SEO Ranking & Brand Names

[ojkingston]

I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me.

Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally.

However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1?

I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4.

Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me?

My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases?

Thanks in advance

Olly

[DanSpeicher]

It's always tough to outrank a website for their brand name, because of the associated anchor text.

And for my Google search (US), you ranked 7th.

I would put your money in other ventures.

[Thos003]

My experience with competing for my own brand name against myself....

Bulwarkpest.com was the established authority and brand for Bulwark Exterminating and Bulwark Pest Control. Time had come for a major site overhaul. We revamped the site and decided to go with the longer domain, bulwarkpestcontrol.com. No matter how hard I tried I could not dethrone bulwarkpest.com. Traffic on bulwarkpestcontrol.com was 10x that of bulwarkpest.com. More links, better SEO, more pages, I even threw PPC into the mix. The only way I was able to beat my own domain was to 301 bulwarkpest.com to bulwarkpestcontrol.com. I took it back out of the 301 out of curiosity, but the new ranking domain, www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com, stayed on top.

Once you have achieved that glorious position of "brand" or authority for a search, it is near impossible to dethrone it.

Even if you were to beat the algorithm, if your site ever got a human evaluation, which google does do on a regular bases, you would be dethroned because searchers want to find the brand website when searching for a brand.