Should You Bid on Your Own Business Name?

This one divides people, and both camps are right in different situations. The answer depends entirely on what the search result actually looks like when somebody types your name, so start there.

Do the check first

Open a phone that is not signed into your Google account, and search your business name. Do it a few times over a week, because ads rotate and one look proves nothing.

What you are looking for:

• Nothing above your listing. Your result and your map profile are the first things on the page.
• A competitor's ad above you. Somebody is bidding on your name.
• A directory or lead-generation site above you. Checkatrade, a comparison site, an aggregator.

Those three situations have three different answers.

If nothing is above you

Do not bid. You are paying for people who were already coming.

The usual argument is that it costs almost nothing because brand clicks are cheap. That is true and it is also the problem: cheap clicks are easy to leave running for two years without noticing, and the money is real even when each click is not.

There is a worse version of this, which is that the brand campaign makes the whole account look like it is working. Brand searches convert at a rate no service keyword will ever match, because the person already chose you. Leave those numbers in with the rest and the account reports a cost per enquiry that is nonsense, and you keep paying for service keywords that are quietly losing money underneath.

The strongest version of the opposing argument is that an ad lets you control the message and send people to a chosen page rather than wherever Google decides. For most trade businesses that is a small gain for a recurring cost.

If a competitor is bidding on your name

Now it changes. Somebody who searched for you is being shown them, first.

Bidding on your own name here is defensive, and it works, because your ad will be far more relevant to the search than theirs and relevance is most of what decides who shows and at what price. You will usually sit above them and pay less per click than they do.

Worth knowing: bidding on a competitor's name as a keyword is generally allowed. Using their trademarked name inside the ad text is not, and Google has a complaints process for that. If their ad says your business name, that is worth reporting, and it is free to do.

Before you react, work out how much is actually at stake. Look at how many people search your name in a month in Search Console, under Queries. If it is forty, a competitor skimming a few of them is irritating rather than expensive, and you may decide to leave it. If it is four hundred, that is a real leak.

If a directory is above you

This is the most common case for established trade businesses and the most annoying, because the directory often ranks on your name by having a page about you.

Bidding here is usually worth it. The person wants you specifically, and the alternative is them landing on a page that lists you alongside four competitors and a quote form.

The longer-term fix is to own more of that first page yourself so there is less room for anybody else: your site, your map listing, your social profiles, and any genuine third-party mentions. A directory ranking for your name is partly a sign that your own presence is thin.

If your name is a common phrase

Some business names are not really brands. If you trade as something like "City Plumbing and Heating", a chunk of those searches are people describing what they want rather than looking for you.

Treat those as service keywords and judge them on the same basis as the rest of the account: what they cost, what they produce, whether the people arriving were looking for you or for anybody.

How to keep it honest if you do run it

Give it its own campaign. Never leave brand terms mixed in with service keywords, for the reason above.

Cap it low. A brand campaign should not need much. If it is spending meaningfully, something is wrong with how it is matched.

Use exact match. Your name and its obvious misspellings, nothing broader. Broad match on a brand campaign will quietly start buying your whole trade.

Add negatives. Your own name plus "jobs", "reviews", "complaints" or "login" are not customers.

Review it quarterly. The competitor who was bidding last year may have stopped, in which case so should you. That one check is the difference between a sensible defensive spend and a direct debit nobody remembers setting up.

The honest summary

For most trade businesses with a distinctive name and nobody competing on it, this is money spent on traffic you already had. For businesses with a directory or a competitor sitting above them, it is one of the better-value things in the account.

The difference is a thirty-second search, which is a lot cheaper than running it for a year to find out. If you want the rest of the account looked at the same way, that is what the ads work is for, and the negative keyword list is where most accounts leak far more than this ever will.