Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

BEING VISIBLE IN SEARCH RESULTS

As we’ve seen, if your brand doesn’t appear in search results for queries related to your industry or product, searchers are unlikely to consider you and you’ll often lose that potential customer to the competition. One way to appear in search results, of course, is by ensuring your own site appears, but social media sites give you nearly infinite opportunity to show up for any number of queries that use language you may not even realize your customers are using.

In addition, many people are now searching social media sites directly. You can get twice the visibility (in both Web searches and social media searches) with one investment.

In the past couple of years, Google and Bing have begun incorporating content shared on social networks into personalized results. This means, for instance, if someone you are friends with on Facebook has “liked” an article, then you might see that article in Bing search results (when it otherwise wouldn’t be listed), and if someone you subscribe to in Google Reader posts an article, you might see it listed in Google search results.

A site with content that a lot of people share on various social networks then has a significantly increased opportunity to be seen by searchers. This is described in more detail in Chapter 10.

The most important thing to realize is that potential customers are looking for authenticity. Attempts to blanket social media sites with positive mentions of your brand are likely to backfire. Much ...