Not long ago, I clashed with a client. They wanted to rename their boutique hotel with a “catchy” name suggested by an agency still stuck in the era of glossy brochures.
The problem? That same name was already taken—by a small town 200 km away, a psychotherapy practice, and even an architecture project with strong SEO authority. The result? Their brand identity collapsed like the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius (rest in peace, Maestro).
Traffic tanked, CPC shot up, Quality Score nosedived. Worst of all: CPA doubled in under three months and organic reach was cut in half.
Rome fell, baby. Again.
The real issue is structural: too many brands today are just pretty facades, but digitally hollow. We live in an age where naming is (also) a query, a logo is (also) an algorithmic score, and like it or not, your identity is decided in milliseconds on a SERP or by an LLM.
If your agency doesn’t even bother to check Google before proposing a name, that’s not creativity. That’s negligence.
A wrong name today is worth less than a flyer in your mailbox: you glance at it once, then it disappears into the black hole of digital indifference—or worse, algorithmic punishment.
See you next week,
Simone Puorto
