

Moneysupermarket Tribal Content

• Iron Man
• Batman

Not as much Tribal Content in firs 24 pages, but two chunky, well linked to pages are evident. Interestingly, Moneysupermarket.com has chosen to redirect traffic for this content to the front page.

They acquired a great deal of organic links and later redirected them to the URL that they want to rank.

The Cost of Being Batman – 301 Redirect

[Infographic]

Number of links 311

The Cost of Being Ironman – 301 Redirect

[Infographic]

Number of links 225

Conclusion

Whilst Gocompare, Uswitch and even Comparethemarket haven’t used this form of Link building. They have used other techniques which we will cover in a future blog post and yes they are very tasty. We see that Moneysupermarket.com and Confused.com have used it highly effectively and although we only looked at the top 24 linked to pages, there are others we could analyse further down the list but we simply don’t have time to do so.

This type of content needs a specialist to create and promote, it’s not the sort of content that can be outsourced offshore or on Fiverr, it costs serious money to put together, although there are ways you can put together such Tribal Content to tap into active sub-cultures who love to link and Tweet.

Ultimately it helps to build the brand, even when such content has nothing to do with the main business of the brand.