HN Explorer

Why is Google charging me $5-10 per click for my own brand name searches

19 points by hypeaccount ↗ HN
It seems Google has made it extremely difficult for small businesses to rank. The only way is to pay for Google Ads to rank for your brand name search terms for which Google is milking the hell out.

Despite whatever I do the website wouldn't rank.

I feel like Google has some sort of big brand whitelist and systemically discriminates against small brands.

9 comments

[ 472 ms ] story [ 929 ms ] thread
ocdtrekkie
Heh, this is one of the dark secrets of how they make their money: Even when people already know they are looking for you, you have to pay to "advertise" to them.
bko
Why can’t you rank? I had no trouble getting ranked if I did the search console stuff and I had a unique name (which I checked before picking a name). Or do you just mean that your organic result is below the paid results?

What’s more likely, someone searching for your small business and some other cash rich business buying the ad space and stealing your customer.

Or a small business buying the keyword for a large competitor and stealing their business?

As a small business,I would prefer the world in which I can bid on my larger competitors key words than not be allowed. How many small web apps are basically wrappers with a better UX on top of standard AWS services?

reilly3000
Try working on your quality score, and definitely add negative keywords for anything that might be confused with your brand name. Keep your brand keyword ad groups separate from any other keywords, and break out by match type. Brand keywords should be your cheapest traffic. Get professional help if you can.
sparrish
Because your competitors are paying up to $5-10 per click for your brand name.
abxyz
You’ve been repeatedly asked to provide your website but you have not. There is almost certainly a problem with your website, whether it’s a banned domain or robots.txt misconfiguration or something more obscure. You need to either share your website so people here can investigate for you, or hire someone privately to investigate. There’s no other advice anyone can give.
lefstathiou
I bought a domain that was previously used for hentai in the 90s and 00s. It was blacklisted from search because Symantec site review and other similar site review services marked it as adult content. I emailed each of them directly and within 48-72 hours, all had manually changed it. This is the only path that I know of.
kentich
I've always felt like Google Ads is unclear about how they set their CPCs. Why not to clearly show who pays what in a clear transparent way? Do they have something to hide?