Dramatic drop on "company name" on the serp

Hi Everybody,

Nice forum.

I have a question that hopefully someone could help me with.

I have recently joined a company as a webmaster and they have an existing weekly web stats system in place inserted by my predessesor. One of the criteria is to record the number of searches in the google SERP pages each week on the company name. Now I've been there about a month and I have established that there PPC campaign is full of keywords of match type "broad". I have gone through these broad terms in detail and have found that customers have clicked through to the site and left immediately due to the broad match being...well to broad. So I have changed them all to "Phrase match". Anyway to cut a long story short. This search on "company name" that I have to record each week has dropped dramatically although generally the site traffic "organic" is on the rise. I have looked high and low to find a reason for the dramatic fall on the company name but have come up short?

So my questions are these.
1. Why would a search on a company Name drop so dramatically? Does google take PPC results into consideration?

Would moving the Company name to the end of a <title> tag exclude it from google if say the cut of rate was 50 characters?

Everything else is fine, the company is top of course for there name and 8 or 9 keywords that I am targeting but as luck would have it the only stat the MD has asked me to look at is the sudden company name drop.

My guess is changing the PPC keywords from Broad to Phrase but I would more than welcome any feed back.

Thanks in advance.

James Hovey

Your strategy prevents PPC searchers who search for "company name widgets" reaching you. That's where most of that brand related traffic will come and it's business suicide to kill it. Try to put in a range of phrase match terms that work rather than just turning broad search off. Also try negative words. .

I'd also be interested to know how you collate your search stats. Do you use analytics or adwords data, if the latter you may be seeing a distortion based on a misuderstanding of how those stats are derived.

Thanks for you reply, much appreciated. I use Google Analytics to asses my stats taking into consideration both paid and organic traffic. Perhaps I will turn on the company name again in PPC.

Current PPC setup is around 65 search terms changed from "broad" to "phrase" and the company name switched off altogether in ppc. you state "Your strategy prevents PPC searchers who search for "company name widgets" reaching you." If anybody types the company name + anything this company is always top?, have I miss understood you?

Thanks again for your response.

Do we need to place some widgets to get better results?

Again thanks for the reply.

I'll be honest, you've totally lost me.

I have the same problem