Audit it properly before you change anything
Almost every brand SERP audit we've inherited was done wrong, in the same way: someone typed the company name into their own browser, on a laptop, signed into a Google account that has visited the site four hundred times. That result is personalised, desktop-shaped and useless as a baseline.
Do it the way a stranger does it. Incognito window, signed out, on a phone, with the location set to where your buyers actually are — a Bangalore result and a Coimbatore result diverge more than most founders expect. Then screenshot the whole page by scrolling, because what matters is the composition, not the top three lines.
- Search your brand name alone. This is the one that matters most and gets checked least.
- Search your registered company name — the one on the invoice, ending in Private Limited. In India this pulls a completely different page, usually dominated by company-registry mirrors carrying your MCA filings, directors and paid-up capital. Your customers see this when they run diligence.
- Search brand + reviews, brand + salary, brand + complaints, and brand + your main competitor. These are the queries a buyer runs after the first meeting.
- Record every distinct domain on page one, and mark each as: yours, a profile you can log into, a profile you cannot, or someone else's entirely. That four-way split is the whole strategy in one column.
What you actually control
This bucket is smaller than people hope and larger than they act on. Everything here is yours, changeable this week, and none of it needs anyone's permission.
- Your homepage title and description. The first result is yours, and it is very often a title written in 2019 that reads as a keyword string. Say what the company does, for whom, in the words a customer would use.
- A real About page. Not a mission statement. Founding year, city, what you sell, who runs it, how to reach you. This is the page Google and every AI assistant lean on to work out what kind of entity you are.
- Organization structured data on the homepage, with
name,url,logo,address,contactPointand — the one that matters here —sameAspointing at every official profile you own. Google recommends putting it on the home page or a single page that describes the organisation, not on every page. - Your Google Business Profile, if you have a real address or service area. Correct category, correct hours, real photos, and a name that matches your signage rather than your keyword list.
- The profiles you still log into. LinkedIn company page, YouTube channel, Instagram, the app store listing. Same logo, same one-line description, same URL, everywhere. Consistency across independent sources is what builds the entity in the first place — the mechanics are in the Knowledge Graph.
What you influence but do not own
The middle bucket is where the work is. You can't edit these pages, but you can change what they say about you or how far down they sit.
Rank them by how far a buyer would have to scroll to reach them, and fix in that order. A one-star review at position four costs you more than a broken directory listing at position eleven.
- Review platforms. Google reviews, and depending on your category, Justdial, MouthShut, Practo, or Trustpilot. You can't remove a review; you can reply to every one of them, and you can change the mix by asking customers properly. That's a standing process rather than a week-one task — review management is its own job.
- Employer review sites. AmbitionBox and Glassdoor rank for brand queries far more often than founders realise, and they're read by prospects, not just candidates. You can claim the employer profile and respond. You cannot delete anything.
- Directory and citation entries with a wrong phone number. Old Justdial, Sulekha and IndiaMART records outlive the office they were created for. Each needs claiming individually and it is dull, unavoidable work.
- Abandoned profiles. A dormant X account from 2017, a Medium blog with three posts, a Facebook page nobody has posted to since the pandemic. These rank purely on brand-name match, and an empty profile at position five reads as a company that stopped existing. Reclaim it and redirect it, or delete it.
- Company-registry mirrors. For a private limited, sites republishing MCA data often rank on your registered name. The data is public and won't come down, so the practical answer is to make sure your own About page ranks for the registered name too, by simply writing it there once.
What nobody controls, stated plainly
Every agency that has sold a brand-SERP project has been asked for at least one of these. All four answers are no, and it is better to hear it now than to pay for six months of someone trying.
Start with sitelinks, because it's the request that comes up hardest. Google is unambiguous: sitelinks are automated, and the documented remedy for an unwanted one is to remove the page or apply noindex to it. Anyone selling sitelink optimisation as a deliverable is selling site structure with a better name on the invoice.
| Element | Why you can't control it | What you can do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Sitelinks under your homepage | Google generates them from your link structure. There's no markup, no setting, no submission form. | Give it a clear structure and informative page titles. To lose a specific sitelink, noindex or remove that page. |
| A competitor's ad on your brand name | Google Ads permits trademarks as keywords. The trademark policy governs the ad text, not the targeting. | Complain about the ad copy if it uses your mark misleadingly. Otherwise, decide whether to bid on your own name. |
| The knowledge panel's contents | It's assembled from what independent sources agree on. Claiming it lets you suggest changes, not make them. | Verify the entity, then fix the underlying sources. Corrections land when the sources agree, not when you ask. |
| The AI Overview for your brand | Generated per query from whatever the systems find. No opt-in, no ranking slot to buy. | Make the facts about you consistent and easy to find. Then check it monthly, because it will change. |
The week-one sequence, and what it actually costs in hours
We run this in the first week of every engagement, before any content or link work, for two reasons. It's the only part of SEO that produces a visible change within days, which buys patience for the parts that take six months. And it's where the entity is defined — the same consistency that fixes your brand SERP is what feeds brand mentions and AI citations later.
Times below are for a company with one location and a handful of profiles. Multiply by the number of locations, and add several hours if nobody can find the login for an old account.
| Step | What it involves | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Capture the baseline | Six queries, mobile and desktop, incognito, correct city. Screenshots dated and filed. | 1 |
| 2. Homepage and About | Rewrite the title and description. Write or fix the About page so it states the facts a stranger needs. | 2–3 |
| 3. Organization schema | name, url, logo, address, contactPoint, and sameAs for every profile you own. Validate it. | 1–2 |
| 4. Business Profile | Category, name, hours, service area, photos, and a description that isn't a keyword list. | 1–2 |
| 5. Profile inventory | List every profile on page one. Claim, update or kill each. This is the step that overruns. | 2–4 |
| 6. Reply to reviews | Every review visible on page one, including the good ones. Fifteen minutes each, done properly. | 1–2 |
| 7. Decide on brand ads | Check whether anyone is bidding on your name. Decide, don't default. | 0.5 |
| 8. Set up monitoring | Brand query filter saved in Search Console, plus an alert on the brand name. | 0.5 |
The two things that outlast week one
Two items refuse to fit in a week, and both are worth starting on day one precisely because they take months.
Reclaiming abandoned accounts. Platforms are slow, support is thin, and the person who created the account left in 2021. Budget weeks of waiting rather than hours of work. Where deletion isn't possible, updating the profile so it points at your current site is usually enough — an accurate profile at position six is harmless, an abandoned one is not.
Building enough consistent third-party sources that the entity settles. Directories, an industry association listing, a press mention, a founder profile that names the company the same way. This is the slow input behind the knowledge panel and behind how AI assistants describe you, and there is no shortcut. It's also the point at which a brand SERP clean-up stops being cosmetic and starts affecting what shows up on the wider search results page for your category, not just your name.