When Company names confuse search

[RobertFisher]

I am currently perplexed over a client's search results. They are an established company and well known in their field. (Unfortunately, I am not comfortable providing a link or their name.) The company is a consulting firm and let's assume it is an accounting firm, which it is not. When you search on BSC Accounting the results give them the first result but the next 18 results are around education - BSc Accounting. Consider the DA on the site is 34 and the PA for homepage is 39.

Is there a chance that when someone is searching on accounting firms that having the BSC in the name skews what they are able to rank for? Forget about searches for their exact name, I am more interested in thoughts as to how the BSC effects general searches for their specialties.

[DonnaDuncan]

Very interesting question.

I'm also wondering if BSC + accounting (as an example) impedes your client's ability to rank because of lowered brand ranking signals. B.Sc. audiences are bound to bounce more and spend far less time on page and site. They're unlikely to link to you when they might, in fact, link to one of your B.Sc. competitors.

[MiriamEllis]

Sounds like the name change might be a good suggestion, Robert, given this scenario. Good luck with this!

[effectdigital]

I think I get what you are querying. What you are saying is, can Google give a wild mix of results, when Google is confused in terms of where the user wants to go? Do Google's query-spaces, contain search-entities (thematic entities) which collide with each other, when the keywords are fuzzy around the edges?

Yes that is a common thing, it's partially by design and partially an error on Google's part. It's also just down to how users search.

If Google's machine-learning detects that, usually when people type in "bsc" they are actually looking for "b.sc" (B.Sc) - then the search results will collide and impact on each other. Google uses a lot of data to tell, which search results users were happy with. But sometimes, Google gets stuck - because one acronym (or search term) genuinely means two or more things and competing groups of users want the results to swing 'their' way.

Obviously, if Google just made the query-space about one thing, there would be 100% chance that a certain group of search users (who enter the query-space) would be dissatisfied regularly. In these situations, the query-space hedges its bets and supplies mixed results, which may vary in intensity (one way or the other) based on 'personalised' search (so the query-space also becomes more variable)

I see you have already discovered that either search produces very similar search results. That is a strong indicator that two query-spaces have 'collided' to some degree. When I checked in AdWords, Google did see "B.Sc" (corrected to "b sc" with a space) and "bsc" (not corrected) as distinct, but if placed into the keyword planner individually (to find keyword ideas) they came back with very similar stuff. That's what I'd call a 'partial' query-space collision

At the point where Google corrects one of the two keywords to the other, that's full-impact

[RobertFisher]

Hello Miriam,

Yes, the firm name conflicts with same term for B.Sc. I am readying a document where I suggest we change the business name and at first I thought, "we could just go to a different URL," but then I realized that doesn't change all the content with BSC in it.

I agree the key is searcher intent and that is what validates at least having a discussion about changing the company name.

Thanks as always for your great insight.

Robert

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Robert!

By BSC are you talking about the educational term Bachelor of Science? If so, then Google would almost certainly be trying to parse the intent of a search phrase containing that term. If I name my meteorology store "Weather Near Me", Google is going to have a very hard time knowing that customers are looking for my store and not for a forecast for their area. Sounds like this may be what's happening to your client ... that their name is too much like a more general search phrase, causing Google to diversify the SERPs because they aren't 100% certain about searcher intent.

If I'm not understanding, please feel free to provide more details.