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
-
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Question about getting domain name re-indexed
I recently swapped my domain from www.davescomputers.com to www.computer-help.com . Originally www.computer-help.com was 301 re-directing to www.davescomputers.com ...however my long term goal is to eventually rebrand my business so I decided to utilize the other domain by swapping the main domain. Is consistant blogging the best way to get Google to re-index the entire website? My focus has been quality posts and sharing them with vairus social profiles I created.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidMolnar0 -
No international targeting option showing in GWT?
Hi for some strange reason for one of our sites the international targeting option to select what country to target in GWT is not showing. Usually it shows up like this: http://s9.postimg.org/bkxkkrafi/screenshot_1672.jpg (this is a different site we have in GWT). But it shows up like this: http://s16.postimg.org/im1ysd5z8/screenshot_1673.jpg With no way to change country targeting. My permission level is set as: Owner and are verified. Any ideas on why its not showing up? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
.Com version of my site is ranking better than .co.uk for my UK Website for branded search. 301 redirect mess
Dear Mozzers, I have an issue with my UK Website (short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD ) whereby when I type my company name in to google.co.uk search the .com version returns in Search as opposed to the .co.uk and from looking at open site explorer the page rank of the .com is higher than the .co.uk ?. Infact I cant even see the .co.uk homepage version but other pages from my site. The .com version is also 301'd to the .co.uk. From looking at Open Site Explorer, I have noticed that we have more links pointing to .com as opposed to .co.uk. Alot of these are from our own separate microsites which we closed down last year and I have noticed the IT company who closed them down for some reason 301'd them to the .com version of our site as opposed to the .co.uk but If I look in http://httpstatus.io/ (http status checker tool) to check one of these mircosites it shows - 301 - 302 - 200 status codes which to me looks wrong ?. I am wondering what it should read ... e.g should it just be a 301 to a 200 status code ?. My Website short url is - http://goo.gl/dJ7IgD and an example of some of 10 microsites we closed down last year which seems to be redirected to .com is http://goo.gl/BkcIjy and http://goo.gl/kogJ02 As these were redirected almost a year ago - it is okay if I now get them redirected to the .co.uk version of my site or what should I do ? They currently redirect to the home page but given that each of the microsites are based on an individual category of my main site , would it be better to 301 them to the relevant category on my site. My only concern is that , may cause to much internal linking and therefore I wont have enough links on my homepage ? How would you suggest I go about building up my .co.uk authority so it ranks betters than the .com- I am guessing this is obviously affecting my rankings and I am losing link juice with all this. Any advice greatly appreciated . thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Google Search Results...
I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100. The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000 but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000. Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains. Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Link to homepage or brand page?
Hi, I have opportunity to get a link from a brands website to our website as we are official retailers. Should I give them our homepage URL or should I give them their brands page on our website? The brand page will have their brand name in the URL, meta details, images, content and products. What is more beneficial SEO wise? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
How to Target Keyword Permutations
I have a client that wants to rank for a keyword phrase that has many permutations.. ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort", "Hill Country Resort Alaska", "Hill Country Alaska Resort" But I'm wondering if I should target these all on the same page or not. I'm assuming all of these permutations are actually valid searches because I did my keyword research for 'exact match' keywords and got results like this.. (let me know if I'm missing something here, or if this sounds right) [Alaska Hill Country Resort] - 230 Local Searches [Hill Country Resort Alaska] - 140 Local Searches [Hill Country Alaska Resort] - 30 Local Searches The phrase we're targeting is their main keyword phrase, so I've chosen their home-page as the page to rank for this phrase. My thought is to optimize for the most popular phrase (ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort"), and sprinkle in the other phrases throughout the copy. Next I would run a link-building campaign targeting the main phrase first.. then the next phrase, and so on, so that my anchor text is more heavily focused on the more popular terms, but I would also make sure to include the less popular terms. Do you think this is the best way to go about this? Do I really need to make individual pages for each of the permutations, or is it okay to target them all on one page since they are essentially the same keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Is there any correlation to time and search ranking?
Is there any evidence that google acknowledges the time that a site has been online with all other things being equal for search ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340