Search results performance affected by similarly named Adult business?!

[AmerTMR]

Hey

This is an unusual one I guess and one we've scratched our heads on for ages without reaching any definitive answer, so would be very grateful to the Moz community for some thought and guidance!

Client website: https://www.themassagerooms.com

This is a professionally run, therapeutic health business offering on-demand ("mobile", ie visiting customers at their homes) massage service. Importantly, please note again (you'll see why in a minute) the exact URL and the fact that this business, our client, is a registered therapeutic health and wellness business (ie it is genuine, real, massage services).

The business has been around for about 10 years and used to rank very highly for many dream keywords for their industry.

However, several years ago they got approached by a domain reseller offer to sell them "massagerooms.com" (ie the same name but without the "The" at the beginning) for a few thousand pounds.  They rejected the offer.

Interesting Aside: This happened a short while before the Facebook movie was launched ... if they'd seen that movie perhaps they would have accepted! (Facebook was originally called The Facebook but then one of the key investors advised them to drop the "The"!

Anyway, unfortunately for them, that offered domain name (massagerooms.com) was then sold to an online adult video services company.

Soon after, themassagerooms.com rankings started to suffer.

Today, TheMassageRooms.com have a technically very clean site (great scores on Google LightSpeed etc), with regularly updated relevant health and wellness content.

They are doing ok in terms of rankings but no where near as well as many of their competitors who on the face of it seem to have significantly worse on and off-page scores as well as many spammy links.

Also, TheMassageRooms.com have a much better Moz DA then those competitors that are ranking better.

The big question is whether the existence of an adult services website, MassageRooms.com with such a similar name is causing them issues in search results?

Especially since many people (regular customers and even their own staff), do search for TheMassageRooms (ie the therapeutic health and wellness company) by only typing "massage rooms". So, there is a clear argument for saying "The Massage Rooms" = "Massage Rooms" in many respects, even through the two URLs which match these exact terms lead to very different businesses.

Of course, one solution, might be to change the URL and 301 redirect everything. But would that actually make a difference if the actual issue is that Google's algorithm is somehow connected "MassageRooms.com" (adult site) with "TheMassageRooms.com" (our client's health and wellness site). Also it seems a bit drastic to ask them to change a 10 year established brand name etc.

[AmerTMR]

Thank you for such an encouraging and supportive answer, we all really appreciated reading your thoughts.

We have actually focused on content a lot in the last 12 months for exactly the same reason you've mentioned (you can see our pretty active, health and therapeutic treatments focused blog here: https://www.themassagerooms.com/blog) and that has definitely helped.

But what is most concerning is that we still seem to very largely lag behind many of the other smaller competitors in terms of key keyword SERPs (like the ones you mentioned), even though we have much more content, better DA, great Google LightSpeed scores, etc etc.

What I mean to say is that we completely agree with all that you have said - and will also take on board your Local points - they are all very sensible in from an absolute perspective.

But we are still confused as to why sites like massagejoy.co.uk, massagepeoplelondon.co.uk and even ubermassagelondon.co.uk ... all of which have lower DA, less content, less good quality links in etc (the last one has a DA = 1 , hardly any content and according to Moz not a single external link in!) rank better than us? It just seems to smell very strongly of something slightly askew and we have no idea whether we can somehow get someone in the know at Google to investigate?

[DarinPirkey]

This might come down to user intent and branding.  So let's say someone searches for "local massage therapist" or "massage therapist" are they finding you?  For the brand name it might be hard to overcome someone who has tons of traffic and possibly a better match for user intent. If people are searching for "massage room" and are clicking on the adult site, that can very well signal to Google that the intent of that query is to find that site.  Also when I think of massage room I think of finding a way to decorate it.  But I wouldn't necessarily change branding and/or url.  I'd need to see some data to give a more in-depth answer but here are some ideas.

1. Jump into Keyword Explorer and look for "Massage Therapy", "Mobile Massage", "massage at home" etc and see what keyword phrases you may be able to get some content around and see if you can rank for those.  (You don't need to capture all the traffic that's out there.  But if you can dominate in a few key areas of content, you can get plenty of traffic)

2. Work heavily on local SEO practices. If you can get into Google Maps by building citations or other forms of credibility around the Brand, that may help people who search for "massage room", in the areas they serve, to show up in the results in a knowledge graph or maps.

3. Answer questions around the web about massage therapy on social media and  answer type platforms.  Get the brand out there and across multiple places to show the search engines that you the brand is all about helping people who are interested in massage.  Don't let the "other site" dominate YOUR brand.  They might beat you on traffic but you can with earned links and citations.

Hope this helps. I'm a big proponent of content as a source of traffic so I would try to find the keywords that you have some viability to rank for and focus on that sort of content.  It will probably take some time for your brand to "outrank" the adult site.  But focusing on good quality content that people are searching for, that doesn't have adult intent, can help you get there.  Best of luck.