Local branding messed up - advice needed

[Cooper1]

Note: not real names, services, locations used:

So we are a single health clinic in Vancouver. Our natural name is GSF Health Clinic. As the most important search term is Health Vancouver by far, we decided to kind of change our brand name to 'GSF Health Vancouver' years ago. Our main competitors name is Health in Vancouver and had had a hard time getting above them in local SERP. But actually, since the change in name, we haven't really improved. As there are also searches for Health Clinic Vancouver, some of our citations are actually GSF Health Clinic Vancouver just to get that keyword in. This variation even happens on our site.

Now, looking back, we should have just kept our natural sounding brand name and more importantly, kept the same exact one everywhere. However I'd like advice going forward. So the decision is whether we need city in the brand name - does it make much difference?

The options are:

• GSF Health Clinic Vancouver ("Health Vancouver" is not together, but we still have city name. Current citation on G+ and a few other places. A bit of a mouthful)
• GSF Health Clinic (Sounds nice, but poor SEO and also no exact citation matches currently so this is a major name change)
• GSF Health Vancouver (very targeted SEO, sounds okay but not amazing when in a sentence)

BTW our domain name is health-vancouver.ca

[Alick300]

Hi,

I have read very recently published an article on 'Local SEO'  written by not very well known  but I have never missed his blog post and always learn something new. Please visit below URL. I hope it will be very helpful in your case.

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/local-seo-guide/

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ali,

So, Google's guideline on this is that the business name should be exactly what it is in the real world (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en_). Businesses should not be adding modifiers to their name for the sake of search. If the business is now considering going through a formal/legal re-branding process, then this would be mean marketing-wide, including the website, all citations and other web references, the way the phone is answered, print materials, radio and TV advertising. You'll need to pick one name and use it everywhere. This will need to be the legal name or DBA.

Yes, it could be of some degree of help if the legal business name included the city in it, but whether this advantage would be great enough to warrant the major task of a formal re-brand will be a big decision for the company to make.