SEO and Your Business Name
I read a twit today (entry on the web site Twitter) that stood out to me. Working with local businesses, it touches on a common issue. It’s about your business name and how it affects your search engine rankings. Almost every business will rank highest for their business name.
That’s because the name of your business is usually all over your web site. It’s in your title tags, the first thing on every page, you have links to it within your site, and from other sites, etc. That’s not bad because you do want to be the first result when someone types in the name of your business.
The problem is when you’re a new business no one has heard of you. Unless you do a lot of marketing and advertising and spend the time to familiarize people with your business, there probably aren’t many people typing your business name into a search engine. Being number one isn’t that helpful and it’s likely pretty easy and quick to achieve. What you really want is to be number one when someone types in what you sell or do.
Example: I just wrote a press release for a locally owned business called HugaMonkey. They sell baby slings. If you type in HugaMonkey their business is #3 in Google. That’s pretty good, but they’d get even more value if they came up #1 for the words: baby sling.
According to WordTracker there are 256 searches a day on the term “baby sling.” It’s actually a lot more that, but that’s a number you can use to approximate how many people are searching the internet for baby slings.
Here’s the twit that spurned this post – it’s from Wendy Piersall. She is inspiring to me. It took courage for her to transform her blog into a business and expand it. She pulled it off beautifully and her community is as vibrant as ever because of her work. Not long ago, she changed her business name from eMoms to Sparkplugging. There are over 400 searches a day on the term “spark plugs,” it’s probably a reasonably competitive term.
It’s great that Wendy ranks high (#2) for that term, but the problem is, she doesn’t sell spark plugs! This may not be a big deal because Wendy has a community not an ecommerce site, but if I were selling sparkplugs I’d be mad. And then I’d start blogging. If that’s all I sell or a big part of my businses, I’d wish my business name had the words “spark plug” in it.
Takeaway SEO lesson: Think about how your business name will affect your search engine rankings, especially if you’re a small business. It’s not an end-all, but consider tacking on other words (like a tagline) that explains what you do – and uses a keyword that people are searching for.
5 Responses to “SEO and Your Business Name”
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June 9th, 2008 at 3:59 am
i really agree what you said here about choosing business names and how effective it is ….In addition to business names i think the content of the website plus the headlines choice is also as important as name…because first thing when a visitor visits they check the content…i have been using Glyphius (www.glyphius.com). It has helped me really fine-tune my sales letters, headlines, ad copy, etc.
June 15th, 2008 at 9:40 am
I hate to disagree, but I think companies that chooses a generic key word for their name will never become a great company in and of themselves.
IMHO, HugaMonkey is a much better name for the company than “Baby Sling Coupon.” They might make more internet sales with tha second rate name, but the product will never be as endearing to the public.
I think the best approach to the market is to have a fun name that helps differentiate your company and product, then use SEO efforts and blogs to go after any keywords. Having a distinct company name actually creates the situation where people will start seeking out your product.
June 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 am
there are so many products that are popular among so many people. but what makes the difference? a brand name as it reflects the origin of a product. unique company names which attracts attention definitely has more advantage.
September 29th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
From an SEO perspective – yes it makes sense to have your product be a part of your name and part of your URL, especially for new companies. After all, most searchers will be looking for your product – not you. However, a bigger part of marketing (and SEO) is word-of-mouth, and back-links. If you have a great company, with a great product the company name and URL are not as important. I wonder what URL Google would have used if they had to say what they do in it?
November 5th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I currently work for a life insurance website called Wholesale Insurance. We sell primarily life insurance and term life insurance, so those are the keywords we’ve targetted on the site. We’ve had some good success getting onto the first page of Google for “term life insurance” (and were #1 for the first four months of the year). I’m constantly having to work to keep us up there. If we had only targetted “Wholesale Insurance” then we would’ve failed as a company years ago.