Someone has asked me to take a look at their website. When I search for the name of the website, google thinks it’s a typo and says Showing Results for ‘what it thinks I meant to search for’ instead. Then I have to click on Search Instead For ‘what I actually wanted to search for’. Obviously, this isn’t a very ideal situation in terms of how many people will find the website via Google.
The question is, is there anything that can be done about this?
Thanks.
Surely the place to put the name of the web site is in the address bar and not in a search engine. People who already know the name of the site shouldn’t need to search for it.
As far as organic search is concerned… Optimize your keywords for the targeted keywords.
As felgal said… Those who know about your website would never search for it in search bar.
Change the name. It’s the only thing in this scenario that you have any control over.
lol. In my experience, search engine users regularly type URLs into the search box and the name of sites will often show up in Analytics as a referring search string. Quite often, for poorly ranking sites, the name of the site can be the top 10 or more keywords by which people find the site, I see it all the time.
Surely you must have come across this also whilst doing SEO? Then again, if you had why would you say that. I’m confused about your level of actual experience…
In response to the original post: I don’t believe there’s a form you can fill in or direct actions to take. However some SEO might well help as the more Google knows and ranks a site, the less likely it should be to suggest an alternative once it realises the search term is legit.
As to the idea that people who know a site won’t search for it - I’m JJMcClure. People looking for google type in google to the search bar! People search first and type URLs as a last resort as there’s more characters in a URL.
In my experience as a developer browsing Analytics accounts for sites (being nosey) I’ve found a lot of popular websites without a strong, recognisable brand are often searched for by their name, most typically on sites where the average user is middle-aged. The website I’m currently working on (several thousand visitors a day) is searched by name quite a bit, although by far the strongest keywords are for very specific keyword phrases.
This is a case in point of where practical experience with SEO related work has shown that what might seem obvious in theory isn’t actually what’s happening out there. I think you probably have more relevant experience than you realise, hope you keep posting in the SEO section.
I don’t know whether, as DominicR is suggesting, Google will eventually recognise the query as a legimate search and stop offering the ‘did you mean’ option, can anyone else comment?