Should I be more specific when naming my business in Google My Business profile?

Question

I am creating a Google My Business (GMB) Profile and listing my language immersion school on various listings to build my Local SEO with NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number).

At first glance, my name doesn't imply anything about the business. Is it a good idea to be more specific when creating your name for GMB? Should I change my name listing from say: "Acme" to something like "Acme Spanish Immersion School"?

Will this help in improving either my SEO or click-through rate?

Answer 1

The most important thing when it comes to Local SEO and NAP information is consistency. Think of your business name, address, phone number like a sticker:

ACME Company
123 Candy Lane, STE 5
Tinsel Town, North Pole [zip code]
(800)001-1225

Search engines see "ACME Company" associated with that exact address and that exact phone number. They'll then compare that to aggregated data across the data internet - your business filing records, Dun & Bradstreet profile, anything public record. So consistency is the key to Local SEO.

You can change this if you want to so what you do is more easily identifiable but be advised of two caveats:

1. It's probably not going to help much with search engines/ranking, but it might a little. The change would be for humans. The primary way search engines will understand what your business does is from your website and the business information you list on your GMB profile.
2. It's hard to replace a sticker. If you change your business name on Google My Business, you'll also have to update it everywhere else. It will take quite a lot of time for aggregators such as Yext to pick up the change, and it will likely (in my experience) be added to their indices in addition to the record they had before (leading to duplicate citations). Unless of course you pay them, which can get expensive. Manually updating NAP citations is one of the most monotonous, time consuming tasks in SEO.

One advanced search operator you can use to find pages containing a certain word (or words) somewhere in the content is intext: Ex: intext:"acme company". More advanced search operators here.

If you want to change it, go ahead, but my advice would be to do it once and never again (unless of course you don't have a choice). The more you change things, the more problems you'll run into. Here is a guide from Moz on you might find useful on how to handle business information changes.