Client is not ranking on Google For Brand Name Search but is on Yahoo and Bing
-
We have a mobile app development client that recently 6 months ago changed their domain name to www.FSStudio.com. So they are concerned that they don’t rank on the first page for the brandname phrase “FS Studio” On Google. They do rank on the first page for this phrase in Yahoo or Bing. But why is Google returning search results for stuff like Free Studio? I know this fairly obvious question which the answers may be that they need more authority or backlinks because their name happens to be a fairly competitive search for stuff that is unrelated. Any suggestions? We are going to be optimizing and creating a lot more content. Is this just that they need to mention their name FS Studio more frequently throughout their website? Here is a screenshot from Moz’s Keyword difficulty and SERP Analysis tool.
-
Just wanted to add my two cents and make sure you're all set. Pretty sure everyone here nailed it. The brand name is a little ambiguous and there are other things our there that could legitimately rank for that. It is a little curious how Google is not ranking it for the brand yet Binghoo is.
One quick example, the Twitter account still links to their old domain - https://twitter.com/fsstudiodev - fix a whole bunch of little things like that and in aggregate they should add up to more clear brand signals.
One thing I'll mention which no one else did ----> Rel Publisher - this connects the G+ page to the website and is probably THE most powerful brand signal you can easily send in Google's eyes. I would do that as high priority.
-
Well it sounds as though everything is in place then (assuming it is a 301 and not a 302 redirect). It may just be that they have picked a difficult brand name to rank for, which in that case, concentrate on building the brand and you should hopefully see the rankings sooner rather than later.
-
Hey Karl, Thanks a lot, say we checked webmaster tools their no penalties. The other name of the company before is call ed FlakaSoft which i guess is what the FS is abbreviated for. When you type in they rank for first and it redirects to the new site.
-
Wiqas,
Thank you also for your helpful suggestions.
-
Thank you very much for taking the time to look at this it was helpful.
-
Hi Andrew,
When they changed their website, did the ensure that the necessary redirects were put in place so that any authority from the old website was changed to the new one?
It may also be worth checking for any penalties, algorithm or manual. Check Webmaster Tools for any messages to double check. Have they ever ranked for their brand name? Did they rank for their old brand name?
It could be, as the other 2 comments say, just be a lack of authority and quality links but it is definitely worth checking that redirects and penalties aren't having an effect because you could be fighting a losing battle if it is one of these problems.
-
Hey Andrew,
This issue comes with new websites with low authority! Currently you have
- Just 21 Referring Domains
Try to link with more. Your Anchors are non-money which is a good thing in deed but you can use your Brand as Anchor "FS Studio" This will help to get visible on Google for your brand name.
Currently your anchors are not pointing to your Brand Name at all: http://screencast.com/t/nHfp4tjQpmb
Best of luck!
Regards
Asjad Afzal
COO
Globital PTY LTD -
Andrew,
The site in question has low authority compared to the ones showing up in the first page. Google is somehow associating your brand with a software called "Free Studio" and sites with almost impossible to beat authority are ranking above.
Google, compared to Bing (and Yahoo! that serves results from Bing), uses different ranking mechanisms.
In order to "claim" your brand's name, I'd suggest you establish several business listings pointing to the site, such as:
- Facebook Page
- Twitter Profile
- G+ Page
- G+ Local
- LinkedIn Page
- Crunchbase
- Yelp
- etc.
Try to put your company out there, expose its name as much as you can without purchasing any "featured listing." Once you have all those steps completed, compare results and see if the brand name starts to show up.
Another approach would be to "extend" the brand name, removing the FS and using the actual significance of those 2 letters ("FS" means?). It should be easier to compete with other sites instead of the ones that are currently returned by your brand query: "FS Studio". Softonic, CNET, afterdawn are not easy targets.
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
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
Listing and Linking Brands from Homepage
We have the popular brands that we sell listed on our homepage. We currently have them in just plain text at the moment but we want to know if it would be best to: Leave them in plain text Link each to the most relevant page on our website Link each out to the actual brands website Link some to internal page, others out to brands website, some blank Not have a list of brands We do have a webpage that lists all of our brands but there are hundreds we carry so we narrowed down the 40 most popular known brands that people will be looking for on the homepage. Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | petsofoz0 -
Rankings have dropped but why?
Recently our keywords have plummeted with regards to anything hen related on our stag and hen website. We were on the first page ranking 6<sup>th</sup> for terms such as Newcastle hen and hen weekend Newcastle. Now were around 15th this has also began to happen with other keywords. Content wise our pages score 90+ on page optimisation, we do have various keywords on the pages alike our competitors and use the highest searched for term as our page title. Our page speed is good on mobile and desktop. I’m struggling to see why we can’t seem to crawl back up to the first page when people who are outranking us have minimal content on slow sites. I know we lack back links but this can't be the only reason? Our website is hangoverweekends.co.uk
On-Page Optimization | | andy_simpson0 -
URL, page title, item name - which is most important for google ranking
We are a bridal store and are able to use different information in the URL, Page title and item name. In item name we give the product a name for us to identify ie. Alex Lace Dress in Black/Nude, Ivory/Nude, Red/Red In Page Title we use the suppliers name and product code as well as the item name ie. Jadore j8075 Alex Lace Dress Online Australia URL = alex-lace-dress/ Are we using the correct format ? What could we do to improve them?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Rankings dropped overnight
We have been doing some optimization for a client. They were not ranked for many keywords before we started, and up until last week 10 were on page 1, with the the last few following closely behind. Everything was moving in the right direction. In this weeks ranking report every one has dropped significantly and some 30 places in one week. We have made no significant changes to the site in the last few weeks. The only issue we picked up on was the slow site speed on their current host 1&1. Any ideas what could have caused the site to have lost ground on all rankings so significantly?
On-Page Optimization | | FLDESIGN0 -
Yesterday our site had a page rank of 5, today not ranked.
All pages on our site as of today are showing current page is not ranked by google, we have been page rank 5 for about 4 years now, we still seem to be showing in google searches. Anyone have any ideas as to why?
On-Page Optimization | | wcuk0 -
Shall Google index a search result?
Hi, I've a website with about 1000 articles.Each article has one ore more keywords / tags. So I display these keywords at the article page and put a link to the intern search engine. (Like a tag cloud) The search engine lists als articles with the same keyword and creates a result page. This result page is indexed by Google. The search result contains the title of the article, a short description (150-300 chars.) and a link to the article. So, Google believes, that there are about 5.000 pages instead of 1.000 because auf the link to the search result pages. The old rule was for me: More pages in Google = better. But is this still true nowadays? Would be a "noindex, follow" better on these search result pages? (Is there a way to tell Google that this is a search result page?) Best wishes, Georg.
On-Page Optimization | | GeorgFranz0 -
Should my client remove "SEO" from the XML sitemap name?
I have suggested to a client with limited content on their site (considering it's in a very competitive sector with oceans of content possibilities!) that they probably shouldn't name the XML sitemap featuring their "seo content pages" (I hate that terminology BTW!) - google_sitemap_seo.xml My reasoning is that if I was a Google engineer or Google bot, I would probably ignore and disregard those pages because they are most likely poor quality content/doorway pages/boiler plate pages/ "enter your descriptive phrase here" pages. The push back from tech is that it doesn't make a difference so we're not going to do it.
On-Page Optimization | | Red_Mud_Rookie0