Website Name Before Search String in Google SERP
-
I'm curious to hear whether it's better to have your company name before the Search String, or after it?When I search for Church Management Software in Google, some results place the company before the string.
**In attached image
(Pink Squares : Company Name)
(Blue Squares : Search String)Please indicate in your response if there is any study, experiment, or evidence to back your answer. Thanks for your help!
-
Yes, that is what is happening. Google will often use the title that is on the page, but it does not always do that. It will use a different title if it thinks a different title is more relevant to the searcher's intent. This is especially true if the content on the page does not match the title. (For example, on the Elexio page, the words "Church Management Software" are not even present on the page, other than the title, description, and schema.)
-
Thanks Linda. Are you suggesting that Google is serving up this change on its own?
-
As far as a reference for the answer that the keyword should be near the start of the title, Moz's Beginner's Guide refers to this.
But what I find interesting is that if you look at those pages (not just the serp), only two of them actually start with the company name in the title on the page. The others are just displayed that way.
-
For sure. Any additional equity must be a plus.
-
Thanks for the feedback Luis. I agree that if this was a campaign on Brand Awareness, then leading with the company name may be preferable. I did some research into your "first 11 characters" reference, and had not realized that Nielsen was the authority behind that study. Thanks for mentioning that.
db
-
I typically use the keyword first and company/brand second. As a prospect will skim the serps, they typically are looking for the keyword entered, so prominence is import.
-
Hello there
1. First of all, place your main keyword at the beginning: Search engines assign more importance to the first word in the title tag than to the second one and so forth. From a usability perspective, since users understand just the first 11 characters of links, then it is important to make the most out of these characters by placing the most important content there.
2. And remember, don't put your company name on every single website page. The problem with this is that when Google comes along to index your site, it has no idea what your site is about, so it looks in the HTML for clues. One place it looks is in the page title, which is what you see in your tag on your browser. If you keep using your company name over and over again, you end up indexing your company name a lot in Google's search engine. This is great you say...so when someone Googles "My Company Name" I will be first. That's true, you will be. But unless you are Nike or Coke, you don't have massive brand recognition, so while you may get a bit of traffic from your name, you are missing out on people looking for your services. So my final advice here is put your company name on your home page only along with your industry and use the other pages for more product related keywords.
Mmm sorry no study here but reading a lot and watching some guru videos from time to time!!
Hope this helps!
Luis
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
-
Search website bar
I've noticed when you search business such as Pier 1, William Sonoma, they offer a "Search william-sonoma.com" search bar within the organic search. You can see it when you google William Sonoma. So, the question is, how does that get displayed? Is it something a business can include or is it something that Google will provide if they feel the need too? Appreciate any feedback. Thanks.
Branding | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.
We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”. Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1 As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6. If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened. Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days. Any help or suggestions would be great!
Branding | | sderuyter0 -
My 40 year old, well established business has a brand name that I think is hurting my SEO. Need advice please.
Our business brand name has words in it which when we were using it as our domain name, was a) bad for our SEO and b) got our emails marked as spam in our client's inboxes. This was not a problem when we first got online, years ago. It eventually became problematic, but we didn't realize it for some time. When we realized the issue, we simply changed our domain name to something more SEO friendly, using exact match keywords. This was fine for a while, but eventually, algorithms changed again, and now with Google putting an emphasis on Brand Names and not looking as kindly on exact match keyword type domains, we are again at a place where we don't know what to do. We can't change our brand name. I don't want to post our real name or business here, but I will give an example. Brand Name: Living Free Travel The Issue: "Free Travel" gets blocked by spam filters, gets us useless traffic from people looking for free travel (which makes out bounce rates very high), gets our domain blacklisted. The Solution: travel2europe.com is the website of Living Free Travel The New Issue: travel2europe.com is not our brand, and probably doesn't look like one to Google, especially since on our site, travel2europe.com is never really mentioned because it is only our domain, not our brand. "Living Free Travel" is generally the anchor text for travel2europe.com wherever we are linked to. We assume this mismatch is problematic for us in ways we don't even know. Are we screwed? Need advice, please. THANK YOU.
Branding | | benenjerry0 -
Should the Facebook page be just the brand name or also include keywords?
Hi. Do you recommend that a company's Facebook Page be just the Brand Name, or should it include some keywords in the title?
Branding | | JonsonSwartz0 -
Are there any companies out there that can do Search Retargeting on a local level? I'd like to target a Metro area, or even a large city.
Are there any companies out there that can do Search Retargeting on a local level? I'd like to target a Metro area, or even a large city. I'm talking Search Retargeting, not Site Retargeting.
Branding | | mustang7870 -
Yelp Reviews and Google + reviews
After reading this SEOmoz thread http://www.seomoz.org/q/getting-reviews-to-stick-on-yelp-google I have learned that one cannot leave fake reviews because Google and yelp can see if the users are real by the user behavior. If one of your clients is happy with your service and they have never left a Google review or yelp review and you have them leave your company a review it will be filtered and not count. Google’s +1 is fairly new and I am not sure if many users use it. IMO a user is much more likely to Facebook "Like" something. Same goes for Yelp, I feel like many local services don’t have a high enough search volume to benefit from these areas. If a company cannot have a satisfied customer leave a review on Google + or Yelp because they are not active enough on these networks, the company does not receive the credit they deserve. I'm assuming SEOmoz has the contacts to make a change, well here is my idea: How about Yelp and Google + send a letter to the address of the review... (Same as a Google places listing, reviewer will receive letter and enter a pin number online to confirm review) this solves the issue and businesses can receive the credit they deserve. In all fairness if a company does right by someone, the company deserves the review, right? Otherwise this should not be a ranking factor IMHO!
Branding | | SEODinosaur0 -
Social boxes on website - facebook comments feature
Hi everyone, does anyone know where i can install a comments box which when people see a post of page they can add a comment - which also goes to facebook? however i would like to preapprove this? I have seen this kind of thing on websites and wondered how it is done? im assuming it can help obtain more social noise? Any help much appreciated.
Branding | | pauledwards0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a catchy brand name url redirect to an exact match domain
A friend wanted to setup a website where people would share and vote on "widget" ideas where the winning idea got build for free. They bought cute the domain name widg.et and branded their site as widg.et. However, for SEO, they are having widg.et forward to www.sharewidgets.com. Then, to complicate things further, they changed their business model to remove the voting feature and now the site is just set to show off the widgets they've made and let people order new custom widgets. They might add the voting feature back later. "Widget" and "widgets" in this case has an SEOmoz difficulty of 72% and 71%, so quite high and none of the two word or long tail phrases have much traffic. What do you think they should do: Remove all domain forwarding and use widg.et as their only domain as it's less confusing and better for branding Get another domain that includes their keyword widget for the SEO exact match benefit Keep it as is, even though "sharewidgets" is no longer quite as applicable Many Thanks!
Branding | | skincareseo0