SEO News You Can Use: Google Updates Its Misrepresentation Policy With Four Brand Criteria | SEOblog.com

Merchants and retail brands gain more insight on how to make their business more visible on Google Search. In a recent post from Google Merchant Center, the search giant outlines four primary factors to increase your trust and safety, protecting your business and customers from potential misrepresentation issues.

Here are the four factors to keep in mind:

• Business Identity
  • Your business and domain names should be consistent with an accurate and unique About Us page. 
  • Urge your customers to follow your social media profiles, linking your website to your social accounts.
• Transparency
  • Be clear and transparent about your business policies, such as shipping, returns and privacy. 
  • Your business model and operations should be clear and understandable.
• Online Reputation
  • Display trust signals all over your content to establish trust with your customers. This includes product and business reviews, testimonials, third-party badges and seals of approvals. 
  • Clearly communicate how your customers can reach you and how your customer support works. 
  • Blog posts and third-party mentions of your business should be communicated with your customers.
• Professional Design
  • Your website should have essential professional features like an SSL certificate for consumer protection, accessibility and ease of navigation. 
  • Your website shouldn’t have unnecessary redirects and broken links. 
  • Avoid using placeholder texts and images on your website.

The update helps Google understand your business better and allows them to “better represent you.”

This is more than just an issue for search engine optimization (SEO), though. Google knows that people will likely “research about your products and businesses,” so having reliable information on your website and across platforms is crucial. Because of this, Google promises to review multiple signals about your business across the web, saying that this is an ongoing process.

This means these guidelines will evolve over time as Google identifies and develops new trust signals they can rely on.

These aren’t the only practices that help rank your business better in Search. They also provided more ways you can help Google understand your business:

With these guidelines, Google is helping brands and businesses overcome the barrage of AI-generated content by ensuring they have authentic, accurate information that the search giant can use to help customers find trustworthy brands across the web.

Read Google’s full help document here.

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Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.