Getting Found When Customers are Looking for You
SEO is all about getting a website found for all of the right keywords. Making sure that when someone is looking for something you do, they find you. What sometimes gets overlooked is, can they find you when looking specifically for you?
Today, search engines are often used in lieu of the yellow pages. When a current or potential customer is looking for you, they will search for your name and get the contact information or address from your website. Does this work? Can they type in your name and instantly find you at the top of the results? Is your name easy to spell? If a potential customer heard your name, would they be able to make a good guess at finding your website using a search engine or just guessing at the url? A good company name that is also a good Internet name is very difficult to find but well worth the effort.
Many years ago, I heard a radio commercial for a new ISP named maverix.net or something like that. They had to spell the name twice on the commercial. I remember thinking at the time that if they had to spell the name for you on the radio, something was terribly wrong. Then I got to thinking about how well my company name was doing. Something I had taken for granted prior to that.
In 1990, when we started, the company was named Western Pacific Technologies, Inc. I really liked that name for a number of reasons including the fact that we worked with railroads, and there was a famous Western Pacific railroad until the late 60’s. We went by Westpac and our customers all knew us by that name. Unfortunately, when we bought our domain, the .com had already been taken by Western Pacific Airlines (since defunct), so we got westpac.net.
Over the years, it became really clear that our customers could not find us on the web (since we kept being asked when we were going to get a website). Not only was the .net troublesome, but there were many spelling variations of westpac (wespac, westpack, westpak, etc. etc.). Eventually, I decided that the name had to change if we were ever going to be able to effectively use the Internet for our marketing.
We had a contest amongst all of the staff with a $500 prize and a few simple rules:
- Had to be able to get the .com url
- If you simply heard the name, you could likely spell it accurately
- Shorter is better
Over a couple of months we reviewed hundreds of ideas and finally arrived at Unidev which was short for Unified Development. We were able to purchase unidev.com from a company in Virginia that wasn’t using it, and then came the hard part (and expense) of changing everything to reflect the new name. This took several months to accomplish.
Was it worth it? Absolutely! Type in unidev in any english search engine and we come back first anywhere in the country; we would have never accomplished that with westpac even if people could spell it. I can’t begin to count the opportunities we have had over time, that I know about, because of how easy potential clients can find us online.
If your success depends on your brand and people finding that brand on the web, then it is worth the time and effort to get it right.