How to target for misspelled Brand name searches
-
Hi to all the SEO experts here,
I am working on SEO of my 4 months old website. For example, its 'abz.com'. We like the brand name 'abz' for the business and we are able to SEO well for keyword 'abz'. However, we would also like to target for the keyword 'abc'. There are 2 reasons for that:
- 'abc' is an actual word. So there is a possibility that our users may type 'abc' instead of 'abz' to reach us.
- For 'abc', the top result is 'abct.us', which is a site of adult in nature. Also our website doesn't feature at all in the results. This is hitting us hard in terms of or brand visibility.
So the questions are:
- How to feature in results of keyword search of 'abc'? Will the following approach work:
- Buying an available domain 'abc.co.in', and use it to feature in 'abc' results and 301 redirect to 'abz.com'
- Having 'abc' in the page meta (title and description). This is hard for us, since we need to rethink our taglines and copyrights.
2. If we search for 'abz', Google says "Do you mean abc". Is there a way to not have this suggestion?
It would helpful to have some more ideas for this problem.
-
Great answer Chris!
Manas,
It sounds to me like Google does not consider your brand to be an "entity" worth ranking for it's own brand name. This is why you're getting the "Did You mean?" link or "Search instead for..." in search results for your brand. The stronger your brand becomes - in Google's eye's - the less likely it is that people will see "Did You mean?" for the search.
Of course, without actually knowing the terms, it's difficult to say. If your brand name is "Helocopter" it would need to be VERY strong for Google not to show results for "Helicopter". However, if your brand is "HeelCooper" you could probably resolve that problem, and several of your others, with the suggestions below.
- Go Through This Presentation and implement what you can, such as:
-
Organization Schema with Schema.or Markup in the HTML or with JSON-LD
-
Add and Define your brand on WikiData, Wikimedia and other open data sources, or repositories for brand entities
-
Work your way up to WikiPedia by doing noteworthy things that generate press
- Make sure your Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) are consistent across the web.
-
There are many ways to format things:
-
(Street, St. | Road Rd. | 1800, 1-800 | 555-999-5555, (555) 999-5555) | ABC, ABZ.
-
The important thing is consistency. You need to "Disambiguate" your brand from whatever that other keyword is. This is important for search, but also in reducing the amount of your potential customers who misspell your brand.
- Drive more searches for your brand, and subsequent clicks to your site by generating positive publicity.
- Use PPC ads for your branded terms, and that other term if possible, to get as much of that traffic as possible to your site, even if you aren't ranking #1. Also, google will be less likely to recommend another search if the one you performed is generating income for them. And they can use the data gained from those real user searches to inform their algorithms, which will - hopefully - eventually result in your site showing up, as it should, for branded searches.
- If none of this works, consider re-branding.
-
Hi Manas,
It's quite tough to give general advice on something like this because it often needs quite a specific answer, depending on your company name and that keyword you want to target.
If your company name is very close to that larger keyword, like Car Hirez and you're trying to rank for that branded term and Car Hire, it can be a little tricky. Without further info, my best suggestion would be to put that company name everywhere that it makes sense, and always in the same order.
I don't mean cram your company name whenever you can, just make sure it's in all the usual places like the page title, logo alt text, in your content, in all of your NAP listings, your link anchor profile etc. Keeping it to the same phrasing each time is also important for you to establish that those 2 or 3 words as your actual brand name, rather than words.
For example, don't allow alternation between ABC Car Hire, ABC Rental Cars, Car Hire from ABC etc. if the name is ABC Car Hire, make sure it's written that way wherever practical.
Of course, to rank for that broader term, the usual rules apply. Include that keyword in your page title, H1, content, internal link anchors etc etc. Treat the branded term and the keyword as separate items; that's how you want them to be viewed.
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
-
Product search URLs with parameters and pagination issues - how should I deal with them?
Hello Mozzers - I am looking at a site that deals with URLs that generate parameters (sadly unavoidable in the case of this website, with the resource they have available - none for redevelopment) - they deal with the URLs that include parameters with *robots.txt - e.g. Disallow: /red-wines/? ** Beyond that, they userel=canonical on every PAGINATED parameter page[such as https://wine****.com/red-wines/?region=rhone&minprice=10&pIndex=2] in search results.** I have never used this method on paginated "product results" pages - Surely this is the incorrect use of canonical because these parameter pages are not simply duplicates of the main /red-wines/ page? - perhaps they are using it in case the robots.txt directive isn't followed, as sometimes it isn't - to guard against the indexing of some of the parameter pages??? I note that Rand Fishkin has commented: "“a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL, because “you'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages).” **- yet I see this time again on ecommerce sites, on paginated result - any idea why? ** Now the way I'd deal with this is: Meta robots tags on the parameter pages I don't want indexing (nofollow, noindex - this is not duplicate content so I would nofollow but perhaps I should follow?)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links on paginated pages - that should be enough. Look forward to feedback and thanks in advance, Luke0 -
Google Search Console > Security Issues
Hi all, *Admin please feel free to remove or add this to any existing post. I have searched the community for any similar questions. While checking in the Google Search Console, under the "Security Issues" (lone section) I have found Google pointing out specific pages of our website where the message we are seeing is "Content injection - These pages appear to be modified by a hacker with the intent of spamming search results." The Learn More link takes us to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/hacked/docs/hacked_with_spam?ctx=SI&ctx=BHspam&rd=1 We've never injected spam code or have not been injected with any spammy code so what baffles me is why would Google pick this up when we have mentioned to them very clear that our code is secure and not hacked. Has anyone received a similar message and had any luck removing the message correctly? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SP10 -
On-site Search - Revisited (again, *zZz*)
Howdy Moz fans! Okay so there's a mountain of information out there on the webernet about internal search results... but i'm finding some contradiction and a lot of pre-2014 stuff. Id like to hear some 2016 opinion and specifically around a couple of thoughts of my own, as well as some i've deduced from other sources. For clarity, I work on a large retail site with over 4 million products (product pages), and my predicament is thus - I want Google to be able to find and rank my product pages. Yes, I can link to a number of the best ones by creating well planned links via categorisation, silos, efficient menus etc (done), but can I utilise site search for this purpose? It was my understanding that Google bots don't/can't/won't use a search function... how could it? It's like expeciting it to find your members only area, it can't login! How can it find and index the millions of combinations of search results without typing in "XXXXL underpants" and all the other search combinations? Do I really need to robots.txt my search query parameter? How/why/when would googlebot generate that query parameter? Site Search is B.A.D - I read this everywhere I go, but is it really? I've read - "It eats up all your search quota", "search results have no content and are classed as spam", "results pages have no value" I want to find a positive SEO output to having a search function on my website, not just try and stifle Mr Googlebot. What I am trying to learn here is what the options are, and what are their outcomes? So far I have - _Robots.txt - _Remove the search pages from Google _No Index - _Allow the crawl but don't index the search pages. _No Follow - _I'm not sure this is even a valid idea, but I picked it up somewhere out there. _Just leave it alone - _Some of your search results might get ranked and bring traffic in. It appears that each and every option has it's positive and negative connotations. It'd be great to hear from this here community on their experiences in this practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Elton0 -
Industry leader being outranked by small competitors in Google Search
Hi Guys, I am working on the SEO strategy of an adult e-commerce website and I don't understand how small competitors/websites with a poor domain authority, links profile and on-page optimisation are outranking us across the top high search volume search terms. We have already fixed several issues with the site including canonical tags, duplicate content, links profile, etc... I would be interested to get someone expert's opinion as we have been working on this over the last 12 months and haven't seen improvements. My email is "damien@bangonline.com.au". Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Site: inurl: Search
I have a site that allows for multiple filter options and some of these URL's have these have been indexed. I am in the process of adding the noindex, nofollow meta tag to these pages but I want to have an idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed so I can monitor when these have been re crawled and dropped. The structure for these URL's is: http://www.example.co.uk/category/women/shopby/brand1--brand2.html The unique identifier for the multiple filtered URL's is --, however I've tried using site:example.co.uk inurl:-- but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using regex but still no success. I was wondering if there is a way around this so I can get a rough idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Recommended e-commerce site search for Magento?
Does anyone have recommendations for any particular site searches for large e-commerce sites based on Magento? Some (hopeful) requirements: Possibility to segment product pages and blog content on results page Doesn't cause any major SEO or technical issues Understands semantic search Ability to filter results Ability to sort (e.g. by price, popularity, new in stock) It'd be really useful to see examples and know if there are any particular issues to be aware of. Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Domain Name Registration - 3 Options - which one?
Hello SEOZ 🙂 I'm thinking about registering a domain for a project, the Keyword I want to rank for consists of two words. Somethink like this: "joomla training" But the domain I want to register f.e. joomla-training.com ist registered already. I have 3 options that I consider, what's the best? Register another TD: joomla-training**.net** instead of .com Ad a letter : joomla-trainings.net Switch words: training-joomla.com Write the Keywords without a hypen: joomlatraining.com What should I do now? Thanks for your help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | krseo0 -
Targetting site in 3 countries
I have read the seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday before asking the question We recieved a query from one of our client regarding targetting his site in 3 different countries namely - US,UK and Australia. Specifically, he has asked us- 1. Whether i should buy ccTLD like - www.example.co.uk www.example.com.au www.example.com and write unique content for each of the above. or 2. or go for subfolder approach www.example.com/UK www.example.com/AU will it affect SEO if the subfolders are in CAPS. Would like to have advice of moz community on what advice will be the best. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050