Tocquigny Advertising and Design

So your brand or product has a funny name. So does ours. We tell prospects that Tocquigny "sounds like martini" to help them remember how to pronounce our name, but that doesn't help them at all when they type our name into Google to find us. Toquini, Tocquiny, Tokini, Tocquini, Tocquiny, Toekeeni, Tuquigny — there is no end to the number of ways you can misspell Tocquigny.

Having a unique name is great for branding — it helps you stand out from the competition. But it does you no good if people can't find you when they are ready to purchase or interact. Fortunately, there are a number of fairly simple ways to solve this problem and achieve the end result of users finding your site easily, even when they don't spell your name right.

1. Set up SEO landing pages that talk about the misspellings of your name

There are two ways of getting your website to show up on a search engine results page. The easiest way is to pay to place an ad on the page — we'll talk about that in just a second. The other way to get your site to show up is to convince the search engine that your site is about whatever the user is searching for — this will get you listed in the natural or free search results. The problem is that most companies don't misspell their own name very often on their website. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) landing pages come in. These are pages on your website specifically set up to convince Google to list your site in the natural search results for a particular word or phrase. You don't want to encourage everyone who visits your homepage to click onto this page, but make sure it at least links to somewhere on your site so Google and other search engines can find it.

Be careful to make the content on this page believable. Don't just fill the page with "Tokini, Tokini, Tokini, Tokini" — Google actually gives negative scores to pages that it thinks are trying to "trick" it, and this can actually have the opposite effect from what you are going for. To see a good example of this type of page — and learn about the small plant-eating dinosaur, Tokini, and why the French try to avoid having to use the word "Tocquiny" — check out our SEO landing page, How do You Spell Tocquigny?

The idea is that people looking for "Toquiny" find the landing page, which hopefully makes them smile, and then directs them to the rest of the site to learn more about our award-winning digital marketing firm in Austin, TX.

2. Intentionally misspell your name in a few places

Just having a single page on your site that uses the misspelled variations of your name may not be enough to "convince" Google that people typing in those misspellings are actually searching for you. Scattering the incorrect names on a few other pages of your site can help to overcome this challenge. You may have realized that the article you are reading right now is actually dual-purpose in nature. In addition to helping others with funny-named products, this page is one part of our attempt to persuade Google that people searching for "Tocquini," "Toquiny," and "Tokini Austin" are actually looking for us. We've cleverly scattered various misspellings throughout the page, which will be featured on our site for a while, and there's a real article — not just a bunch of keywords masquerading as content.

Another good way to get your misspellings out there is to put them in user comments online. If you don't let users post comments on your website, you can still put comments on other sites that link back to you. Articles about your business, blogs, even social sites like YouTube that have a video of your brand or product, are great places to do this. By posting as a user, it does not look like you don't know how to spell your own name — and it gets the misspelling out there where Google will notice it. Be sure to post comments somewhere on pages that actually show your name spelled correctly or link back to your site — otherwise you're not really accomplishing much with this tactic.

3. Purchase the most common misspellings of your name for paid search

If the first two tactics we've talked about don't work for you — or if you just can't wait for Google to update its database and start linking to your new content — the quickest way to put a link to your page on any search results page is to pay to put it there. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and many other search engines allow you to run paid search ads that display adjacent to the natural search results for specific search terms that you specify. Best of all, misspellings are typically such uncommon words that they are pretty inexpensive to purchase. Many companies run paid search on their product name or brand name, but typically don't think to purchase the misspellings of their name as well.

In summary

For Google's sake, let's sprinkle in a few more references to Toekeeni, Tuquigny, and Tocquiny. There, I feel better now. And if your name is as hard to spell as Tocquigny, you should get to work setting up pages like this one for yourself. Better yet, let us help you with that — send us your contact info so we can get to know you a little better.