So we had a client come to us kind of frustrated because when you Google their business name, they’re not the first result. A social media influencer with basically the same name is beating them out, and shes got like 250,000 followers on Instagram. Not exactly small potatoes. So naturally the question was, how do we outrank her? Do we just spam blogs with the keyword until we win?
Honestly, its not that simple, and also its not really the fight worth having.
Heres the thing, Google’s whole model is trying to guess what people actually want when they search something. If way more people are searching that name looking for the influencer than the business, Google is going to keep favoring her, because thats literally their job, to serve up the most relevant result to the most people. Its not personal, its just math and algorithms doing what there suppose to do.
But heres the part that actually matters more. As a business you obviously want to rank for your own name, thats a given. But ranking for the SERVICE you provide is way more important in the long run. If someone searches your brand name and clicks the influencer by accident, they’re going to realize pretty quick thats not what they were looking for and scroll down or go back and refine there search. Your not actually losing that customer, your just making them work one extra click to find you.
We see this alot actually, people get so hung up on winning the exact keyword battle and forget to ask why they wanted to rank for it in the first place. If someone’s searching your competitors name or an influencers name that happens to overlap with yours, ask yourself, are they actually looking for me? If the answer is no, chasing that ranking is kind of a waste of time and resources.
Our advice in this situation, and its pretty simple, differentiate your branding. If your apple slicer company is getting confused with dumbell workout girl, then start branding yourself as something a little more specific, like “Apple Slicey” instead of just “Slicey.” That way when people realize they clicked the wrong result, they naturally search the more specific term and boom, there you are, ranking easily because now theres way less competition for that exact phrase.
At the end of the day, competitive markets mean sometimes someone else is going to have a bigger footprint than you for a shared word or name, and thats okay. The fix isnt always to fight harder for the same real estate, sometimes its just to carve out your own lane so people can actually find what they came for, which is you.
