Not Ranking For DomainName + Widget?

[jskrewson]

My domain name is two words slammed together that are rarely if ever used together.

Awhile ago I noticed that repeat customers were searching for "mydomain widget" with the expectation that Google would land them on the right page on my website. The first two pages of results are pages about my website, articles that have been written, etc. A random deep link to my site shows on page three!

The problem exists for "mydomain.com widget" as well. So the domain extension doesn't even help.

As an additional insult, domainname + widget is part of the Google auto-complete results. I have to run adwords ads with a broadmatch on my domain name, but the first adwords ad is at the bottom of the page event though I am bidding for top page placement.

If you search for "mydomain" or "mydomain.com" or "my domain", my site is #1 in the SERPS with good sitelinks.

I'm afraid that a large portion of my potential repeat customers don't make it back because neither my website nor my adwords ads show above the fold. Is this a common problem?

[goodroi]

There could be several different issues happening here:

#1 - Your serps mighty be personalized and since you don't normally click on your site in Google serps, Google has dropped your site ranking in these personalized serps.

#2 - Auto complete results does not always mean people are searching for that phrase. When I look at the auto complete results for one of my smaller sites, one of the suggestions is "example.com links". My site doesn't sell links, talk about links or submits to link pages. Since it is a smaller site it is easier for the auto complete to get skewed since there aren't alot of people typing in search terms containing my domain name.

#3 - You might want to recheck your optimization for this. Do you talk about widgets on the landing page? Do you also include synonyms and other semantic clues for Google? Do you have backlinks using the word widgets?

#4 - You might have overdone some of the optimization and ended up with a penalty.

[jskrewson]

I can rule out #1, just checked.

I can rule at #2 because I can see the volume for domain + widget in adwords via my performance history.

hmmm, it might be #3.... Will need to think about that some more. You know, I do show first in the SERPS for "domain cheap widget synonym" because I have a URL with that phrase as part of the URL.

[goodroi]

I assume you changed your adwords setting to exact match instead of the default broad match. Otherwise that could inflate the numbers.

[jskrewson]

I know volume because I am running broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact in an attempt to get my adwords ads "on top" of the page more often.

I also can see what is going on from the "See Search Terms" Adwords report and I'm logging and paying attention to the actual search terms coming from my Adwords ads server side in MySQL.

For a big site like mine, which has lots of different widgets, its pretty daunting to think I need to put effort into optimizing for each widget in order to show for search terms that include my non-common domain name. The number of of possible widget terms that could be combined with my domain is in the 100's of millions.

I have these widget terms in search results that look like ?kw=widget, but I guess Google doesn't like that as much as /mydomain/widget.... I thought they fixed that?