Ranking for its own name, and nothing anybody searches for.
The keyword report looked healthy until you crossed out every brand term. One row was left standing, and they ranked ninth for it.
Read this first
Nobody asked me to write this.A teardown of a public site, anonymized. The ranking positions are from a standard rank check; the search volumes are from a keyword tool and are estimates, which is why they are described as estimates on the figures. I have written the actual terms as [company name] and [city] rather than reproducing them, because the pattern is the finding and the name is nobody’s business.
A report that looks like success
Twelve terms. Eleven number-one positions. Green arrows down the page. If you were the owner of this company and received this every month, you would conclude that your marketing was working, and you would be reasonable to conclude that.
The same report, with one edit
Every struck-out row is a search performed by somebody who already knows this company exists. They have the van’s phone number, or a neighbor recommended them, or they are checking the hours before calling. Those people were always going to find the business. Ranking first for them is table stakes, and it is what a domain name does on its own.
Brand traffic is the sound of marketing that already worked, somewhere else, being counted a second time.
The size of what is missing
What I would do, in order
- Delete every brand term from the report. Whatever is left is your actual position. Look at that number honestly before deciding anything.
- Build one real page per service. Not a paragraph on the home page — a page, with the words a customer would use, which are rarely the words on the side of the van.
- Do the same for the towns you actually serve, if you serve more than one, and only for the ones you genuinely cover.
- Re-run the report in ninety days with brand terms excluded. It will look worse than the old one and it will be the first honest thing you have seen.
I want to be fair to whoever built this. Nothing here was done incompetently. Somebody set up rank tracking, added the obvious terms, and reported on them faithfully every month. The failure is not effort or skill. It is that nobody stopped to ask whether the thing being measured was worth measuring — which is the same failure, in a different costume, as every other article on this page.
Want this pointed at your site?
The Revenue Audit is two weeks and $3,500, and it is yours whatever you decide to do next — including taking it to somebody else.