Hi, I own a running apparel brand called Wippet. Despite doing multiple SEO updates on my Shopify store in the last 12 months and successfully scaling our business, my store still gets over ridden by Google’s ‘did you mean’’ function when searching Wippet. Instead, Whippet (as in the dog) comes up as the automatic search function and unless you click the ‘search for instead Wippet’ button, it shoes pictures of Whippet’s and Whippet apparel, not my running brand Wippet. Is there a way I can have this fixed or something I can do to stop this happening?
Hi Wippet! This is a very common for brands using an ambiguous company name. Understanding searcher intent has been a problem Google has been working on since the beginning. How to know if a searcher wants your store or information about the dog breed when just searching for the keyword “wippet” is almost certainly never going to be reliable. Google will default by looking back at their data and seeing how many people actually wanted your store vs dog information. My guess is that more people want dog information.
The best thing you can do is keep building your brand so that the number of people wanting your store vs dog information starts to tip the scales and then Google will likely show a bit of both because they are really unsure, but that is better than nothing. The more you can build association between your name and your product, they better.
Hi @Wippet ![]()
You’d want to engage with an SEO-expert for that type of competition as your pitting an unknown brand word vs a literal breed word.
You probably do NOT want to over focus on fighting word vs whord at the top level and instead should be going for higher signal to noise on specific phrases.
And likely you want to be going regional where the competition is less frequent.
Though if the breed is common among the rich and your a luxury brand then your gonna have a bad time.
Example, word pants should become more relevant than whord pants as how many people are searching for dogs pant; but in the same vein word shirt vs whord shirt may be hard as dog shirts are probably a more common idea even though dog pants are also a thing, etc etc etc