Marketing on a Nickname or Phonetic Spelling for Your Brand

EZ Care for EasyCare Example

What if customers search for EZ Care Warranty when the product is really named “EasyCare Vehicle Service Contract”?

What happens for organic search visitors who search for your brand name using a nickname or phonetic spelling? How can you not only

• Avoid losing traffic for searches that don’t match your name exactly?
• How can you gain additional relevant traffic by using your “nickname”?

We’re working that issue now for a brand name EasyCare Vehicle Service Contracts where a very large proportion of customers search with their query string as EZ Care Warranty”, or some variation thereof.

First, if there’s really strong traffic on the nickname or phonetic spelling, Google and Bing take note and track visitors who eventually find and choose your domain from other search results. Google is clearly associating “EZ Care” with “EasyCare”. This isn’t novel, but it certainly helps provide a better user experience. Connecting a phonetic spelling to natural language spelling gets people what they want. So, in part, Google is going to help you with part of the problem, directing a stream of traffic to the natural language version of your brand name.

The second concern is, “Can I get more traffic by leveraging popular nicknames that future customers will use?”

Yes, there are dozens of steps you can take to leverage a nickname using ordinary SEO techniques. The key is to associate the brand nickname or phonetic spelling with your official brand name in a way that your competitors cannot follow because they don’t own the online footprint where your official brand lives.

Here are a few simple ideas that you can implement by yourself with no special tools. Power tools and magic wands are not required.

• Use the nickname in your site in some pages as an important keyword, and tune the pages for that keyword. Where used, associate the nickname side by side with your official brand name
• Use your nickname, and variations, as triggers in your PPC campaigns. Don’t let your competitors own the PPC space on your brand nicknames.
• Build a dedicated page in your web site, perhaps as a glossary page, to connect your brand nickname to your brand page. Embrace the nicknamme, and make sure it is bringing traffic to your real brand name. So, for this example, you’d build a page as EZ Care Warranty page and explain the connection to EasyCare Warranty.
• Research the nickname for your brand to find out how your competitors are using, or abusing, your brand nickname. With content, backlinks, video, social, and any other tools you need, fight back to own your keyword. You have the advantage of owning the official domain name, brand name, and best ranking keywords for your brand, so you can use all your online properties (site, blog, YouTbue channel, Tumblr account, Twitter account, LinkedIn, and other sites you may own such as brand-specific sites, to connect and own your own brand nickname or phonetic spelling. This is what your competitors cannot do as well.
• Use Google Trends and similar tools to compare trends among slang and nickname terms for your brand.
• Don’t forget to do domain research to find domains that match brand nicknames or phonetic versions of your brand name that you should own. Seems pretty basic, like Coca-Cola should own Coke right? Well they do, but chances are that not every brand you serve is defending it’s brand nicknames. So go ahead and check, and prioritize your domain buying by the importance of each brand nickname. Competitors will buy and use brand nickname domains on your brand.