Google Doesn't Rank My Site for My Own Brand Name
30 hypeaccount 17 9/10/2025, 6:15:14 PM
I run a small business in Canada. Oddly, if you search my brand name, my own site doesn’t show up at all on the first page. Instead, Facebook, Instagram, and random sites that link to me outrank me.
I’ve submitted my sitemap to GSC, checked indexing, and built branded backlinks—but Google still ignores my homepage. It’s bad because people looking for me are funneled into other platforms where I lose control of the user journey.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is this Google punishing small/new sites, or do I need to approach brand SEO differently? At this point it feels like Google wants me to buy ads just to show up for my own name.
i have seen everything, from page set to noindex, from page blocking googlebot, from dns resolving errors, from special http headers just for googlebot, from google not being able to see anything on the hompage, from hidden spam issues, hacked sites, from robots.txt disallowing /, from x-robots-tag noindex at cdn, from rel=canonical to the wrong domain, from 302 chains and soft-404 homepages, from mixed http/https splitting signals, from geo redirects trapping bots, from bot protection blocking googlebot, from server 5xx timeouts under crawl, from spa content with empty html, from blocked css/js so rendering fails, from cloaking-by-accident via ab tests, from staging/dev subdomains indexed, from domain move with missing 301s, redirecting away from the domain root, from self linkspam due to "branded backlinks" ...
run the 3 SEO tests https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/seo-basics#:~:text=t... on the root domain which pretty much identify 80% of all onpage (but not onsite) issues and report back
Google Search Console should tell you what’s wrong. What does it say?
https://search.google.com/
Two reasons this usually happens.
1. You’re trying to jump on a generic term that is already established and make it your brand. Ie don’t try claim ‘superfood’ as your brand name and sell fruits and nuts.
2. A much bigger brand exists with the same/similar name. If I make a newsletter platform called chimpmail, aside from being sued Google might think my entity is the same as Mailchimp and not bother adding me to the index.
Other than that I would add some organization schema to your site to help confirm that your site is the canonical 'home' for you business, possibly a Google MyBusiness profile as well.
https://schema.org/Organization
You could try SEO strategies, and they help but you will not likely win.
Just spend the money on ads. That's what your competitors are doing.
It's better to think about your goals. what are you trying to convert when the traffic arrives at your website? Joining a mailing list, adding to cart, buying a product? Contacting sales? How many of those leads do you need a month?
then work backward in the funnel and see how much google traffic you need to make that happen.
And remember google is a shrinking segment -- other social media channels will likely have a bigger impact.
websites aren't driving a lot of action these days.
At $Job, we've got a couple long-time micro-clients in niche industries. They don't bother with SEO. Spend $0 on ads. Have decades-old site designs. And are in the top 3 Google results for most search strings that they care about.
The website is 1 year old.