Ranking for a brand term with "&" (and) in the name?

[flowsimple]

Hello Moz community.

We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped.

Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)!

Any suggestions or ideas, please help!

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Pashmina,

It looks to me like the problem is that Google doesn't yet understand that "Bar & Cocoa" is a brand in and of itself. Until they receive the signal that "Bar & cocoa" (or "bar and cocoa") is a different query intent than "bar cocoa", this will continue to be an issue. Focus on building your brand online; in particular, I recommend researching the Knowledge Graph to understand how Google catalogs entities. Some things to try:

• Roman's suggestion to implement Schema markup is a good one; I actually recommend implementing markup both inline and via JSON-LD in your header (you can also use Google Tag Manager to implement JSON-LD schema markup; check out this awesome post by Chris Goddard for more on how to do that: https://moz.com/blog/using-google-tag-manager-to-dynamically-generate-schema-org-json-ld-tags). Make sure you use Store markup on your home page to mark up your business name, logo, contact information, and other important details about your business, and mark up as much information about your products as you can.
• Spend some time doing some online-focused PR (that's public relations, not page rank); the goal should be to get mentions of your brand name alongside relevant words about your products (like "chocolate shop") in reputable news outlets. It would be ideal if this coverage resulted in links back to your site, but news coverage without a link will still provide something of a brand signal.
• Start planning your content calendar; think about what's unique about your products and create some content around it that you can then, hopefully, promote to earn links back to your site.
• Make sure you're behaving like a brand online in other ways. Build out your social media profiles, and start trying to build a following on e.g. Facebook and Twitter. With a highly visually-appealing product like chocolate, you might have success on Pinterest and Instagram. Make an effort to engage with your followers - don't just talk about yourself, but really start a conversation and respond when people talk to you. Having a robust, active social media presence sends search engines and users alike the signal that you are a real, reputable business. Claiming social media profiles under your brand name will also provide additional pages that use your brand name in conjunction with your business.

The good news is, all of these activities are worth doing to promote your business online anyway; the bad news is, they will probably take some time to really establish your brand. In the short term, it might be worth investing in some paid search ads to make sure your site shows up for your brand terms.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Roman,

It looks like Bar & Cocoa is an online-only chocolate shop. (Virtual businesses should not optimize their websites for local search.)

[Roman-Delcarmen]

jajajaja thank you james wolff I will take as a recognize

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Let's define your problem into smaller pieces

1- bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa
Stop words (a, the, of, for) are usually filtered out by Google in a search query

I will suggest to check this List of stop words

So we can asumme that you have a problem with the stop word, but I think this not your main problem.
Your main problem is, From Google perspective your website is not relevant for the search querys that you want to rank.

1 - _Do you have an old url or website? if you have it a good idea make a redirection or Add cannonical Tag _Basically you will transffer the authorithy of your old domian to the new one.

_2 - Make Topic Research (Yeah, I'm talking about Topic not keyword) if you made a research you will notice that google classified __the keywords by topic. So if you are a bar in Denver research all the terms related such as: happy hours, special drinks, ect. _Choose the right keywords and start a link building campaign.

__3 - Add schema to your website. In this way Google will have a better understanding that you are a Bar or Restaurant in a Specific Location (The best way to add schema is json, you just need to add some code to your header)

Example 1
http://schema.org/Restaurant

On schemas you can add as many info as you can open hour, price range, geo location, description and so on

I will assume that you are registered on Google Small Business if not, now is the right moment.

Here are 2 list of business directories on USA, so is a good idea to register your website
Hubsopt
localseoguides

If my answer were useful don't forget to mark it as a good answer
Cheers