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200 Different Ways to Say Your Name
By Robert Campbell on Monday, October 19th, 2009
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I was studying one of my clients analytics today, and was please to see a such a low bounce on their Google traffic. They currently get about 2,000 visitors a month from Google with a bounce rate of just 23%. It appears I nailed it for this site in regards in targeting keywords. The reality is though, all I nailed was their name.
They Kind of Remember You
Doing a little more digging around, I did find that I ranked well for several of the keywords I was after. What really amazed me, and I simply had to take the time to count them all, was the number of ways people searched for this company. I guess most people just kind of remember who you are, or at least your company. I counted 274 different ways people searched for my clients site by company name in just one month, and that was just from Google. The company’s name was made of three words, and also includes an Inc. afterwards. Here is a list of the different ways I found people searching for my clients site by company name.
Different Ways Visitors Searched for the Company Name
- By Actual name
- Partial name
- Words in name in mixed up order
- Replaced spelled out numbers with integers
- Included city with name
- Partial name with city
- Partial name with city and state
- With an S at the end of the name
- With and without the Inc. title
- With Inc. spelled completely out, as in: company name incorporated
- With the word “company” after their name
- With spelling errors
- Replaced certain parts of name with synonyms
- By domain name with and without www
- By domain name with and without the .com
- By domain name with all items listed here as optional ways
- By domain name with a space between every character – Strange, but occurred more than 10 times.
- As one long word – My clients site has three words in its name.
- With the + character between each word
- By same name and city, but different city than their location
Obviously a lot of different ways to be found on the internet. The top two methods were by actual name, not including the title of Inc., and the second most popular way was by not including spaces between the words. The second method, though it does not include the .com, is obviously a search for the domain, so it couldn’t hurt to make sure your site ranks well on this. Using my site for an example of this it would be: bestwebimage.
There was also one thing that wasn’t there that surprised me. Nobody was searching by the use of acronym. I commonly searched for sites this way, like using RWW to search for ReadWriteWeb.com. 274 search methods by name, and not one acronym used? Crazy.
Know some other ways? Feel free to post them in the comment box below!
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Robert,
What tool did you use to find all of the name variations? I’m guessing Google’s Adwords tool, but I don’t think it’s nearly that comprehensive (giving 274 results).
Also, I too am shocked that people aren’t searching using the company’s acronym, as acronym .com domains go for so much money — seems like there is a disconnect between how people think people search for them and how people actually do.
Hey EEM
I just used Google Analytics. The easiest way to see it would to got to Traffic Sources -> Keywords. I found it looking for another stat first so those 274 words were just from Google. The way I did that was to go to Traffic Sources -> Search Engines, then I clicked on my top one which of course was Google. Keywords were then revealed.
Thanks for getting back to my questions, Robert. I’m going to go check out Google Analytics for a few of my sites and count the different variations of my sites’ names. I doubt I’ll find 274, but, after reading your post a couple of days ago, I now expect to find a few.
Thanks again for the response.
[...] thinking of ways people search for your company, here is a great post I wrote on my other site BWI: 200 Different Ways to Say Your Name. I was doing a little research on one of my clients site, and found that his visitors had searched [...]
Nice Post Robert.
Different people search the same thing with different style as you mentioned. I don’t think Google consider Acronym sites while searching for full name. Its good to see that all of your visitor searched your name in stead of the acronym becoz acronym sites skims traffic from original site.
Hey, that is a good point. I will have to do some digging into that. I tried doing a little test just now, and got one crap acronym site as a result out of just two tries.
I think that more clients will seach by the keyword in the first time.
[...] 200 Different Ways to Say Your Name – There are a lot of different ways people can search for your company. Here is a list of the ways I know. (257 views) [...]