How to Choose an SEO-friendly Company Name

What considerations did you take into account when you named your company? Was SEO one of them? Did you think about findability? 

I've had tons of questions come in about how a company name affects SEO. So if you're considering changing your company or clinic's name or are about to launch a new company and you're trying to decide what to name the business, this episode is for you. 

Hello, and welcome to the Propel Your Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, with Propel Marketing & Design. 

If you're new here, welcome. We're excited that you decided to tune in. 

Today, we are talking all about the role your company name plays in SEO and online findability. In a few episodes from now, we'll dive into how to rebrand your company in a way that will help you with your findability online and SEO–instead of harm you. 

But today, we're talking purely about picking a new name for your company or clinic. I don't know about you, but I love naming things: people, pets, products, product lines, companies, whatever it is. I love it. And as a kid, I even wanted to grow up to be one of those lucky, lucky people that got to name things like nail polishes. 

Needless to say, that did not end up being my occupation, but that's okay. Over many years, I have sat in many, many meetings about picking a name for a company or a new product line, and in these countless meetings, I have often had to look away and try not to roll my eyes at some of the horrible ideas that I've heard. 

I'm sure we've all come across a company or two where we want to scratch our head and go, why on earth did they name their company that name? 

Well, oftentimes, when I sit in on meetings or when somebody has asked me my advice on naming a product, service, or company, I look at it from a different direction than most. I add it through the lens of SEO, search engine optimization. 

Now, truth be told, what we're going to discuss today not only relates to picking a company name, but you can also use the process that we're going to discuss today when you're considering naming a new product, a new brand line, a new procedure or a technique before you apply for a patent, a company division, or if you're simply crafting or recrafting your company tagline. 

Like I said, when it comes to business names, I always look at them through the lens of SEO and brand awareness. If you haven't yet had the opportunity to watch our free training on SEO, I suggest that you visit propelyourcompany.com. 

During that hour, we spend time diving into the basics of SEO. We talk about on-page SEO; those are the actions that take place on your website to help improve your brand's online presence. 

We talk about off-page SEO; those are the actions that you take outside of your website to help improve your overall brand awareness online. 

And we dive into the most critical element of SEO, and that's what holds those two areas together. And that is your branding and understanding of how to connect with your target audience. 

So again, if you have yet to watch that free training, please feel free to do so. You can do that by visiting propelyourcompany.com.

And one of the reasons that we really dive into brand identity on that training, and we're diving into it in this episode, is that it matters. The words that you use to define your brand and to represent your brand matter, and when you're using words that people are searching for, you can use the word brand, just like that- you're gonna get found. 

Now the reason for today's episode is, I kid you not; in the past week and a half, I've had three people ask me about this specific topic. They have all wanted to rename their clinics and really wanted an SEO perspective on that. 

Now, this isn't the first time this has happened. We've worked with chiropractors for a number of years, and I've had a number of chiropractors, along with other clinic owners, ask for advice about either naming or renaming a company, and this comes up time and time again. 

The reasons for that really range from the fact that maybe they had originally named the company and included their last name as part of the company name. Now they're looking to expand where they don't wanna look like a one-person shop, or they're thinking of selling their company. 

Or maybe it's a clinic that highlighted a niche, and now they wanna move away from it. Maybe they had originally represented themselves as a sports chiropractor, but they're finding that being a family chiropractor is more profitable in their area. It could be because their competition has way too similar of a name. 

This came up recently, and even a company that had such a similar name to them had some really bad press happening, so you can imagine that they wanted to step as far away from the name that sounds like the other brand's name is possible. 

It could be that they want to expand the services that they offer. It could be that they had purchased a clinic. We've seen this happen before when somebody purchases a clinic, and they're trying to rebrand, or it's a family practice that's been handed down from one generation to the next, and the new generation wants to make some modifications to the brand. 

It can also happen when a clinic is ready to expand, and maybe the original name just reflects the city where they currently reside, and they want to expand into other cities and other locations. 

Whatever the case, and there are so many of them, oftentimes when I ask the business owner, “Well, what made you decide to name the company what you did in the first place,” they'll mention that they wish they would have given SEO some consideration before picking the name. 

Whatever the case, we're gonna dive into two ways that you can look at your company name through the lens of SEO to help identify opportunities for what your new name could be. And again, you can go through this process if you're considering just modifying your timeline. If you're naming a product or a service or a procedure, you'll just wanna modify it slightly, but I think you'll get the gist of it.

Well. Before we dive in, I just wanna mention that I absolutely do not want you to use “near me” in the title. I think we've all seen some of those ridiculous names where it's like, oh, I guess they got SEO right and it's like the dentist that says Dentist Near Me or Chiropractor Near Me. 

I am absolutely not suggesting that you do anything of that sort. I just wanted to get that out of the way right off the bat. 

What I do suggest you do is that you bust out a blank Google Doc, and what I want you to do is to just set a timer for 10 to 15 minutes and just do a data dump of any potential names that have been rattling around in your head.

Anything that you think would be of interest is worth considering. Put that list down and let it sit there. Let it sit there for a few hours, let it sit there overnight, just let it sit there, take a walk, do whatever you've got to do. Come back to it after you've let it sit for a little while, re-look at the list and continue to expand to the list after your mind has already worked through the first list that you've put together. 

So now you've got a list of your original potential names. You've got some ones that you've probably added on or that you've scratched out after revisiting them with a clear head. 

Under that, I want you to make a line, draw a line, do whatever, make a marker, do whatever you want to do, and write keywords. 

Under that, make a list of common keywords that people associate with your brand, your service, your type of company. 

Under that, write locations. For instance, I live in South Florida. There are many cities in South Florida. If I wanted to just target locally, I might want to target my city. I might want to target a couple of other cities around me, so I would include that in the list as well under location. 

After you've got your original list of suggestions, you've revisited it, and you've written down your keywords and locations, consider and see if you can work in any of your regional words or keywords as modifiers to include in some of your original concepts for your company name.

Now let's look at an example of this. Let's say that you are a chiropractor and you live in a city called Cityville. Well, you know people are going to Google and typing in “Cityville chiropractor” or “chiropractor in Cityville” and searching online. 

It is much easier for a company to rank for the keyword “Cityville chiropractor” if that's actually your name than it would be if your company name was just simply Spine and Sport. 

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the name Spine and Sport, but I think that we can all agree that if your brand name represents what somebody's specifically searching for, it's going to be easier for you to be found. 

Now you don't want to use a name that's too crowded. It might be, after doing some research which is what we're going to get into in the next stage, that you find that there's already 25 “Cityville chiropractors,” “Cityville chiropractor groups,” “Cityville chiropractic,” like it's already too saturated. 

So keep that in mind. But right now, we're just at that phase of just throwing it all out there. Just think of it like you're throwing the spaghetti at the wall, and we haven't decided yet what's going to stick. 

Now, when you're thinking through these names, we want to be unique, we want to be descriptive, but we don't want to go crazy. 

And I think of that episode in the TV show The Office. Everybody in the office worked for Dunder Mifflin, and actually, as I say this, I can't say that I watched the UK version, but in the US, they worked for Dunder Mifflin, and the company was then bought by Sabre. But there was a whole episode, and they went into all the crazy pronunciations. 

Is it Sabre, say how do you pronounce it? So, as fun as it is to get creative with your name, you still want it to be easy and recognizable when somebody sees it. And I think, even as we see all of these new naming conventions for children, right, we're like, what kind of name is that? You see it written out, and you're like, I have no idea how to pronounce that. 

We do not want that to happen to your company. So consider that we want to be able to look at the company name and be able to pronounce it with ease. Also, it doesn't sound professional. It doesn't look like a one-person show. 

Are you considering the future? If, for example, you're considering using your last name in the name of your company, well, if you were to decide to marry and take on your spouse’s last name, would that mess up the representation of your company? 

If you were to decide to take on associates or expand your company outside of it, just being you as a sole primary person running the company, is that still a good representation of the company? 

Where do you see the company going in 10 years? Do you consider that you might want to sell the company later or franchise the company later or expand it for locations? 

I gave that example earlier when we were listing out locations. After we had listed out keywords, I mentioned that I live in South Florida. If I were a local business and I only was targeting one city, that's great if I had a city name in my actual company name. But what happens if I want to expand outside of that city? So keep that in mind. 

Once you've got this crazy Google Doc that is full of all of your ideas, go over to Google and do your research. You want to head over to Google and see what happens when you start to look up the names that you wrote down for potential company names. 

Are they already taken? What about the URLs? Are they available? Now you can go over to godaddy.com and type in a potential domain name. When you're considering your domain name, it doesn't have to be an exact match of your company name, but you want it to be close and easy for somebody to type in. You also ideally would like for it to be a .com. 

Now, if you find that the URL is available, go ahead and grab it before you completely decide on the brand name because, worst-case scenario, you would hate for somebody else to grab that company name as their URL before you have the opportunity to.

And you can purchase the domain name, which is the URL, from various sources. It doesn't have to be from godaddy, but they're pretty cheap, and if you're in the stage of still deciding what to do, you can purchase a couple of them and just purchase them for a year until you decide what you want to do with them. You're not going to spend billions of dollars doing this.

And, just as a side note, I know a lot of people try to get a URL that has a bunch of keywords shoved in it. That doesn't work the way that it did 20 years ago. So don't spend a billion dollars getting a URL just because it has specific keywords in it, especially if it doesn't match your company name. 

So once you've done your research, you've got your mega list of potentials, you have looked at them online to see if is it too crowded, are there other companies that already have that name, or is this a fresh new name that would be good in the marketplace? You've also checked for domains to see what's available that would match. Also, go over to social media and do a search for those company names and see what shows up there. Make sure that's not too crowded. 

Once you've got that done and you've got your shortlist in order, then it's time to get other people's opinions. 

Now make sure, when you get other people's opinions, that you're asking them and you're taking their feedback with a grain of salt. Right? After all, usually, it is your company, so we do wanna make sure that you feel comfortable and confident with the name that you are gonna pick. 

But it's a really great idea to not only go out and ask people that you know but also get some opinions from (if you're renaming your company) your current audience. It could be a fun way to get them involved with your rebrand, which we'll talk about in another episode. 

If you take to social media and tell them you've got a couple of choices and see what they do, if you ask them to vote, it would actually be a really fun campaign to run. 

Okay, well, I hope that this gave you some insight and some things to think about when it comes to findability and your brand name. Again, in a couple of weeks, we will dive into SEO considerations when you are rebranding your company and even changing your domain. 

Well, hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads. You can find a link to sign up for this free masterclass in the Show Notes for this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence. Including your Google Business Profile, that's what used to be called the Google My Business listing and what controls the Google Maps section, along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact.

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon. I'll see you next time. Bye.