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Hi, new to keyword research and have a question on branded search terms. I'm optimising the product pages of a manufacturer's site and assume that the primary keyword for each product page (and therefore the H1 header) should be a detailed product name e.g.'Aqua Power wet and dry cordless vacuum cleaner'. Is it good practise to add the manufacturer's name to the beginning of a product title? I can't determine this by looking at search volume or competition for the two versions of the keyphrase as they are too low to get stats in both cases. Previous SEOs have set up the product titles on my pages without including the brand name but this seems to me to be loosing out on the opportunity to rank for both '[brand name] [detailed product name]' and '[detailed product name]' with the one keyphrase. On the other hand, this site only sells products from one manufacturer so maybe it looks fussy to include the brand name on every product title. I would of course add the manufacturer name to the page title e.g.'Aqua Power wet and dry cordless vacuum cleaner | cordless vacuum cleaner | [brand name]' so Google would be able to associate a brand with the product even if I didn't include it in my primary keyword. Thanks for any guidance on this!

Hi all, I really hope you can help with this one! My brand/domain name "oboem" is nowhere to be seen on the Google rankings (france) but is number 1 on Bing and Yahoo. We are a young art crowdfunding start up and a full page article about us getting published in a magazine that will come out in december. "Oboem" is not a real word and no one else exept us should rank for it.  😞 I'm a bit out of ideas here. Thanks for the help 
Oliver
oboem.com

I recently started with a company who've benefited from using a competitors brand name to explain why theirs is superior. They're not wrong and neither have they been derogatory, however they have had significant traffic to their website using the competitors branded search terms. I'm concerned Google will penalise us for this (if so can you point me to case studies/similar examples), or am I worrying unnecessarily?

In this article by Cyrus Shepard, we are reminded of the relationship between keywords on a page and how each secondary keyword should support the (single) main keyword phrase. What is the best practice for a website that deals in two major market sectors instead of one. Often (like in this article) SEO examples focus on a well-defined topic (like "White House" or "used cars"). But what about a case in which, for example, the company is involved in both pest control and odor removal. For the home page, would you try to still focus on a **single **keyword phrase (and close variants and synonyms) that would be general enough to encompass both? Or in this case would it work to apply this method to two main keywords on a single page? Although this article (and others) would suggest the first, it often feels that in cases like this where there are two or more topics that are not closely related it's hard to find a single keyword phrase that would generate significant traffic with the right intent. Would you still try to focus on a single keyword phrase for the homepage that encompasses both topics (like 'environment restoration') vs two phrases (for example 'pest control' and 'odor removal') knowing that the home page will probably not rank heigh against competitors, and focus on the single keywords 'pest control' and 'odor removal' on the secondary pages?

I alone cannot do keyword research on all of the online content that  my company produces. There are about 10 publishing support teams who could do this research themselves, once trained, but I don't know which tool to suggest they use since they can't all use my MOZ login. Right now, those who do any research at all are using Google Trends. Wrong answer, but of course they are used to Trends for their social campaigns. Has your company dealt with this situation?  I've looked at a few free keyword tools...each seems to have its plusses and minusses.  **What would you recommend...either as a free tool or possible other workaround?   **

-Most of the organic keywords driving traffic to our website are branded. -I’ve used UberSuggest, but those keyword phrases tend to have low CPC and low volume -Thus, the UberSuggest keywords usually produce a low benefit & K.O.B score. -Andrew

Our niche has one keyword phrase that is much, much more active than any other comparable phrase. Let's call that phrase "math problems". Within this phrase, the "math" is absolutely the most important keyword, as it is also used in every spin-off search phrase, like "math answers", "math practice", etc. We've had our domain since 1996, and is currently the company name - "Rocketproblems.com". Over the last year (2010-2011) our SERPs have steadily dropped to the point where we're not getting a sustainable level of business from organic search, whereas in 2009 we were doing fantastic. However, we've also had "Rocketmathproblems.com" since about 2000, just gathering dust. What I've noticed from the top search results is that nearly every domain has either "math" or "math problems" in its URL. Do you think it's worth it to switch to the keyword-rich URL? It is a bit more verbose, and the "Rocketmathproblems.com" v.s. "Rocketproblems.com" example perfectly captures the different feeling. My inclination is that SEO is only becoming more competitive, and if we aren't getting worthwhile business from organic search at the moment then we should bite the bullet and make the switch for the future, along with ramping up our content generation. However, I also noticed that in late 2009 a previous webmaster switched to "Rogermath.com" but switched back within a month when our SERP for the key phrase was a page lower - I gleaned this from a Moz Juicy Keywords Report :). Thoughts?