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.

hard to say without the URL, just post it

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

Admittedly I had a client with this. He was on Shopify. We did everything thgat franze highlighted. We did a full screamingfrog audit of the sitemap, and fixed everything from title length down to html and script problems. Wound up being really toxic backlinks that we needed to disavow. It still took a few months but finally his links were listing. The crazy thing is we had cloned competitors getting higher ranking before.

If it were me, I'd just setup a PPC campaign in Google Ads and not worry about it anymore.

I'd imagine your brand name carries a low CPC, so the cost to ensure potential clients find you would be pretty low.

Use [exact match] keywords, campaign goal of clicks, and a pretty basic/clean ad with some sitelinks.

Worst case, you're really visible and it adds some authority to relevant serps.

Google took all their rules from years ago, and broke every single one of them. This was one of the rules: you can't advertize for keywords that include brands that are not yours. Now I was surprised that they will happily take the money, no matter what.

Also, ads must be cleary distinguished from the website content... not anymore Ads should not trick the user to click them (animating them so they expand over the content as the use tries to interact with it)... not anymore.

Basically, they are doing every single thing that the spammy websites were doing, 20 years ago. That also means that there is no more space to grow in the ads market.

> I’ve submitted my sitemap to GSC

Google Search Console should tell you what’s wrong. What does it say?

https://search.google.com/

How generic is your brand name, and are there other brands that sound similar?

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.

this is almost generally true. concerts, clothes, consumer packaged goods , utilities -- almost none of the brand websites are the top rank.

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.

Sometimes adding separate pages for mobile user agents helps, but Google isn't very forthcoming with what they care about. This leaves search engine optimization services as the most cost effective option, much cheaper than paying for ads.

Not sure if you have a Google Business Profile.

Also, make sure your Google Maps profile is well done, it can be as or more important than the Google Business Profile as it helps shape how you'd like traffic to become interactions with you.

The more useful information is available from your website in structured form, the less it likely will pull structured information from the social links pointing to you. I forget what this is called but I believe it's semantic metadata settings or something, can try to look it up and reply here again.

How long have you been on the web, and how crowded is your industry (from an SEO PoV)?

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.