RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: HOW GOOGLE OWNS YOUR IMAGE ON THE WEB

Posted: October 21, 2011

Or rather, if you think your website is that site you update – the one with your about page, your services, your contact information – think again.

What’s even more important than the site you own is where people turn when they want the real information about your business: google.

That’s right, your google search results reveal the truth about your business as far as your customers are concerned.

We now google everything before making a purchase – from the largest contracts down to the smallest impulse buys. (If you’ve ever spent way too much time reading reviews for what should be a simple buying decision you know what I mean!)

Even if you’ve already made a purchase decision you STILL usually google that business for a quick final vetting, or for basics like how to contact the business or their hours of operation. We view google as an unbiased third party, and the best source for the full picture on anything we want to research.

The sooner you embrace the fact that prospects judge you based on what they find on google, the more business you can start bringing in.

Here’s what’s a little unfair about the whole google search game – whoever has the most results wins.

People are impressed when they see pages and pages full of relevant information about you and your business. And those impressive-looking results are surprisingly easy to create. (I actually teach businesses an entire in-depth system on this called Creating Fame, but we’ll stick to the basics for now.)

Of course you can’t actually judge how good an accountant is at their job by the number of google results that pop up when you search for their name. Truthfully, it’s irrelevant. But as a customer, what else do you have to go by? There’s no way to know for certain if the accountant is any good, but when you see pages and pages of features, interviews, mentions, and content it shows us that the business is good enough to be talked about.

And everything else being equal, customers will always choose the business that is talked (positively) about more. It’s core part of our psychology – we believe that if everyone is talking about this accountant, they must be good enough for us, too.

But you don’t need heaps of journalists writing cover stories about your business to rank well in google – here are a few ways you can create these impressive search results on your own:

1. Register for directories and second-tier social networking sites.
Let’s be honest, less-trafficked social sites probably won’t do much to bring in new leads. But the profiles you create (which are really just mini brochures) show up when people search for you and add to that impressive volume that we’re looking for. It’s easy to fill up the first page of google with relevant results with social profiles and directory listings alone.

2. Pitch yourself to online radio shows
Blogtalkradio.com is an amazing source of online shows that are looking for interesting guests such as yourself to interview! This not only fills up your google results but gives you major bonus points as a a top dog in your industry. People automatically assign expert status to those that are interviewed.

3. Put videos on youtube
While youtube isn’t the magic bullet it once was for ranking on page 1, videos still rank. Adding videos with information about your business is a great way to up your number of search results and provide people search for more information a multimedia experience

With just these three simple steps you’ll be putting out one heck of a welcome mat for potential customers.