Why can't I rank for my brand name?
-
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
-
Yep, seems right. I'd say you don't have enough authority yet to rank for a generic term. You would have to be #1 for "zing company" first i believe. But you are on the right path... just need to build more brand awareness and let google better learn the association between "zing" and your company.
My guess is that once you reach a certain "authority", you should see your rankings jump for "zing".
-
Ok well that is (kind of) reassuring! I'm finding link building to be quite difficult but I presume its one of the missing links for us at the moment. Thanks again for your help, all of our thoughts are with you and everyone in Australia right now.
-
I found this reply very helpful and will be taking your advice closely! Thanks especially for the Google + / URL advice! I agree it is a bit of an uphill battle as I know that the expectations in-house are a little bit over the top. All I can do is keep working hard and try to get on the first page by launch. I just don't understand why we wouldn't be ranked 359th? I think I might start up a new post to do with link building as I am finding it extremely difficult while we have such little content! Thanks again for your help.
-
It doesn't same particularly strange, no — you can rank for certain terms and not appear at all for others. I'd give it time, continue with your link-building and content efforts, and re-evaluate once you've actually launched.
-
A quick look and it doesn't seem like you have a lot of links yet, which isn't surprising since you haven't launched. You will have some work to establish your brand in Google. It might help to grab a business Google+ page, as it looks like right now you have a personal one. Also, in the link to your G+ profile, never use the /b in the url, this is part of the admin page url. Getting ranked for the term zing means you have to show Google that if people search zing, they are looking for you. I think this will be a difficult task with the word, but as was mentioned start with social profiles before launch, after launch focus on NAP listings, a press release for sure, and niche specific links. If I named a company Michael Jordan, even if I did everything right to establish a brand, it's not likely I would rank when people searched Michael Jordan, so just keep that in mind. There are many other sites using zing in there name or even having the domain zing.com. You have an uphill battle my friend, good luck!
-
Thanks for that Thee, I will do the NAP listings after launch, as my colleagues have requested me not to do it at this time. Do you have any comments about my question? Do the rankings in my reply to Oleg seem natural to you? (Regarding the search term zing not even showing up in the search results when our website is even called www.zing.co.nz)
-
Thanks for the awesome reply Oleg! We are a New Zealand only company so we will only be aiming for number one here. Thanks a lot for your great advice, I'm yet to create a wikipedia page or use freebase.com. I have been tracking quite a few keywords but not the ones with company. I'll get onto that asap. We are not a payday loans company but will be breaking into the market somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd tear lending zones. We have some ground breaking technology that lets us only except loans for people who have every capability of paying it back, where as payday lenders tend to target the lower socioeconomic groups. Our main target audience will be people like me, young tech savvy professionals who want to do more with life (our tagline). For example, getting an early bird ticket to a new years festival.
Heres how we are ranking at the moment for the terms you mentioned:
zing short term loans - #1zing loans - #1
zing company nz - #2
zing nz - #5
zing company - #21 (I haven't tried to optimize for this yet so will work on that due to your recommendation)
zing - We don't show up once in all 358 results.
Does this seem natural? I mean if we were in the results at all I wouldn't be so worried...
-
Great answer Oleg, I would just like to add that on top of the social presence that you should also be looking at NAP listings for the company.
-
Thanks a lot for the reply! The problem that I find, is that we don't rank on ANY of the 37 pages of results. I don't understand how we could possibly be ranking number 1 for so many terms with zing in them yet not even in the search results for Zing.
The company will be New Zealand only and will have huge brand exposure. From my research of competitors, I have found that a large majority of the search terms are branded, rather than generic terms such as short term loans. I also feel that it will be a lot easier to rank in the top page for the term zing, than it will be to directly compete with other lending companies when we are so new. I of course plan on doing that later!
Anyway, does this seem odd to you? I mean i searched through all 37 pages and... nothing.
-
Its a very generic term that actually has a dictionary definition. On top of that, there are dozens of other brands that use the same name. Google is getting a lot of feedback coming in for the term "Zing" so it will be difficult to rank #1. If you play your cards right, you will probably get it in NZ first. You should track brand association by genericizing your keywords and looking for improvement. e.g. "zing short term loans" -> "zing loans" -> "zing company nz" -> "zing nz" -> "zing company" -> "zing"
How to establish your brand:
- Social media presence. go to www.knowem.com and create profiles for your brand on as many of these sites as possible, linking back to your company website. Be sure to load up a bunch of company info to each social media property and do some interlinking.
- Create a wikipedia page. This is one of the sources that Google uses in it's knowledge graph and to judge entity relationship signals.
- Create entities + relationships on freebase.com
- Create a google+ brand page and link up with publisher markup
Ultimately, you are going to have to convince google that when a visitor seaches for "zing", they are actually looking for your company.
p.s. are these payday loans?
-
"Zing" is a fairly generic term, so I wouldn't expect to be able to rank in the first page with almost no content or links on a brand-new site that hasn't launched yet. The blog is a good effort, I'd keep working in that direction, as well as developing the social media pages you guys have set up.
Ranking for this branded term is unlikely to have a meaningful effect for traffic or conversions, though. What's the intention behind this goal?
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
-
Where can I ... ?
[Spammy content removed by moderator.] Abdullah-Al-Asif-1.jpg?fit=177%2C177&ssl=1 tEjk20Fs_400x400.jpg
Technical SEO | | Abdullah-Al-Asif0 -
We just can't figure out the right anchor text to use
We have been trying everything we can with anchor text. We have read here that we should try naturalistic language. Our competitors who are above us in Google search results don't do any of this. They only use their names or a single term like "austin web design". Is what we are doing hurting our listings? We don't have any black hat links. Here's what we are doing now. We are going crazy trying to figure this out. We are afraid to do anything in fear it will damage our position. Bob | pallasart web design | 31 | 1,730 |
Technical SEO | | pallasart
| website by pallasart a texas web design company in austin | 15 | 1,526 |
| website by the austin design company pallasart | 14 | 1,525 |
| created by pallasart a web design company in austin texas | 13 | 1,528 |
| created by an austin web design company pallasart | 12 | 1,499 |
| website by pallasart web design an austin web design company | 12 | 1,389 |
| website by pallasart an austin web design company | 11 | 1,463 |
| pallasart austin web design | 9 | 2,717 |
| website created by pallasart a web design company in austin texas | 9 | 1,369 |
| website by pallasart | 8 | 910 |
| austin web design | 5 | 63 |
| pallasart website design austin |0 -
How to handle pages I can't delete?
Hello Mozzers, I am using wordpress and I have a small problem. I have two sites, I don't want but the dev of the theme told me I can't delete them. /portfolio-items/ /faq-items/ The dev said he can't find a way to delete it because these pages just list faqs/portfolio posts. I don't have any of these posts so basically what I have are two sites with just the title "Portfolio items" and "FAQ Items". Furthermore the dev said these sites are auto-generated so he can't find a way to remove them. I mean I don't believe that it's impossible, but if it is how should I handle them? They are indexed by search engines, should I remove them from the index and block them from robots.txt? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | grobro0 -
Can't understand poor rankings
Hi Guys Our site gets an A for on page optimisation and has much more backlinks and content than our competitors yet we rank no where for majority of keywords Please Help! Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeAquaspresso0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Will syndicated content hurt a website's ranking potential?
I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider. The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc. My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time? Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | copyjack0 -
404 error - but I can't find any broken links on the referrer pages
Hi, My crawl has diagnosed a client's site with eight 404 errors. In my CSV download of the crawl, I have checked the source code of the 'referrer' pages, but can't find where the link to the 404 error page is. Could there be another reason for getting 404 errors? Thanks for your help. Katharine.
Technical SEO | | PooleyK0 -
Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none). In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research... And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found. His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse" We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat. We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened. Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on... Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
Technical SEO | | Greg_Gifford0