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?

[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!