What To Do With Two Business Having The Same Name?

[localtrifecta_im]

Hi friends,

We have a client who is in a peculiar predicament... essentially his business and his biggest competitor share the same name. Officially on their business licenses they are differentiated by the year they were each established, but in all their marketing, on their website, and in the community they are both known by the exact same name. When the company name is searched for, the competitor shows up #1 organically with the map pin as well as in the knowledge graph, and our site shows up number 2 without any any map pin or Google+ page site link or anything.

We thought we could differentiate ourselves by changing his Google+ page name to his official business name (with the date) and building a bunch of really good citations with that official business name, but we still haven't made a dent for his branded keyword, and our Google+ page site links aren't even showing up.

Has anyone run into a situation like this and any suggestions?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Samuel,

I see ... thank you for explaining what you meant about the dates. You're right, no one is going to search for the business name/year. Good luck with the citation building!

[localtrifecta_im]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the response!

So the only way the two business officially differentiate themselves is by the year they were established on their business licenses. For example, we're "ABC Company 1983 Ltd." and they are "ABC Company 1995 Ltd.". We tried changing the Google+ page to "ABC Company 1983 Ltd." and building citations with that name, but the problem is people only search for "ABC Company" and we're pretty behind compared to them in citations, anchor text links, etc. I guess the only thing we can do is keep our name without the date, and just out-build them. Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Samuel!

That is an unusual situation (and kudos to Ryan for surfacing the Burger King story!). If, in your geography, Google is only showing one local result for a branded search (not a keyword search) then the client may be stuck. In some geographies, a branded search will show a pack of all nearby locations of that brand, but it sounds like in your client's scenario, Google is showing a local one-box or something like that. Unless the customer wants to re-brand, he is likely going to be stuck with this situation unless:

1. Google starts showing multiple results for the brand

2. He manages to completely surpass the competitor so that he becomes the #1 result

Right now, Google is likely thinking that both businesses are the same entity. I'm not quite sure what you mean about adding a date to the business name - please feel free to clarify that. If the client can't re-brand then the second option is really the only active thing he can pursue. You might like to check out the How To tab of this tutorial for using our Check Listing tool to identify weaker competitors:

http://moz.com/help/guides/local/check-listing

[RyanPurkey]

It's definitely an odd situation!  Any sort of differentiation you could use would help though: logo, tagline, business format (LLC, Inc, Canadian equivalent)... Personally a year wouldn't mean much to me if I was on the consumer side trying to figure out which one was which.

[localtrifecta_im]

I'm not that Burger King... but maybe if I can get this figured out I'll reach out to them

So when our agency came aboard, we were definitely behind as far social media profiles, popular local citations, etc when compared to the competitor. And the majority of the profiles for the competitor have the name in its simplest (and most searched for) form. When we started we wanted to differentiate ourselves so we added the year established to all our citations, but I think we might just have to use the more common business name even if it conflicts with the competitor. Since we're not showing up in maps anyway, it's not like our local listing can get any worse...

[RyanPurkey]

You're not running Burger King in Matoon are ya? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_(Mattoon,_Illinois) -- a pretty good read about how the US has two Burger Kings...

That's definitely a tricky spot. Has the competitor already registered social media accounts in the company name as well? Is their domain a better match for the brand than your client's? Is the competitor active on social media matching the company name? Are both companies thoroughly listed on the sites you'd find in Moz Local (Yelp, YP, Foursquare, Google and Bing Local Business, etc.)?  To get the map pin you'll really want to focus on the Name, Address, and Phone lining up on each service and ensure that Google has the verified business address as well.  If there are big gaps in any of those things between your client and the competitor catching up should help move the needle.