SMarT Marketing

I am sure you have seen it or possible even use it daily as a spell checker. If you search Google and spell your word(s) incorrectly, Google will ask you “Did you mean…?” with a suggestion link to alternative search results. Sounds like a great idea and usually it works very well. However, let’s take a case where your brand name is close to an actual word. If my company name was “fintastic fins” and a potential customer heard about me and searched on Google, they would get these results. This wouldn’t be so bad, unless of course my competitor’s name was “fantastic fins”. In which case it would seem Google is recommending my competition over me.

There are various ways to overcome this issue. The first, make your brand name so well known that it is used across the web and searched for consistently. This should make Google realize the term is legit and that users “Did not mean anything” except for what they typed in. Another option is to ask Google to stop the correction. This is unlikely to produce any results as it would mean Google would either have to adjust their algorithm or hand edit it, which is rare but does happen on occasion. An alternative is to attempt to rank for the generic term of “fantastic fins”. Since it is generic and very on-target based on your content (presumably finastic fins makes really good fins) there is no reason your site shouldn’t rank for it. You may also want to bid on the term using Google AdWords to ensure those looking for your site and/or products find you. If you are having this issue or similar problems, you may want to contact SMT Web Development for a solution or ask me a question on Linkedin.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.