In the economy of diminishing time, people are even more impatient to get the information they need. None more so than with searches on Google it seems.
I remember going to a Google Search Partners conference in Sydney last year where they presented some really compelling information. They had just rolled out a new campaign for their partners (high spending agencies) called ‘Google Moments’. It was all about capturing that moment your customer searches online for your product or service and making sure you were front and center. You needed to market your clients’ offering at times when their customer would be searching for it in a brief moment, typically on their mobile device. If you want to see their SanFranesque promo video you can watch it here
Reading between the lines however, I dug deeper and came upon some statistics which allegedly claimed the total number of people using their search service was decreasing. Read this article for more info on that. Was I surprised? Not really. The more advanced a country’s digital economy is the less the need for search engines or portals. To prove this point just ask anyone in the USA to name a website they would go to to ‘buy something’. Almost 100% will name Amazon as their first choice. The rising dominance of Social Media platforms has also eaten into Google’s market share by offering users a more engaging, experiential, less linear buying experience than searching on a text UI dominated website.
In Australia, we’re a bit different. Amazon isn’t the category dominant behemoth that it is in the USA where James Hammon & Co spends half of our time every year. However, we still have some big e-commerce players which own certain categories in Australia. Think Asos, or Kogan, or CatchOfTheDay.
Reading further between the lines, the challenge for your business however, is that you’re faced with a user who has less time and less patience for finding the information they need. What does this mean for you? Well it really depends on what type of product or service you are selling. Let’s delve into some basic marketing 101 so I can be more specific.
The first question you need to answer is, whether your offering is a high or low involvement product. If you don’t know what that means, it essentially refers to the amount of effort your potential customer expends during the decision making process. If you are buying a house, you could spend months or even years researching different suburbs, finding data on your location, talking to other people and choosing between options. This is what we call a ‘high involvement product’. Let’s compare that with a locksmith. If you’re locked out of your house, what’s the first thing you will do? Unless you know a locksmith by name, you’ll Google ’emergency locksmith’ or ‘locksmith [insert city location]’ and click on the first listing that appears on your phone. That is a Google moment, and it’s very powerful at creating value if you’re dominating the search results.
Now let’s put this into perspective. If you’re a real estate agency wanting to promote your new properties, you can safely be on Page 1 or 2 of Google and still get some qualified traffic to your website. However, if you’re a locksmith and you’re below position 3 on Page 1, forget about it. You’re getting almost no return on your investment. It’s a brutal truth I know, but I’ve tested it and it’s very accurate.
Now, this is all assuming that you’re ranking for phrases which you know are high converting phrases, not the junk that your b-grade SEO company will recommend to you like ‘professional locksmith melbourne cbd’.
Either way, you should have a think about how the nature of search engine use is changing and how you need to capture the ‘moment’s your potential customers are engaging with the different platforms they use. They are inherently becoming shorter search sessions and less frequent. Who has time these day, I know I don’t. I measure my day in 5 minutes blocks of time.
If you aren’t highly visible, you’re invisible, and increasingly so it seems.
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