How can I outrank a website whose brand is named specifically after a product / service (and mine is not!) ?

[AlexTL]

Hi everyone,

I've been working hard on my on-page SEO lately so I can gain visibility for my website. The results have been great and I am now on top of the SERP for the services I propose.

I think that my content is almost fully optimize and** I've respected all the best practices (both on-page and technical SEO)**.

However, there is one problem I just can't deal with for I don't have the knowledge, hence this post. I'm pretty sure that this issue is quite common for SEO experts.

Here the thing: I offer dental emergency services, which is my core business. I'm ranked 4th for that request in my area, which is good, but I'd like to rank 1st as** I have a better DA and content than the 3 websites outranking me**. Also, I'm the first result for any other related services such as "dental services" or "dentist".

However, when it comes to the theme "dental emergency", I'm constantly outranked by the same 3 websites. I ran an audit on their website but **my content and technical SEO is way better **than theirs. I suppose that the only reason I'm behind them is because they used "dental emergency" in their **Brand name **and, therefore, in the Home page URL. Every time someone is looking up online for "dental emergency", these websites will be on top of the SERP as I think that Google is unable to know whether the users are specifically looking for their websites (aka Brand) or for "dental emergency" services.

Here is an example of a competitor: https://www.urgencedentairedemontreal.com/ (urgence meaning emergency in French). His whole Brand name and URL have been built after the "dental emergency." service. On the contrary, **my Brand name does not mention "urgence". **

I see that as a trick that is confusing Google. The fact that my competitors named their Brand after a specific service I also offer is real pain for my SEO.  I also think it's really unfair as I've put a lot of effort in designing a nice website with great UX and content. This is the kind of practice that should be penalized in my opinion.

Please, does anyone know any way to resolve this issue?

[sarahwalsh]

You can often get a business to rank right at the top of Google, higher than some big brands, that's if you have a lot of really high quality back links.

For example the business has back links from the BBC and other high-quality websites, such as the Independent newspaper, these links can help get a company on to page one.

However the back links must be high quality. So if you hire a web designer or a search engine optimisation company, make sure they are building very high quality white hat do follow and no follow backlinks. The most important thing to remember is that the backlinks must be built in a white hat way. we do know what we are talking about, because we got our bristol garden room company onto page one.

[JJCristiano]

@AlexTL Hi Alex,

I know this was asked some time ago but I believe it still holds relevancy in 2022 and many people asking a similar question can benefit from this.

From my experience and an emd a.k.a exact match domain is incredibly powerful especially with age and even more powerful with off page brand building.

When it comes to dental seo https://hip.agency/ a Juggernaut in the dental marketing space utilizes powerful local SEO practices that have include both these on page and off page core things.

On-Page

1. Keyword in the URL
2. Keyword in the Title
3. Keyword in the H1
4. Secondary Keywords in the H2's and H3's
5. A good amount of very informative and brand content for each heading.
6. Optimized image File+ Geo+AltText
7. Map Embed-Name Address And Phone number Mentioned
8. Local Schema Markup

Also make sure you are internal linking with relevancy.

The important things on this list from my experience is 1-5 and if you are missing any of those it could be a factor. On the other hand you could use a tool like surfer to make sure your content is just as optimized for dental emergency services

If you do not have an emd or an optimized url what I suggest you do is build a few pieces of content around dental emergency service and use a variation of exact anchors to internal link to the page that is stuck.

Then be sure to look at your competitors link profile. Do they have good DR link and even more important anchor text. You want relevant power links that are indexed and pass not only juice but anchor text power.

Hope that helps!

[Nozzle]

DA is not a ranking factor but it is a nice metric made by Moz to help us get an idea how we're doing compared to our competitors in terms of quantity and quality of links. So having a higher DA doesn't automatically mean you should rank higher than your competitors.

Also, since the EMD (exact match domain) update back in 2012, sites can't rank better just because of the keyword in the domain name if their site authority and optimization isn't great.

My main suggestion for you would be to acquire more backlinks with "dental emergency" as the anchor text (making sure they are linking to the correct page on your site, of course). Obviously, don't over do this and build hundreds of links with exact match keywords in the anchor text but don't be shy about it either.

As an example, one of the owner's of my company has a personal site and I asked him to change the anchor text of the link in his footer to our company's homepage from "Nozzle" to "Keyword phrase - Nozzle".  After Google recrawled that page, our rankings jumped up 10 spots. To be fair, I'm aware that jumping 10 spots while on page 3 is different than trying to go from #4 to #1 though. My point is to not be afraid to use exact match anchor text sometimes.

Also make sure that your page that is ranking #4 also has internal links from other pages of your website pointing to it with the keyword in the anchor text.

Test out things like moving that phrase to the front of your title tag and even trying to get it in there twice if at all possible. These will be tests and can be changed back if your rankings drop, so don't be scared to test. Pay attention to your CTR as well inside of Google Search Console to make sure you don't drop in CTR because of the changes too. Also, test out adding that phrase more times in the content of the page.

Good luck!