Brand name search

What this check looks at

Brand name search is one of the Off-Page SEO checks. Authority earned outside the site. It is judged from what your site served at the time of the crawl, and a page we could not reach is reported as unreachable rather than skipped.

What this one needs to run

This check depends on a commercial data set. Backlink graphs, keyword volume and difficulty scores are crawled and licensed by a handful of vendors, and there is no way to derive them from your own site.

This check needs a paid data feed, so it is listed here with what it would read and why it matters. A catalogue that quietly omits what it cannot do is a catalogue you cannot trust.

What you get from it

• 51 of the 78 catalogued checks need nothing but a scan of your site
• Answer engine access, rendering and schema value checks cover the ground that decides citation
• If backlink data matters to your work, a dedicated backlink tool will serve you better than a bolt on

What it reports when it fails

These are the findings this check can raise, taken from the code that raises them rather than rewritten for the website. An ellipsis stands where the report fills in what it measured on your page.

• notenot evaluated, the search for this site's own name did not come back
• worth fixingGoogle returned no organic result for this site's own name
• worth fixingthis site is not in Google's top … results for its own name
• notethis site is at position … of Google's top … results for its own name

What would have to happen for this to run

This one is a purchasing decision rather than a technical one. The check is straightforward to write; what it needs is a data set that costs more per month than most of our plans do, and passing that cost on for a check few people asked for would be the wrong trade.

1. We license a backlink or keyword index from a vendor that crawls the wider web
2. The check queries that index for your domain and compares it against what we crawled
3. Until then it names the data set it would read, rather than returning an empty result that looks like a clean bill of health

Where it sits in the audit

See every off-page check or the full catalogue of 78 checks. The documentation covers the order checks run in and how a finding is fingerprinted, and the about page explains why we publish the checks that do not run.