Website Name Before Search String in Google SERP

[ChurchCommunityBuilder]

I'm curious to hear whether it's better to have your company name before the Search String, or after it?When I search for Church Management Software in Google, some results place the company before the string.
**In attached image
(Pink Squares : Company Name)
(Blue Squares : Search String)

Please indicate in your response if there is any study, experiment, or evidence to back your answer. Thanks for your help!

NameOrString

cmsSerp.jpg

[Yeeply.com]

Hello there

1. First of all, place your main keyword at the beginning: Search engines assign more importance to the first word in the title tag than to the second one and so forth. From a usability perspective, since users understand just the first 11 characters of links, then it is important to make the most out of these characters by placing the most important content there.

2. And remember, don't put your company name on every single website page. The problem with this is that when Google comes along to index your site, it has no idea what your site is about, so it looks in the HTML for clues. One place it looks is in the page title, which is what you see in your tag on your browser. If you keep using your company name over and over again, you end up indexing your company name a lot in Google's search engine. This is great you say...so when someone Googles "My Company Name" I will be first. That's true, you will be. But unless you are Nike or Coke, you don't have massive brand recognition, so while you may get a bit of traffic from your name, you are missing out on people looking for your services.  So my final advice here is put your company name on your home page only along with your industry and use the other pages for more product related keywords.

Mmm sorry no study here but reading a lot and watching some guru videos from time to time!!

Hope this helps!

Luis

[KevinBudzynski]

I typically use the keyword first and company/brand second. As a prospect will skim the serps, they typically are looking for the keyword entered, so prominence is import.

[ChurchCommunityBuilder]

Thanks for the feedback Luis. I agree that if this was a campaign on Brand Awareness, then leading with the company name may be preferable. I did some research into your "first 11 characters" reference, and had not realized that Nielsen was the authority behind that study. Thanks for mentioning that.

db

[ChurchCommunityBuilder]

For sure. Any additional equity must be a plus.

[Linda-Vassily]

As far as a reference for the answer that the keyword should be near the start of the title, Moz's Beginner's Guide refers to this.

But what I find interesting is that if you look at those pages (not just the serp), only two of them actually start with the company name in the title on the page. The others are just displayed that way.

[ChurchCommunityBuilder]

Thanks Linda. Are you suggesting that Google is serving up this change on its own?

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, that is what is happening. Google will often use the title that is on the page, but it does not always do that. It will use a different title if it thinks a different title is more relevant to the searcher's intent. This is especially true if the content on the page does not match the title. (For example, on the Elexio page, the words "Church Management Software" are not even present on the page, other than the title, description, and schema.)