The importance of SEO in brand naming

Ever wondered why brands these days tend to use weird names that don’t seemingly have any connection to their product offering? Names like Spotify, Haagen Das or Smeg are weird, invented abstractions that don’t sound anything like what they do and in the case of Smeg, are contrary to what they do. Smeg is a kind of dirt and a fridge is designed to keep food edible, not dirty. Who knows what a Spotify is supposed to be but it doesn’t sound like music to my ears. 

However, these names are unique and stand out in their market place. This is key. These names have helped their brands become leaders. Think about leading brands like Air BnB – doesn’t sound a lot like a hotel does it? Yer compare its performance to brands like Owners Direct. We are sure both brands do a great job of providing you with a place to stay but one is worth many times more than the other – the one with the more SEO-friendly name. When creating names for new brands, brand strategists (your’s truly here) consider several key factors. 

These factors are:

1. Uniqueness – how similar is it to other names and competitors in your market (Air BnB is unique compared to its vacation or home-based rivals)
2. Memorability – how easy is it to recall this name vs others, is it sticky and do you lock it in your mind (BCBGMaxaria is memorable and maybe for all the wrong reasons as it is a ghastly name IMHO)
3. Facility – how easy is it to work with, to say, to apply (Apple is easy to say and work with)
4. Typography – how does it look when it is written down, what letters does it use and (in the case of latin script names) what case are these in (Avis is a near perfect typographic logo as it sits perfectly within a Golden Mean rectangle)
5. Relevance – how relevant is it to the product of offering (Landrover is a relevant name)

Notice how we put ‘Relevance’ to the bottom of the pile? Because these days, Relevance is the least important factor, especially with millennials who have grown up on Apple and Spotify. With so much of the Latin language used already, it is hard to use a relevant name with out it stepping into another brands shoes or maybe worse, sounding passé.

If these 5 considerations were not enough, now we need to add a new and ever-important factor.. We can call it SEO-ness. Ok, sounds silly and arguably SEO-ness comes under the same area as Uniqueness (originality) but it is important to understand that even if your name sounds original in your area, district or even country, if Google has a million references to it in their database of web content, your SEO is going to be terrible. In short, a user will type in your name and your site or content will be lost under a million other, higher ranking and more optimised results. As far as names are concerned, you have picked a ringer, a dead dog, a Norwegian Blue (Monty Python fans will get it). 

When choosing a name, one needs to search Google and why not try other popular search engines too, and see if the name is highly contested or not. If it is, rethink it. Some brands try changing or misspelling the name to create uniqueness but this isn’t a good policy. Misspelling the name will not help as most users who can’t remember your address from your marketing will search by your name and then get lost in other similar sounding names or brands. 

We once worked with a firm who thought adding two ‘A’s at the end of their name would help it compete against another firm who shared their name and competed for their customers. We tried to advise them that this was not going to work and it is of no surprise that they wrapped up shop after a few years of the failing endeavour. I’m not sure how much of an issue the name was and it could be that the poor thinking regarding the name permeated the rest of the business. How you do one thing is how you do everything, or so the saying goes. The poor name decision could have been the bell weather, canary in the cage for their brand. Either way a great name would have been one less nail in the coffin.  

“Can we share an instance to prove our point” you say? Ok, let’s take Mooon vs Moon. If your potential new client can remember your URL then happy days, they can type it in an off they go. If they can’t then they will search for Moon or even Mooon and if autocorrect doesn’t get them, Google will display the correctly spelt terms search results. Then the user will have to know to click the option to show the misspelt version. 

Another barrier to entry you can easily avoid. If you think about a name as only type then you are missing the fact that names are in fact sounds. We only know them as letters because we want to create a record of the sound to share with others. So we have veto think of the names as sounds first and in the case of Mooon vs Moon, they are identical and so will not work well in terms of accurate recall and then, the Moon is going to win in SEO as it is the one that was indexed first. 

So to sum up, when considering candidate names for your new brand or product, think SEO first, then the other 5 considerations (Uniqueness, Memorability, Facility, Typography and Relevance) before you spend too much time on your impending launch. The right name might not save your business in the long run but a poor choice here is unsettling the canary in their cage, so to speak.