When you search for your business name, what appears first?

Unless you either have a very generic business name or incredibly aggressive competitors, you’ll see your website, phone number, reviews, and probably a map pin. It looks like proof that everything is working.

But is it? Ranking first for your own business name is the easiest result in search, and it tells us nothing about whether people who don’t already know you can find you.

There’s two kinds of search results, but only one of them truly matters from a marketing and sales perspective.

Branded and non-branded search are two different problems

A branded search contains your business name, or something close to it. Let’s use a simple example: “Adkin Legal”, “adkin lawyers perth”, “adkin legal phone number”, “adkin law opening hours”.

A non-branded search doesn’t include the business name, but it includes the words your prospects are actually searching for: “family law perth”, “lawyers near me”, “legal advice for small business”, “perth lawyer fees”.

The people typing those two things are in completely different states of mind.

Branded searchers already knows you exist. someone told them your name, or they drove past your sign, or they saw your ad, or they’ve been in before and can’t remember your number. The search engine isn’t introducing you to them, it’s just the address book.

Non-branded searchers have a specific problem but no preferred supplier. In this instance, they don’t know your name, and they probably do not know you even exist. Whoever appears in front of them has a real chance at the job.

Branded search captures demand you already created, whereas non-branded search creates demand you didn’t have.

Why you win branded search automatically

You’re not winning branded searches because your website is built well – it’s because there is no meaningful competition.

Who else is trying to rank for your exact business name? As I mentioned earlier, unless you either have a genuinely ambiguous name or aggressive competitors ¹, nobody.

Meanwhile, you might have a website, Google Business Profile, a Facebook page, Instagram, X or LinkedIn, maybe a couple directory listings and possibly a local news mention or two. Every one of those carries your name repeatedly – and really, you’d have to work quite hard to not rank first for your own business name.

Which means the result you’re getting was going to happen whether you invested in your website or not.

The number that actually matters

When looking at your website’s search queries, you’ll want to split them into two piles: queries that contain your business name, and queries that don’t.

For a lot of the sites I’ve seen, the branded list contains most of the clicks and impressions. Sometimes it’s nearly all of them. The non-branded pile is thin, and what’s in it is usually vague or accidental.

That pattern tells a clear story: most websites are working as a destination for people who were already sent there, but it isn’t working as a way to be found.

If word of mouth stopped tomorrow, so would the website’s enquiries.

The useful question to ask yourself is, “can anyone actually find me if they don’t already know my business’ name?”

So how does a web page gets ranked for a word?

One thing to note is that search results don’t rank websites, they rank pages. Every choice needs to be targeted to the specific page in question, rather than the website in general.

A search engine reads a web page and tries to work out what it’s about and who it’s for, by checking which signals align. Fortunately, several of those signals sit almost entirely within your control.

Optimised page titles

The title is the strongest single on-page signal about a page’s subject. It’s the clickable blue line in the search result, and it’s what you see in a browser tab next to the website’s icon.

The typical small-business home page has a title like Home | Adkin Legal. If you look at that the way a search engine does, you’ll think: this page is about a business called “Adkin Legal”.

So it ranks for exactly that, and for nothing else – because it was not told about anything else.

Relevant heading text

Headings give a page structure. There are six levels, but the main heading (the H1) states the page’s subject. Subheadings (levels 2 – 6) then break the subject into parts.

“Welcome to Adkin Legal” is a greeting, not a subject. “Business Law Specialists in Perth” is a subject.

Headings must be written as real headings in the page’s code, not just text someone made to look bigger and bolder. This matters for screen reader users as much as it matters for search – the same markup does both jobs ².

Well-written body text

This is where we demonstrate what the title and heading is all about.

It isn’t about repeating keywords a set number of times ³ – it requires naturally and organically using the language a real person expects to read within that topic.

If you’re a legal firm, a page about commercial law will mention shareholder agreements, employment contracts, fair work obligations, and what happens when a supplier stops paying – not because those are keywords to insert, but because you can’t write usefully about the subject without them.

A page that says “we provide practical advice tailored to your business” has stated nothing – it could be a business broker, accountant or management consultant. If a reader can’t tell what a page is about, neither can a search engine.

Representative anchor text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable words in a link. It should accurately describe the destination ⁴.

Internally, links from your other web pages tell search engines what the linked page is about. A link that reads “commercial law” pointing at your law firm’s business law page is a small but clear vote for that subject. On the other hand, links with the words “click here” or “read more” are wasted because it describes nothing about the content on the other side of the link.

Externally, links from other sites ⁵ carry the same signal but are generally considered more valuable. However, you cannot control the words they use – but you do have some influence, because generally this will be your page title or main heading as the link text. This is another reason why naming your pages well and writing relevant headings can help – it shapes how other people describe them.

Descriptive alt text for images

All images have the ability to add alt text, which is a written description of an image that gets read aloud to people using screen readers – also it’s what gets displayed if an image fails to load.

However, it also happens to be readable context that can help with rankings.

This is not where we should cram keywords ⁶ but it is a good place to describe what’s in the picture – and doing so should naturally include keywords that help with rankings.

Accurate file names for images

While this is only a minor signal when compared to alt text ⁷, it’s still useful to do.

A product or service page where the images are all variants of IMG_4471.jpg isn’t going to help, but if they were more like adkin-agency-web-design-example-1.jpg then we just might push the needle in our direction.

The most important signal is agreement

Individually, none of these will make you rank first, but together you have a chance because the real value is consistency.

Picture a web page:

• The page title says Employment Law for Employers in Perth,
• The H1 is identical to the page title
• The subheadings cover employment contracts, unfair dismissal claims, redundancies and workplace investigations
• The body text discusses how each process is handled and what it typically costs
• The images show the legal employment team and name them in their alt text
• Multiple internal links point at it with the anchor text “employment law”.

There is no ambiguity left – every signal says the same thing: this page represents Perth lawyers who specialise in employment law.

Now imagine a more generic version:

• The page title is “Services – [ Business Name ]”
• The h1 is “Welcome to [ Business Name ]” or “Our Services”
• Six services are listed in a row with a brief description of each, where every link text is “Read more” or “View service”
• All images are stock photography and have no alt text
• The only link is from the menu as “Services”

In this instance, every signal is either blank or contradicting the others – a search engine’s only conclusion is the business name plus “services”, and that’s all it will ever tend to rank for.

That site isn’t failing to be optimised – it is very well optimised, but only for the business name.

What this means practically

Each page should only ever have one job. Every service you provide should have a page dedicated to it. A single page listing eight different services will struggle to rank for any of them because it can’t align its various signals behind eight subjects at once.

Describe what the page represents. While your business name should be in the title, it should be at the end, after the subject.

Use the same words your customers use. Not the words in your fee schedule. People search for “my employee is suing me” much more often than “adverse action proceedings”, and a good page can address both.

Link with intent. When you mention a service anywhere on your site, link to its page using its name as the link text rather than “Read more”.

Describe your images. Every meaningful image should have alt text that describes it using natural language, but purely decorative images should not have alt text so they’re skipped by screen readers rather than announced.

This should not be considered “advanced technical SEO” but it’s rarely done because most websites are built to look nice rather than to be found ⁸, and when the branded search result appears as the top result in Google, many web design agencies will consider their job done.

Where to start

If you want to know how big the gap is on your own site, check Google Search Console and split the results as described above, with branded queries in one pile, non-branded in the other – the ratio will tell you most of what you need to know in about ten minutes.

If you’d rather an expert’s eye look into it, I run a website visibility review that determines what your website is doing right, what it’s missing, and what it could do better.

1. Competitors that appear when searching for your business name are actively trying to steal your customers with targeted advertising ↩︎
2. This is a rare cases of two problems having a single fix – there are several more in the realm of website accessibility, but they are not commonly know ↩︎
3. This is known as “keyword stuffing” and can get you penalised by search engines for doing it ↩︎
4. For more information, read the section about how links should be written ↩︎
5. These are sometimes called “backlinks” ↩︎
6. Egregrious use of keyword stuffing will punish your search engine rankings ↩︎
7. For more information, see Google’s advice on image file names and alt text https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images#descriptive-alt-text%20descriptive-titles-captions-filenames ↩︎
8. In my first article I wrote about the apparent disconnect between web design and business goals ↩︎