EBCs and corporate IFAs are, with a few exceptions, virtually invisible on Google searches for words describing what they do. Innovation Visual founder Tim Butler explains what firms can do to get their name nearer the top of the list
Google is the world’s leading search engine with 79 per cent of the market share. Every day Google deals with over 3.5 billion searches. The power of Google is astounding, but are EBCs and corporate IFAs really harnessing its potential?
Understanding Google is about more than understanding search engine optimisation (SEO). Most business people at least understand the importance of their business’ website being found in Google search results as a means of driving relevant traffic.
For example, 400 people per month search for “employee benefits consultant” and its close variants, while 1,900 people per month search for “financial adviser” and there are 4400 searches a month for “pension advice”. Do you want to be found by these potential customers or are you going to leave them for your competition?
Most people think of these ‘organic’ search results when they think about Google, but there’s also a range of other tools on offer from Google that can help you deliver more profit.
A Google My Business (GMB) page allows you to register your business so it will show the location on Google Maps and in local search results. You can optimise your GMB page to display relevant information such as your business name, address, opening/closing times, phone number, website link and, recently, Google has added a new feature allowing you to post about up and coming events.
The best thing is that this listing is free to create and register. Google is becoming increasingly intelligent when it comes to user intent and this means more results are becoming geographically specific.
For example, if your business delivers pension consultancy then imagine if someone does a search for “pension consultancy near me”. The search results will display three pension consultants nearby based on the Google My Business data.
If you don’t have a GMB page your business won’t be found and your competition gets the lead.
Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool from Google, which is vital if you want to monitor the performance of your website. You can observe how many people are visiting, when they visit and how they are coming to your website. It will also offer useful insight into which of your website’s pages perform best in terms of attracting traffic and engaging the user. This can then help identify how you should optimise other pages on your site to achieve similarly positive results.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for helping you to make improvements to your website performance.
Google AdWords is another powerful tool for advertising your business online. AdWords allows you to promote your products or services on Google search results, YouTube and millions of websites. You can achieve goals in the short term, rather than taking the longer-term approach of focusing just on SEO. With a good understanding of AdWords you can structure and optimise effective campaigns targeting potential customers to secure sales.
John Wanamaker famously said of marketing spend ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’. If Mr Wanamaker had access to AdWords, he’d know exactly which of his campaigns were successful and which weren’t because a defining feature of AdWords is the data you can collect and analyse. You may already be investing in advertising in magazines but how do you track if someone actually comes to you as a result of seeing your ad? The truth is you can’t, unless they tell you.
With AdWords you can directly attribute the sale to the campaign, keyword, even time of day and location. Most importantly, you know your cost per acquisition and can see if campaigns are profitable. This gives you better control over your advertising spend and provides evidence that you’re using your spend wisely.
YouTube – yes really! Owned by Google and the second biggest search engine after Google itself, you might not think that YouTube is relevant to your business. Think again. Make some explainer videos, perhaps on financial products or the budget, or for issues for certain target customer groups you have. Get them on YouTube, add good titles and descriptions – use a transcription service to get the text written out if you didn’t script it – and put them live. You will be amazed at what people look for on YouTube. As an added bonus, embed the videos on your website and you’ll find the engagement rate with your visitors climbs and your conversion rate should too. People like to see the people they are dealing with so why not do it through video!
All these tools are available but a lack of technical understanding holds the majority of people back from making use of them. If this is the case then you should be looking to the services of an expert marketing agency who understand how to make Google’s tools work for your business. Going it alone may seem like the cheaper option, but if you lack the required knowledge then this will only lead to avoidable mistakes, which could turn out to be costly.