Kiru comics is not Kirtu comics

November 7, 2017 6:28 AM

My friend has setup a website, Kiru comics, suitable for for all ages. However, Google isn't currently recognising his brand, so when searching for Kiru comics Google prompts you with: Did you mean: kirtu comics So the question is, what do you think he should do? He's paying an seo consultant for 3 months to attempt to fix this, but he's seriously considering renaming his site to not clash with Kirtu, but he's spent time building up his kiru brand, and he would rather not have to.
posted by ben30 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: I think he's pretty well hosed until he can become popular enough that searches for his site register as more than typos. It could still change, but there's no telling when (since Google publicizes nothing about how their algorithms work).

One thing he can do, in order to keep using Kiru, is adding another word. So instead of Kiru Comics, Kiru [noun] comics. Heck, even searching Kiru Smith Comics gets me your friend's site because *no one searches for Kiru Smith abut actually means Kirtu*.
posted by flibbertigibbet at 7:03 AM on November 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I am not an SEO expert by any means but I do work on e-commerce sites some really easy things that occur to me that can help "legitimise" the keyword further in Google's eyes.

- kirucomics.com is not owned? Buy that asap. Redirect to .co.uk
- Create a Wikipedia entry for Kiru comics
- The social media links on the Contact Us page goes to Account Does Not Exist pages. Fix that now, today. Have a presence on those channels and fix those links.
- Create a Google+ account, add some content driving to the website.
- If they're open to it, place the business as a location on Google Maps and add business info to it (it could just be a link to the website and to some of the fixed social media accounts). Yes they can do this even if it's not a physical store. I know this because someone I know had the opposite problem, they wanted to get OFF of Google maps because they were just an online business. However, in this situation it might help them?

To be completely honest, the architecture of the website is not doing them any favors. Maybe that SEO consultant can help, but I would recommend moving over to a more stable e-commerce platform like Shopify. Whatever this is using right now is... not great, and Google can tell.
posted by like_neon at 7:37 AM on November 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Yeah. Right now your friend’s website takes 4.4s *just* to get to the point where it’s loaded the DOM according to Firefox’s web tools & a total of 7.3s to actually load completely.

This alone will cause Google to downgrade it in web searches quite severely - as far as Google is concerned a slow website is a bad website that their users aren’t going to want to use.
posted by pharm at 8:33 AM on November 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I am a professional SEO (I know, I know). Google does actually provide a lot of information on how their algorithms work. If he'd like some short-term consulting for free, please memail me :)
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 9:02 AM on November 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you for this feedback, he’s really appreciated the comments and suggestions.
posted by ben30 at 12:33 AM on November 8, 2017