A competitor has a search term in their brand name - Can we outrank them for that search term?

[SanjidaKazi]

Hi Mozzers,

I have been putting a lot of work into ranking for a certain search term. We have managed to get our homepage to #3 for that search term.

#1 is a comparison site, so I am not overly fussed with beating them - we probably won't. But we do want to hit #2 and in all fairness, we have better content and have put more into our SEO efforts than the current #2. I think they are ranking so strongly because their brand name is exactly that search term with the word "go" in front of it. Google even spits out their extra links under the result as if it was a branded result.

I know EMD's don't hold much weight any more so I'm guessing this is all to do with their clever brand name choice.

My question is, can you outrank a competitor like that?

If you're selling wooden rocking horses and your company is called toybox.com for example, but your competitor is called GoWoodenRockingHorses and their domain is www.gowoodenrockinghorses.com, can toybox.com ever outrank them for the search term "wooden rocking horses"?

Hope this makes sense, please private mail me for more info if you need it!

Cheers,

Jamie

[SanjidaKazi]

**UPDATE

We hit #2 last night and have held the position this morning. Hopefully a stronger link profile will now take us to #1!

[Alick300]

Hi Jamie,

Mark Ginsberg is absolutely right "Despite the EMD update, EMD's do still have some advantages from my experience." and even I know list of the websites who is ranking for very competitive keyword by having EMD with very low number inbound links not even quality backlinks.

So it is not impossible to outrank them very easily but for that you must have more quality backlinks from authoritative websites.

Thanks

[SanjidaKazi]

Cheers Mark I just wanted to make sure.

Our SEO and content is more on point than ever at the moment - as is site speed and errors -  but from your response I am deducing we need to get a stronger link profile to knock them off the #2 spot.

That's where ill focus.

Thanks for that

[Mark_Ginsberg]

You can absolutely outrank them, but you are starting out behind.  Despite the EMD update, EMD's do still have some advantages from my experience.  Specifically, they can get more keyword rich anchor text links "naturally" because people tend to link using the site name.

That said, if you have better on-page SEO or significantly more links than the EMD you're competing with, you should ultimately come out ahead.