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.
- 93.4% of potential product purchase research is done online -- anonymously.
- Nearly 2 of 3 buyers begin product research using a search engine (Google being the overwhelming favorite, especially for high-income users).
- Buyers have little interest in sales calls unless and until they (the buyers) initiate the interaction.
- The number of sales calls/day has fallen by 25% while the cost of a sales call continues to escalate (now above $300 per call).
- Not surprisingly, hiring a sales representative is now the most difficult position to fill [and train!].
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).