My 40 year old, well established business has a brand name that I think is hurting my SEO. Need advice please.

[benenjerry]

Our business brand name has words in it which when we were using it as our domain name, was a) bad for our SEO and b) got our emails marked as spam in our client's inboxes.

This was not a problem when we first got online, years ago. It eventually became problematic, but we didn't realize it for some time. When we realized the issue, we simply changed our domain name to something more SEO friendly, using exact match keywords. This was fine for a while, but eventually, algorithms changed again, and now with Google putting an emphasis on Brand Names and not looking as kindly on exact match keyword type domains, we are again at a place where we don't know what to do. We can't change our brand name.

I don't want to post our real name or business here, but I will give an example.

Brand Name: Living Free Travel

The Issue: "Free Travel" gets blocked by spam filters, gets us useless traffic from people looking for free travel (which makes out bounce rates very high), gets our domain blacklisted.

The Solution: travel2europe.com is the website of Living Free Travel

The New Issue: travel2europe.com is not our brand, and probably doesn't look like one to Google, especially since on our site, travel2europe.com is never really mentioned because it is only our domain, not our brand. "Living Free Travel" is generally the anchor text for travel2europe.com wherever we are linked to. We assume this mismatch is problematic for us in ways we don't even know.

Are we screwed? Need advice, please. THANK YOU.

[donford]

Hello Ben,

That is a very good question. I don't think I've seen this type of issue here before but I would imagine others have at some point been in the same boat. The inherit problem as you likely know, is the word Free.

I cannot offer you an absolute solution, but I can provide some ideas that I hope will lead you to an informed solution. I think you have made a good decision to try and combat the email filters from auto marking you as spam. Now the question is how do you market the actual brand without the negatives associated with our problem word? My thought would be to consider a parent company for internet re-branding purposes. I don't suggest abandoning what is likely a long cherished company brand, simply rolling it into another corporation / llc / company for the sole purpose of internet marketing.

The first step you have taken is changing your domain name; this probably has saved your emails from going directly into the customers spam folders more times than we can count. The next step would be re-branding your online presence. This is not to say you abandon your original company brand, rather you forgo using it exclusively when doing online marketing and everything that encompasses. Like websites, social media, AdWords etc. I would point to probably the most high profile case on these forums is SEOMoz becoming Moz, and why that happened. Here the reasons maybe slightly different, but the reason why you re-brand isn't set in stone.

Thinking this through, I would first start by picking an online brand name. You probably have more insight as to what that could be, than I. The next would be to do the research, how do we re-brand ourselves. Again Moz has been through this and has gone that extra step detailing some of good and bad of re-branding. If you decide this strategy may work for your situation, I would like to point out to avenues I see as viable.

1. You re-brand under new name. But keep your old brand name alive on a sub page. (I.e. newbrand.com/living-free-travel)

Benefits:

• Your long time clientele can still find you online all-be-it on a sub page
• Focused marketing can now mostly forgo negative keywords
• Fresh brand built on the backbone of a trusted brand
• Ability to offline market old brand

2. You re-brand under new name with a simple reference to the old brand.

You inform your clientele of the change and how it can positively affect your services to come. For example a well written article detailing why you are changing brand names can give you exposure. See my first link to Rand Fishkin's "SeoMoz becoming Moz" post above. This would be trying to get the best out of a bad situation. It really is not your fault your brand has come under unwanted scrutiny but you would be showing that the company is adaptive and responsive to the changing market place.

That is what I had running through my brain; I hope it helps you and anybody that comes across this in the future.

And as always I hope to hear from others to get you even more help,

Don

[UmarKhan]

Hey Ben,

Thanks for sharing your problem and it's indeed a very tough situation for your business. If I were at your place, I wouldn't take this step to go with domain that's not matched with my brand name. Even if I had to, I'd go with something that at least partially linked with brand name.

For the email marketing problem, I strongly think this "FREE" word problem can be taken care, if you implement some latest email marketing strategies like Email Schema Markup. You can also work out on the useless traffic by creating some great and targeted content. From the SEO perspective, if you have good amount of quality links at your original branded domain, I'd suggest you to go with it.

Let's see what other experts recommends!

Good luck!

Umar