Why you should stop googling your own business

"I looked for my company on Google and I cannot see myself there at all!" More than one marketing manager has heard that sentence, sometimes with a few choice words added, or questions about what exactly they are being paid for.

Curiosity is a natural human trait. Otherwise gossip would not spread at the speed of light and most snake bites would not be on the finger (how else to check whether the snake is dead?). One of the best-known Greek myths is about curiosity and the opening of a small box with a secret in it. It is the story of Pandora, thanks to whom we now have all manner of trouble in the world. Let us be positive — at least hope was left to us.

In business, your Pandora's box is opening Google and searching for your own website. It may seem harmless, but it is not a good idea. Searching this way harms not only how you appear in organic search but undermines the effectiveness of your paid advertising as well.

And now let us look at the possible scenarios of what happens when you search for yourself and what the consequences are.

Why did you not appear?

You typed your company's name into Google, or a word you were certain you should appear for. And you see only your competition.

What did you type into Google? Give two people the task of searching for the same thing and they will never search for it the same way. It is likely that there are literally hundreds (or in some cases even thousands) of keywords and phrases relevant to any business. At the same time it has to be said that ranking highly for every keyword on a single page is all but impossible. Gradually, abroad above all, people are using longer phrases to search, and voice search is joining them. Your page may rank well for one term but not show up for another. If you optimise on the basis of a single search term alone, you can lower your organic performance on others.

Where did you type it from? Two people searching for the same words can get entirely different results. Even though Google says search results are not necessarily "personalised", it takes the searcher's context and intent into account when choosing. Google knows, for instance, that I live in Bratislava and search for places in Dúbravka, so it is more likely to show me results relevant to Dúbravka than to Petržalka. Add to that the prevalence and weight of local search results, and what you see may differ considerably from what your prospective customer sees.

What have you done on Google in the past? Google takes your browsing history, or rather your behaviour, into account too. If it has offered you a page several times and you showed no interest, it will not show it to you again.

Google uses constantly changing, ever-present tools that make it the best search engine there is. On that basis you can be sure it has many deep, algorithm-based rules and preferences for determining your intent, and it is a many-sided decision about what to serve for each of your searches. How could it know? Simple. It knows you. What Google knows about you can be reviewed HERE.

What happens if you did appear?

If you type your company's name into Google and it appears, you have landed in a bad situation, because any further action you take can send Google less than positive information about your page's quality.

In organic search

• You could unintentionally lower your own value. If you look at your site on Google and do not click it, you have just told Google the result it showed you is not relevant to that search.
• If you search and take the next step — clicking your site — but leave it immediately, you tell Google your site did not meet the needs of the search term. Again that can affect SEO and future search results negatively.
• If you look at your website on Google and want to avoid sending Google the wrong message about relevance, you can click it. But if you then do not spend time on your site and do not click other pages (do not interact), you send bounce information into Google Analytics and drag your own site's statistics down. Again you may be telling Google that the page's relevance to your search was not great.

With paid advertising

• If you use paid Google ads, these scenarios disrupt your ad's performance too and can cost you money besides. Click the ad and you have charged your own account.
• If you do not click, your ad looks less relevant to the machine learning algorithms, which can potentially lower your quality score, which can hold back performance and raise your costs.
• If you do not click your ad when you come across it, you add an impression that lowers your click-through rate. That in turn can harm your Google ad campaign's quality score and lead to higher costs.

These were losing scenarios in every case! So what should you do if you want to improve your results?

Instead of googling your own business, invest your time in getting to know your target group. Ask yourself questions such as: what answers are my clients looking for? Are there recurring problems or identifiable patterns? How can you address those problems effectively and offer a solution? If you do not know how, read our article — What a marketing strategy looks like in digital marketing.