untied united

This could be the name of our company football team, if we had one. We don’t yet. We might just about muster a 5 a side team right now, but I think this is something for future hires.

As a team we are united though. United in wanting to untie people from the hassles of taxes and financial administration. We’re starting with tax but we have big plans. We’re also united in our efforts to teach Google and Apple that untied <> united.

United is of course a misspelling of the word untied (from our PoV it’s never, ever, the other way around!). This has presented a few challenges on Google and the app stores which currently seem to assume you mean united when you type untied. We’re at the mercy of the search algorithms, their assumptions and the weight they give search terms but as time has gone on it seems to have got better.  Of course it’s all about the content and the website has grown. The algorithms are learning.  We’re telling them we are here and that we mean business.

My Mac and iPhone often annoyingly autocorrect me when I type untied.  Mind, they do the same for other words too. The device often seems to think it knows better. Why did I buy an Apple Watch recently? Oh my goodness it wants me to stand up again. I’ll be back in a minute …

Where was I? Oh yes, aeroplanes and lawyers. No wait. It turns out someone who has a legal case with an American airline owns the .com version of our domain. A year ago that site came up higher than we did in the google search for the word “untied”.  At time of writing – using a private browser and new IP – we now come first.  Not that we’re in competition with someone who’s got issues with airlines.

So over time we’ve written more content, the google juice has started flowing, and the algorithms have been tamed. And now it’s time to turn our attention to the app stores. Having recently gone public in the app stores (Yay!) we’re now looking at discoverability and all that. On day one in the Apple App Store we were several pages down the list if you searched for ‘untied’. A few days later we’re now about position 3. So again, time heals. The algorithms are grinding away making sense of it all. Of course we can and will do other things like make sure key phrases are in the text, but it’s interesting to see what happens with just the word ‘untied’.

So go search the App Store and Google Play. Let me know what you find. Go untied united!

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