Page 58 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

regardless of being the exact keyword or partial keyword, there are two main things Google
looks at to "give relevance" to the EMB (exact match brand) or PMB (partial match brand) for a
specific search term.

1. Does the term contain a majority of the brand (60% or more)?
2. What is the order of the search query terms? (think: what is the likelihood someone tried
to search for the brand but put it in the wrong order…)

If there are additional competitive/keyword terms that are not present in the brand but used in
the search query, it will not gain relevance from the term in the brand. Also, more noticeable with
a PMB or our long tail keyword brand tests, search queries that had the keywords from the brand
in a different order, were less likely to see gains.

While that is a lot of info, the fact is, every test we ran, we knew almost exactly what keywords
were going to benefit or possibly hurt due to any given exact match or partial match brand name.

The biggest takeaway is understanding how using a keyword in your brand name will impact
rankings, and knowing how to use a term in a brand most effectively. Here’s an example, if your
target is "New York Personal Injury Attorney" then the brand "My New York Legal Personal Injury
Attorney" would help the primary term as opposed to "Personal Injury Attorney in New York".

How Much Does the GMB Description Impact Rankings?

Test Setup:

Does the GMB description give you any "rank boost" or only give you the opportunity to rank for
a specific keyword, as we found with the service area tests? Or does it possibly not help with
anything at all. While this test setup was simple, it gave us a general answer to the above
questions.

We took a GMB listing that was already ranking well, had a description, and just removed the
entire description and watched the rankings. We theorized if the description itself provided a
ranking boost, then we would see some keyword drops or fluctuations.

Test Results: December 11, 2020

To ensure we could really evaluate the impact of the description, we tracked keyword variations
that were only mentioned in the description and no nowhere on the GMB listing. This acted as a

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