SEO - How has Nest managed to rank higher than Hive when you search for Hive?

[UberTiger]

I've just been looking at the Nest as it just came out in the UK, but it seems that even though it's the biggest brand at the moment in that niche it does have some competition, one of which is called Hive.

So I googled Hive only to find that the official Nest site seems to rank higher than the official Hive site even though theres no mention of Hive on the nest site or in the source code for the landing page.

How have they managed that?



Another search in incognito mode so it's not tailored to me. This time the hive link is for their user guide page instead of their home page. A bit odd isn't it?

 

[touch]

Try thinking about the actual meanings of the words rather than the companies associated with those words. That might be why google is highlighting both words.

For example, if you search for "wasp hive", one of the top results is waspnestuk.co.uk
edit: in fact, pretty much everything on the first page references "wasp nest" rather than "wasp hive".

 

[xbenjiiman]

Google bought Nest, so they're probably forcing it to the top for some free self-advertising.

 

[UberTiger]

Try thinking about the actual meanings of the words rather than the companies associated with those words. That might be why google is highlighting both words.

For example, if you search for "wasp hive", one of the top results is waspnestuk.co.uk

Interesting point, and it makes sense for the wasp analogy. But I've added the 'thermostat' criteria which is pretty specific and you'd have thought Google would be able to figure out exactly what I'm looking for from those two words.

Google bought Nest, so they're probably forcing it to the top for some free self-advertising.

That thought had crossed my mind! It would be mighty cheeky of them to interfere with their algorithm to self promote a brand they own without it being a sponsored link...I wouldn't put it past them though.

Looking into it a bit further it does look like Hive was setup by British Gas. I figured the first link which is a British Gas link was UK centric, but as it's a UK company it's not, so I guess it could also classify as an official page.

Perhaps it's not as suspect as I first thought, although it's still amazing that the biggest competitor's official web page is the second link and there's no mention of 'Hive' on that web page at all.

If you search for Nexus tablet there certainly isn't a link to the official Apple iPad page on the first page of results!

They're not self promoting their nexus tablet though, if you search 'apple tablet' there's nothing nexus related on my results.

 

[UberTiger]

Note how they've bolded 'nest' and 'thermostat' in the results, shouldn't they only be bolding the search terms which are 'hive' and 'thermostat'? That seems a bit dodgy, like they're replacing the search timer hive with nest even though I didn't say anything about nest.

 

[touch]

Interesting point, and it makes sense for the wasp analogy. But I've added the 'thermostat' criteria which is pretty specific and you'd have thought Google would be able to figure out exactly what I'm looking for from those two words.

You can see from the bold words in your screenshots that it is searching for both words.
I guess it can work out synonyms of the words you are looking for but isnt clever enough to look at the whole search phrase and work out exactly what you want.
(or maybe it thinks you might also want a thermostat for your bee hive)

edit: as you posted above, you can see which words have been searched for. It's not dodgy, it does this for most things.

 

[UberTiger]

lol

The searching for synonyms could make sense I suppose. In one sense perhaps the Hive marketers thought they were being clever by using the word 'Hive' as a competing product for the 'Nest', but it's now inadvertently coming back to bite them in the ass by promoting their competition when a user searches for 'hive' as google thinks they could be looking for a nest instead

So maybe it's turned out that without any kind of crazy SEO or even mentioning the competition on their website nest is now number 2 on search results when someone searches for hive due to a poor choice of company name and because Google is trying to be helpful and can't differentiate the two?

Edit: (Or you could argue it's being very helpful by providing a link to an alternative popular product so high in the search results)

I guess that works well for the first person to market, but not so much for the copycat?

 

[touch]

Another random example would be "uk automobile sales". Nothing on the first page even mentions "automobile" but you can see that it has searched for "car" instead.

I guess that works well for the first person to market, but not so much for the copycat?

I would think it's quite rare for two competing companies to have names which are synonyms.
For example (keeping with the energy providers theme), "British Gas" and "British Energy" are similar. Anybody would be able to tell they do the same sort of thing just from reading their names, but the words "energy" and "gas" are not synonyms.

*awaits thread to fill up with hundreds of examples of competing companies who's names are synonyms

 

[Phunky]

Stupidly they're not targeting that simple phrase, if you look at most of the marketing for Hive it's "Hive Active Heating" or "Hive Home".

Nest will jump in due to it being mentioned alongside hive in most reviews and will gain more relevance overall.

Wouldn't take much for hive to jump above, but they'll have to target some content for that phrase.

But on the flip side, maybe they know that phrase has a low conversion and just left it for the natural listing.