Companies spend thousands of dollars on consultants in their quest to come up with product, service and company names. Here in Nashville there are names like Laser Quest, Cheddar’s, Nissan and Maggiano’s that probably were the result of months of talks, tests and money.
But does the name itself create revenue for the company? Does that even make sense?
In a consumer world largely based on what you can find on Google, your name can significantly impact your bottom line. A marketing guy may tell you differently, but he’s likely to give you examples like Pepsi, Blockbuster and Disney. Dare them to give you an example of a start-up or small, local company.
Recently a company in town opened called Nashville Furniture and Interiors. The name isn’t sexy at all, but when you drive by you surely understand what’s inside. On the other hand there’s another new place called Kay’s. The reflection on the window has prevented me from seeing it is a clothing store for women.
That same thinking applies to the web, but in a much more revenue generating manner. When a consumer chooses to go furniture shopping, the first thing they may search for is “furniture store nashville”. If your business name happens to have Nashville and Furniture in the title, you’re much more likely to be found on the search engines.
Not only that, but whenever your business name is mentioned elsewhere on the net and people click it to go to your website, Google gives you extra “points” for having your main keywords directly in the link.Technically, a link that contains your keywords is called a “keyword rich anchor text” link. Those are the sought after kind. That’s much easier to attain when your name is your keywords.
From a branding perspective, fancy names do have a place. Pepsi, JC Penney, Best Buy and even eBay have excelled with little attention paid to their keyword-empty names. On the local level however, a good plumber is a good plumber. Whether you call Fast Pipe Guy or Nashville Plumber doesn’t matter when the toilet is overflowing.
The difference however, is whether you can find Fast Pipe Guy during those critical moments when you search for “Plumber in Nashville”.