If your company name is the same as a famous person/movement/celebrity what kind of options do you have in building your knowledge graph relevance, and improving your SERP?

[Scratch-Kony]

Is it possible for a large global company to compete for SERP rankings against a pop-culture celebrity/movement that is regularly in the news?

Thank you!

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Lora,

Yes, it's definitely possible! I work for Rover.com - if people search for "rover" Google's not sure if they mean us, Land Rover, Mars Rover, the movie The Rover, etc etc. I'll admit that we don't often compete with trending news, but we're competing with companies and concepts that are much older and better known than us. Here's what I've found:

• **Google likes variety. **So, even if you can't rank #1 for the name of your company, chances are, you're going to rank #2 after the celebrity/news, even if the celebrity/news has enough content to take up the entire page. If people are searching for your brand, they're going to see your results, even if you're #2. (In case this isn't a given, you want to make sure that you make your company _stand out _from the celebrity/news, not try to pick up on interest from it. Then you'll be competing with all the news media outlets.)
• **Google understands that two separate things can be named the same thing. **We never rank for "Land Rover" or "Mars Rover" and neither of those two very, very popular subjects rank for "Rover dogs." Google's pretty good at filtering out results that aren't a good match for all of the terms in a search.
• **Most searchers are willing to refine their searches. **If all else fails, searchers are probably okay with searching for your brand + your service if they don't see your site when they only search for your brand. An advantage here is, if people are looking for your brand, they won't be distracted by completely unrelated information, like celebrity news. This would be a bigger problem if this celebrity news were also a business competitor.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

[RyanPurkey]

Hello Lora. Yes, it is certainly possible although the SERPs are going to vary based on current news, personalization, localization, and so on. Each type of site is going to have it's own strengths and weaknesses and the search engines are going to try and match their results to search intent as much as possible. The less you try to shoehorn into phrases that have a clear intent of looking for the celebrity / pop-culture item and instead play to the strengths of the global company, the better.