Do you ever Google your business name? How many results come up? How high up are you?

Your internet address is just as important these days as your physical one, and visitors to your site are just like customers walking through the front door of your office or shop.

A search engine like Google is like Main Street. There are plenty of shops lining the streets, and you need to stand out if you want to sell. Nobody’s going to buy your stuff if they don’t know you exist.

So try it: Google your business name.

If you don’t show up at all, stop reading right now and go fix it. That’s just not acceptable.

If you’re not high up on the front page, you’ve got problems. On Main Street, customers don’t want to have to walk far to get to your shop. The same is true online. Don’t ask searchers to scroll to page 2 of a Google search. Most people won’t do it. You really want to make sure you’re there when the customers are searching for you.

If you find a page full of bloggers complaining about you, then you’ve got a serious clean-up effort on your hands.

The supermodel Kate Moss has had many unfortunate public dealings with drugs, so much so that it’s the first thing most people think of when her name is mentioned. But Google her name and see what comes up: her fashion label and very complimentary articles about her. This is no accident.

Kate Moss’ marketing team has skewed her search results in her favor and, if you’ve had some bad press, you need to do the same. Obviously the best defense is a good offense, and in this case that means not running a business that’s worthy of complaint. But if one customer happens to have a bad experience and then writes about it, you need to address it.

How do you do that? Stay tuned…

This entry was posted on September 2, 2010 at 8:04 am and is filed under Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.