A business name is a very important thing, to the extent that there is a whole industry built around business names. When you choose your business name, it not only has to appeal to you, but it also has to appeal to your customer base.
A business name is something that customers identify with the business. It is also often unique, such that when people use it, they uniquely refer to that business. Consequently, the business name has a very important role to play in search.
If you are not in the know, Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising web pages and other content, such as videos or audio, so that they rank high in search results of search engines.
When you are carrying out a search on a search engine such as Google, you enter a search term into the search bar, and the search engine returns results that are relevant to your search. The results are not just returned in any order, they are sorted according to the most relevant being on top.
Since a search query returns anywhere from millions to even up to trillions of results, your website can end up anywhere in the results. And in most cases, it can never be seen by the searcher due to the sheer number of results, unless you take steps to guarantee a top spot in the search results.
It is safe to say that being the first result in a search, is a great thing for a website, because people are likely to click results in correspondence with the order in which they appear on search result pages. Also the chance of a result being clicked at all, decreases as one goes down the list of results.
Website owners therefore need to find a way to stay at the top of search engine results for certain search keywords. This is what Search Engine Optimization is all about, and it is hard. It is not easy to appear and stay at the top of search results.
To get Search Engine Optimization right, you have to tweak the website markup and content, so that you rank with relevance for the keywords you are targeting. This takes a lot of time and effort. Furthermore, you are competing with other website owners that are aiming for the same keywords.
There are millions of websites online, and even if you are competing with a small fraction of them for relevance for certain keywords, it is a tall order. What makes this especially difficult and critical, is the fact that if you do not make the first page of results, your chances of being found online, are close to zero, because most people rarely go to the second page of search results and beyond.
If it is very difficult to get on the first page of search results, what is the next best thing? Does it mean you have to give up and abandon the quest to rank in search? Not necessarily.
Most often when people are optimizing for search, they are trying to rank high on search engines for keywords that describe what they do, the kind of business they are in, or their core business activities. In the case of Webmobyle, we would be trying to rank high for keywords such as “web design” or “web development”.
Although we have been optimising for these keywords for quite some time now, Webmobyle does not yet rank favourably for these keywords. However, in the process of optimising for these, I discovered that we rank very high on search results for the business name, which is Webmobyle.
This is a very important discovery because, even though not done intentionally, we ended up optimising for the business name, to the extent that the website is the first result for the “Webmobyle” keyword. This brought me to the realisation that, even if you do not rank high for the activity your business engages in, you better at least rank high for your business name, and continue to fight the good fight for the other important keywords.
It falls to reason that, if people input your business name in a search engine, they should be able to find you. Even better, you should be the first business they find. This is why you have to at least search optimise for your business name.
Whilst search optimising for what your business does faces a lot of competition with other websites, that are optimising for the same or similar business name, search optimising for your business name has lesser competition by far, because business name are more often than not, fairly unique.
When search optimising for a business name, you are only competing with a handful of other websites, compared to thousands or possibly millions when optimising for your business activity.
Another important reason to search optimise for your business name, has to do with the very recent trends in how people navigate to websites. More and more people search for a website, instead of having to remember its web address. And if they do not find it, or it turns up to be too far down the list of search results, then you lose a potential website visitor, that could possibly turn into a client.
I am not saying you should not try to search optimise for your business activity. What I am suggesting is that, because Search Engine Optimization for your business activity takes a lot of time and effort, at the very least you should search optimise for your business name. It is more practical than the former in the short term.
It is practical to first get your business website to the top of search results, when people search for your business name, whilst working towards ranking high for keywords of your business activities.
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