Following on from Aleyda’s advice to optimize for citation-worthiness, Sukhjinder Singh shares that brand recognition is key.

Sukhjinder says: “Say goodbye to rankings and hello to recognition. It's time to appear everywhere.”

Why is it time to say goodbye to rankings?

“It's not a complete goodbye, but it’s changing your mindset. We're still comfortable with tracking ranking positions as one of our main metrics, and it should be one of our metrics, but we need to become more comfortable with appearing in different ways and broadening our idea of what it means to be discoverable.

We should be focussing on things like brand mentions, entity strength, visual content, and all the different ways that you're surfaced in the SERPs and the more conversational interactions across platforms.

It's broadening that idea and getting out of the comfort zone of tracking the top 10 ranking positions. Even now, that has been made more difficult with Google's change to pagination and how tools are picking up information from beyond position 10.

It’s not a complete goodbye, but it’s time to open your mind to other ways of tracking brand recognition instead.”