Why can't I rank for my brand name?

[Startupfactory]

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!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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".

[Startupfactory]

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.

[Startupfactory]

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.

[Ophelie]

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.

[TheeDigital]

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!

[Startupfactory]

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)

[Startupfactory]

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 - #1

zing 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...

[TheeDigital]

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.

[Startupfactory]

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.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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?

[Ophelie]

"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?