Long Business Name & Citations

[TriciaClements]

I have a client that has a super long business name - 55 characters. There are some citations that only allow 40 characters in a business name. On the one's that allow longer, I'm including the full business name. On the others, what is recommended?

I was planning on stopping at the end of the last full word allowed for the space provided but wanted to know if there are any other recommendations on how to approach it.

 

[PKLilikoi]

@Phil Rozek touched on this quite a bit ago. You can read his article here .

Here is a quick answer from that article.
The answer: if your official business name is more than 40 characters long, you should abbreviate it to 40 characters or less before you use it as the “business name” of your Google Places page.

 

[TriciaClements]

Thank you for the information. Before I was involved, it was already listed fully on GMB (55 characters). I'm a little conflicted about how to proceed with other citations because when I asked the business owner to confirm it was correct (they have a dba) they said there were specific reasons they did it that way and want to keep it the correct way on GMB (55 characters).

 

[Phil Rozek]

@TriciaClements, whether and where to chop is a case-by-case question, because it's a question of where the (relative) fluff is. The very end of the name may be important, and may not be a good idea to cut. If you're a realtor or a therapist or a financial advisor, for example, you're required to include certain elements in your name. Other parts of your name may be critical for branding, such that if you remove them and search for the abbreviated name, Google may pull up the wrong business (or several businesses, including your competitors).

Anything like "Corporation" or "Company" "Licensed" or "Agency" is a good possible way to abbreviate.

What is the name of your client's business (or a generic version of it)?

 

[TriciaClements]

@Phil Rozek It's a private school and child care. None of the extra words are Company, Corp, etc. The last word in the name is school. Does this mean that it would be OK to shorten it by removing words in the middle of the business name for those citations that only allow 40 characters?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@TriciaClements, those were just examples. Again, if I don't know what the name is, so I can't say what is the least-bad thing to cut.

The word "school" may help you rank currently or in the future, so that's probably not one to trim out.

You'll want to scour the "Performance" -> "Queries" area in Search Console to see exactly which phrases (including variations of your name) you get impressions and clicks for. You'll also get a sense of how searchers already abbreviate your name - what part they think is extraneous.

 

[fpaschoal]

Hello ! I just saw this a article, it is from 2011. Last update 2014, do you think it still valid, 40 characters as best practice ?
Thank you,
Fabricio

 

[Phil Rozek]

@fpaschoal, I wish I knew Can't say I've looked into it recently.

But one thing I'd say has changed is that Google seems much better at recognizing the names of entities / businesses, so I'm not as concerned about discrepancies in the name.

 

[fpaschoal]

Thank you @Phil Rozek. The last reference I had from GMB name length was from Mike on this post.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@fpaschoal, thanks. I saw that one a few years ago. Mike's post is crunchier, and I like it better than mine, but they're on slightly different topics. His is about how long of a name GMB will accept, whereas mine is more about how long of a GMB name will other sites accept before they start messing with the formatting of your name.

Unlike when I wrote that post 9+ years ago, these days my approach is more like: make sure your name doesn't create problems in GMB, and don't worry too much about the formatting on other sites. (For what that's worth.)