How does a business name affect SEO?
-
We have a client that's changing the name of their medical practice from the doctor's name to their region + "eye care." However, they recently told us they're changing it from "eye care" to "eye center."
Many of their direct competitors use "eye care" in their name. I ran a quick keyword analysis and it shows "eye care" gets a million US searches a month, whereas "eye center" gets 450k searches a month.
While that alone would make me suggest they keep "eye care," I ran a keyword difficulty analysis and found that "eye center" has a KW difficulty of 41 and "eye care" has a KW difficulty of 78.
Should we recommend they stay with "eye care" because it gets more searches? Or is it better to go with "eye center" because it'll be easier to rank for?
-
You are losing the big picture......the content on the site is the content. New content can continue to focus on "eye care" or "eye center" regardless what the core name is....... Make sure if they change the name and change the url you redirect from the old url to the new. Remember, you also have the ability to generate additional "defensive urls' on the same subjects that support either term.
Good luck. Please show me the thumbs up.
Mark
-
The focus below is mainly on the domain name, what about the actual business name? Think this would be equally (or more important) from an SEO standpoint as it would appear multiple times in the pages, title etc.
-
I agree with Alan. I have a few clients (lawyers) that I suggest getting a domain name with their practice and their area (e.g. type of law + area). This works great if they are mid level firm. They care more about traffic than branding.
-
I think that depends who you are. If you really are a brand then fine, but if you a small business cutting lawns, then lawnmowingdallas.com would be the way to go.
People can nly reconnize or remeber so many brands, we can't all be a household name.
-
Although keywords in domain name do have relevance in ranking it should not be the sole focus of a business. I would rather have a solid brand name with no keywords in the domain than some long domain with brand+KW for the sole purpose of ranking. I work in highly competitive verticals where none of the top 5 have KW's in the domain, and the ones that do tend to rank at the bottom. It's all about branding and authority.
-
I second Alans comment!
-
I would go with "eye care center"
-
I think it is always a better practice to try to keep the desired keyword in your domain name. However, if they are set on center, you can always make a silo for care and still do plenty well in ranking for both keyword phrases.
In thinking this out loud, I might suggest keeping "eye center" as there domain and use "eye care" as the blog that supports the domain. This way you would be covering more ground and have a two pronged strategy to hit both choice key word phrases.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Standardising of Company Name Across The Web Question
Good Morning All There are two variations of our company name on the website. Sometimes the name is listed as "name and name" and sometimes listed as "name & name" The domain is obviously www.nameandname.co.uk I believe I am correct in saying that we would be wise to go through and standardise, using one form or the other? Secondly, my main question is would we be wise to use "name and name" as the default, as the word "and" and not the symbol "&" is in the domain itself? Many Thanks
Branding | | ruislip180 -
Enhancing SEO Between WordPress Blog and Company Website
My company has recently launched a new and improved website within the last couple months. Unfortunately, the web developers that we'd hired to build and create the site work very little with SEO, thus leaving me in the dark on where to direct any questions regarding the optimization of our web content. Along with the new website design, we've also rolled out a WordPress blog related to our firm. We do have the blog embedded onto a page of our website, and clicking on any title will redirect the viewer to our WordPress blog, hosted separately from our website. My question is this--how do you suggest I drive viewers from our blog to our website, rather than vice versa? Are there any applications, widgets, etc that you could recommend that would help me better associate the blog with our company? Any advice would help. Thanks!
Branding | | LMcLaughlin0 -
Blog SEO strategy
Hi Moz community, we are looking for some advice on our blog/SEO strategy. I hope to find some people who faced similar challenges in the past. Wishlist currently has one blog (http://blog.enjoywishlist.com/), which has two main focus points. One main focus is to portray and encourage a lifestyle that is conducive with our product offering. The main driver behind the content we post is for SEO optimization for our B2C clients. The other focus for our blog is to target current and potential clients on the B2B side of things. That content is much more driven by a target audience and different topics. It is hard to address two audience in one blog and we are working with the idea of separating the blog into two different host domains. Along with the blogs we will also move the landing pages for B2C and B2B into different domains and link these as appropriate. The challenge we face is understanding if it would benefit us to host these two blogs on different domains. We are also wondering if it would help our hurt our SEO to take the content related to our corporate blog and move it to the new domain? Advice appreciated! Thanks Andreas
Branding | | AndreasD1 -
Will you show a case study/live analytics of Moz before and after name change?
so many people are interested these days in changing domains either for branding purposes like you did or some people believe that having an exact match domain will save the day. I believe posting any knowledge you have gained through your fantastic looking analytics system could shed light on a subject so many people seem to be asking about. Some things I would love to know regarding the amount of people that you have either gained or lost through organic search along with your ranking for the term "seo" And other things you guys must be learning along the way as well. I would also like to know your opinion of having a meter of some sort tell us just how many new people type in Moz vs seomoz I tink it would be a great topic for people to learn about branding from as well as a way to show off your new analytics. Fellow Mozers to you agree or not? ( I now see all the little tricks you guys have been putting in our head by never using seo in branding for a long time aside from of course your name) Great job on the transition. Sincerely, Thomas PS. Did Roger get a new coat of paint or did you just take him to the car wash?
Branding | | BlueprintMarketing0 -
Register a Domain: Brand Name VS Product Name
Hi All, Since Google give more priority to brand names and most of the penalized websites by Google's Penguin update are websites which had links with promoted keywords, is it a good idea to register a new domain by the product name (ex: www.leatherbags.com) ?. Or is it good to register the domain by the company or brand name and then build a reputable brand first before targeting product based keywords (ex: leather bags) ?.
Branding | | Iresh.Dilan1 -
How much would or have you pay for a domain name?
I wasn't asking the question from a complete lack of experience but I put this question on the forum here last week…How much would you pay for a key rich domain name with the correct extension? I'm setting up a new website to sell Whitby Jet and one of the members of this forum suggested I should buy the domain name www.whitbyjet.com it was for sale for $300 or £200 in UK money and they thought it was a bargain. I thought it was worth the cost even though I've never paid anywhere near that amount for a domain name.
Branding | | whitbycottages
.
There is a company offering www.whitby-jet.co.uk or £1500 ?!!!! I have bought key rich domain names before, which were very descriptive also but only paid the registration fee with no additional costs
.
I just wondered how much members of this forum have paid for domain names. And why they thought it was worth the cost... SEO Branding etc.? By the way the company that was acting as the intermediate for my new doaminis is an absolute pain. They didn't perform the transfer process quickly until I bombarded them with emails My new domain is still not working one week down the line. In the past I bought a domain cheap and it has been working within 24 hours directly.0 -
Social Profile for my business, where do I start
Hi, Today our business has no social presence so we are starting from the ground up. We have implemented the Google +1 button across the site, but nothing more. The social sites I'm considering targeting are: Linked In Twitter Facebook Google +1 I already have personal accounts used personal sharing on Linked In, FB and +1. I'm unsure whether I need to create a new facebook account for each of those and then create the business profile on each one or whether I should use my existing personal account. Further, for Google +1, there was no requirement to create any business page of any kind, all I had to do was take the code and insert it into the website. That confused me as for Facebook and Linked In, I was sure you must have an account up in order to have the social Like or Share button working Given I'm at the very start of this process, it would be great to get others input into how they went about this, and perhaps share any pitfalls they may seem obvious to avoid in hindsight. Thanks.
Branding | | fdep0 -
Should your company's name be in the title tag of your website?
First of all, I would like to provide some background information. Our company is small. We are just now getting into SEO research and have been improving over a couple months of research. We are somewhere in the 500,000's in the world rankings. From what I understand, the title tag provides a great amount of weight to whatever keywords you set up. The words in the title tag are supposed to represent keywords that you want to be high in the search engines for, correct? Well, in our title tag, we have the name of our company. To me, this is a waste of space. No one is going to go to Google and search for our company's name because we are not that widely known. Looking back at our search history for customers, there has not been a single search for the company name. What someone is telling me, is that when we put our link somewhere, having the name of our company in the title tag strengthens the "link juice" we get from those links. Is this correct, or is it worth trashing the company name for another keyword to optimize?
Branding | | FrontlineMobility0