A Business Name That Is Also a Common Word

Searching for your own name

Type the name of a business called Summit, Pacific or Elite into Google and the first page belongs to everyone else: a dictionary, a mountain, a hotel, a car dealership two provinces away.

Customers who heard your name from a neighbour do exactly the same thing, and few of them scroll far.

Ordinary words make memorable names. They also make names a search engine cannot easily tell apart from the word itself, or from every other business that chose it.

The answer is rarely a new name. It is making sure the searches people actually type lead to you.

How people search for a half-remembered name

• The name alone, which returns everyone sharing it.
• Name plus trade, the word followed by plumbing or roofing.
• Name plus town, when they remember where you are.
• Trade plus town, once the name has slipped entirely.
• A near miss: plural for singular, or a similar word.

The second and third are the ones you can win. A searcher who adds a trade or a place has told Google which owner of the word they mean, and your pages need to match.

Put the full name where Google reads it

The home page title is the strongest signal on the site itself. Give it the name, the trade and the town, within about sixty characters, rather than the name alone or the word Home.

Write the same combination into the first lines of the home page and the contact page, in an ordinary sentence a customer would read without noticing.

Use the full form, name plus trade, in the logo text, the footer and the about page. A logo that shows only the one word gives search engines nothing to connect it to.

The listing does much of the work

For searches that include a town, the map results matter as much as the website, and a Google My Business listing with the right name, category, address and hours is what appears there.

Use the name on your sign, written exactly as it is there. Google's guidelines do not allow keywords or towns to be added to the name in a listing, and listings that do it can be suspended.

Choose the most precise category available. It helps the listing appear for name plus trade searches even when hundreds of others share the word.

When someone searches your exact name and town, a complete listing often appears as a panel of its own, which is the clearest answer a searcher can get.

A worked example

A civil engineering firm with two offices in the Fraser Valley designs site grading, drainage and servicing for builders and developers. Its name is a single ordinary word, shared with a ski hill, a hotel and several local businesses.

Most new work arrives by referral. A builder mentions the firm to a developer, who searches for it later from a phone on site.

Those searches returned the hotel, the ski hill and a directory entry for a different firm. The firm's own site sat on the second page, under a home page title that read only the name and the word Home.

Its listing used the bare one-word name under a vague category, and the second office had no listing at all.

The fix took about a week: page titles pairing the full name with civil engineering and each town, a complete listing for each office, and proposals, signatures and site signs spelling out the full name.

The name alone still returns the hotel. That search was never one the firm needed to win.

Teach people the whole name

Searches start with what people heard. If staff answer the phone with the single word, and the trucks and hard hats carry only that word, that is what customers will type.

Say the full name, word plus trade, in the phone greeting, on vehicles, on invoices and in email signatures.

It costs nothing, and it changes what ends up in the search box.

Own the obvious combinations

The single word as a .com or .ca was probably taken long ago. A domain combining the name with the trade, or with the town, is easier to find and to remember.

If both combinations are plausible, register the second as well and point it at the same site.

Claim the same full name on Facebook and any other network you use, so a search inside those sites finds you rather than a stranger who took the word first.

Advertising on your own name

A small AdWords campaign on your name combined with your trade and towns usually costs little, because few advertisers compete for those exact searches, and it puts you at the top while the rest of the work takes effect.

It also covers the case where another business sharing the word advertises against it.

Treat it as a supplement. The listing and the site still have to say the right things.

Know who shares your word

Search your name the way customers do: alone, with your trade, with each town, and on both a phone and a computer.

Note who appears. A national brand using the same word is a permanent neighbour you can live with.

A business in your own trade and area using it is a real problem, and worth knowing about before customers confuse the two of you.

The counter-case

Some businesses barely feel this. In a small town where nobody else uses the word, or a trade where customers search by service rather than by name, the effort matters less.

Renaming is rarely worth it for an established business. Years of recognition are worth more than a cleaner search result, and a new name brings problems of its own.

A new business still choosing a name, though, should search it before printing anything.

For everyone else, pair the name with your trade and town wherever it appears, and make the listing complete.

Making the name findable

1. Search your name the way customers do.
2. Retitle the home page with name, trade and town.
3. Add the full name to your key pages.
4. Complete your listing with a precise category.
5. Say the full name on phones, vehicles and invoices.
6. Register the obvious domain combination and redirect it.
7. Consider a small campaign on your own name.

Step five is the one most businesses skip, and it shapes every search that follows. People type what they heard, so the full name has to be what they hear.

What happens to search results after a business changes its name is covered in the site that ranks for the old business name.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.