Why can't I rank for my brand name?
-
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
-
Yep, seems right. I'd say you don't have enough authority yet to rank for a generic term. You would have to be #1 for "zing company" first i believe. But you are on the right path... just need to build more brand awareness and let google better learn the association between "zing" and your company.
My guess is that once you reach a certain "authority", you should see your rankings jump for "zing".
-
Ok well that is (kind of) reassuring! I'm finding link building to be quite difficult but I presume its one of the missing links for us at the moment. Thanks again for your help, all of our thoughts are with you and everyone in Australia right now.
-
I found this reply very helpful and will be taking your advice closely! Thanks especially for the Google + / URL advice! I agree it is a bit of an uphill battle as I know that the expectations in-house are a little bit over the top. All I can do is keep working hard and try to get on the first page by launch. I just don't understand why we wouldn't be ranked 359th? I think I might start up a new post to do with link building as I am finding it extremely difficult while we have such little content! Thanks again for your help.
-
It doesn't same particularly strange, no — you can rank for certain terms and not appear at all for others. I'd give it time, continue with your link-building and content efforts, and re-evaluate once you've actually launched.
-
A quick look and it doesn't seem like you have a lot of links yet, which isn't surprising since you haven't launched. You will have some work to establish your brand in Google. It might help to grab a business Google+ page, as it looks like right now you have a personal one. Also, in the link to your G+ profile, never use the /b in the url, this is part of the admin page url. Getting ranked for the term zing means you have to show Google that if people search zing, they are looking for you. I think this will be a difficult task with the word, but as was mentioned start with social profiles before launch, after launch focus on NAP listings, a press release for sure, and niche specific links. If I named a company Michael Jordan, even if I did everything right to establish a brand, it's not likely I would rank when people searched Michael Jordan, so just keep that in mind. There are many other sites using zing in there name or even having the domain zing.com. You have an uphill battle my friend, good luck!
-
Thanks for that Thee, I will do the NAP listings after launch, as my colleagues have requested me not to do it at this time. Do you have any comments about my question? Do the rankings in my reply to Oleg seem natural to you? (Regarding the search term zing not even showing up in the search results when our website is even called www.zing.co.nz)
-
Thanks for the awesome reply Oleg! We are a New Zealand only company so we will only be aiming for number one here. Thanks a lot for your great advice, I'm yet to create a wikipedia page or use freebase.com. I have been tracking quite a few keywords but not the ones with company. I'll get onto that asap. We are not a payday loans company but will be breaking into the market somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd tear lending zones. We have some ground breaking technology that lets us only except loans for people who have every capability of paying it back, where as payday lenders tend to target the lower socioeconomic groups. Our main target audience will be people like me, young tech savvy professionals who want to do more with life (our tagline). For example, getting an early bird ticket to a new years festival.
Heres how we are ranking at the moment for the terms you mentioned:
zing short term loans - #1zing loans - #1
zing company nz - #2
zing nz - #5
zing company - #21 (I haven't tried to optimize for this yet so will work on that due to your recommendation)
zing - We don't show up once in all 358 results.
Does this seem natural? I mean if we were in the results at all I wouldn't be so worried...
-
Great answer Oleg, I would just like to add that on top of the social presence that you should also be looking at NAP listings for the company.
-
Thanks a lot for the reply! The problem that I find, is that we don't rank on ANY of the 37 pages of results. I don't understand how we could possibly be ranking number 1 for so many terms with zing in them yet not even in the search results for Zing.
The company will be New Zealand only and will have huge brand exposure. From my research of competitors, I have found that a large majority of the search terms are branded, rather than generic terms such as short term loans. I also feel that it will be a lot easier to rank in the top page for the term zing, than it will be to directly compete with other lending companies when we are so new. I of course plan on doing that later!
Anyway, does this seem odd to you? I mean i searched through all 37 pages and... nothing.
-
Its a very generic term that actually has a dictionary definition. On top of that, there are dozens of other brands that use the same name. Google is getting a lot of feedback coming in for the term "Zing" so it will be difficult to rank #1. If you play your cards right, you will probably get it in NZ first. You should track brand association by genericizing your keywords and looking for improvement. e.g. "zing short term loans" -> "zing loans" -> "zing company nz" -> "zing nz" -> "zing company" -> "zing"
How to establish your brand:
- Social media presence. go to www.knowem.com and create profiles for your brand on as many of these sites as possible, linking back to your company website. Be sure to load up a bunch of company info to each social media property and do some interlinking.
- Create a wikipedia page. This is one of the sources that Google uses in it's knowledge graph and to judge entity relationship signals.
- Create entities + relationships on freebase.com
- Create a google+ brand page and link up with publisher markup
Ultimately, you are going to have to convince google that when a visitor seaches for "zing", they are actually looking for your company.
p.s. are these payday loans?
-
"Zing" is a fairly generic term, so I wouldn't expect to be able to rank in the first page with almost no content or links on a brand-new site that hasn't launched yet. The blog is a good effort, I'd keep working in that direction, as well as developing the social media pages you guys have set up.
Ranking for this branded term is unlikely to have a meaningful effect for traffic or conversions, though. What's the intention behind this goal?
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
-
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
Any SEO-wizards out there who can tell me why Google isn't following the canonicals on some pages?
Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
301 redirects don't work properly
Hello all, I've been working on 301 redirects for a bit and normally it's no problem but some seem to be going wrong. Redirect 301 /3-zits.html http://www.bankstellenshop.com/banken/3-zits.html This one works properly but the following one gives a very strange result as it goes to http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen.html/u (no idea where the .html comes from) Redirect 301 /bankstellen/u http://www.bankstellenshop.com/bankstellen/u.html Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what should change? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kapottefietsband0 -
Duplicate Page Content error but I can't see it
Hi All We're getting a lot of Duplicate Page Content errors but I can't match it up. For example this page: http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/32-antique-cottage It is saying the on page properties as follows: Title DayTripFinder - Things to do reviewed by you - 7,000 attractions <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Meta Description</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Read Reviews, Browse Opening Hours and Prices. View Photos, Maps. 7,000 UK Visitor Attractions.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">But this isn't the page title or meta description.
Technical SEO | | KateWaite85
</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">And it's showing five (many others) example pages that share it. Again the page titles and description are different.</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/mckinlay-theatre</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/bakers-dolphin</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/shipley-park-fishing</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/king-johns-lodge-and-gardens</dt> <dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">http://www.daytripfinder.co.uk/attractions/city-hall
</dt> Any ideas? Not sure if I'm missing something here! Thanks!0 -
Ignore url parameters without the 'parameter=' ?
We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign? For example: www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Duplicate titles OK if page don't need to rank well?
I know It is not a good idea to have duplicate titles across a website on pages as Google does not like this. Is it ok to have duplicate titles on pages that aren't being optimised with SERP's in mind? or could this have a negative effect on the pages that are being optimised?
Technical SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0