Google is a dark secret to most small business owners and CEOs, which is pretty easy to understand given all the buzz and jargon like SEO, PPC, AdWords, SERP, CTR, etc.
It may not be all that important for a CEO to know any of this unless you're the marketing director responsible for generating sales leads for your sales team and you need more resources (read: budget).
Demystifying Google for CEOs begins with this question: When a prospective customer Googles "your keywords" are any of the search results yours? If you don't show up in the first couple pages, it's a lost business opportunity you'll never know about.
Think about all those weekly lost-business reports, which only report lost sales opportunities you actually knew about and failed to win. In the online world, you're losing deals you don't even know about.
Some small business CEO's have decided to stick their head in the sand.
Well, avoiding Google isn't an option, either. Consider:
The Secret to Google
It's easy to get all wound up in the minutia, but the "secret" to Google comes down to just 1 thing: Regularly posting relevant, findable content.
The big surprise to small business CEOs is that the content Google (and their prospective customers) are searching for is in their head or on their hard drive. They just need to get it onto their websites in the format Google wants.
And while the accepted "format" isn't a secret, as reported in my article last week, our research of the top 1 million websites shows just 9.6% have their web pages correctly formatted.
With such low compliance, there's a great opportunity to jump ahead of competitors by regularly posting relevant, findable content.
Once a small business CEO recognizes they can easily master the key elements of Google -- and even turn Google into their best salesperson -- they're empowered to do even more (and sign-off on those precious SEO resources you need).
Follow John Fox on Twitter: www.twitter.com/b2bmarketing
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