It seems harmless. You own a business, and you want to find out how your digital marketing efforts are paying off. The next logical step?
Googling yourself, of course! What could go wrong?
As it turns out, quite a bit could go wrong. By searching for yourself online, you make your SEO and ads less effective. It’s a total bummer if you’ve just spent half your marketing budget trying to get your rankings up.
Keep reading to find out why you should resist the urge to google yourself and how else you can safely monitor your rankings. The best part? You already know how!
Googling Yourself Is Inaccurate
Whether it’s YouTube videos, social media, or Buzzfeed articles, we’ve all fallen down internet rabbit holes before. You know, the type where a minute of searching on your mobile suddenly turns into a lost hour?
Well, googling yourself is no different. And as an HVAC business owner, you’ve got better things to do than waste your time with one-off, inaccurate Google results that give you no usable information.
At best, you will discover that based on your personal search history and Google’s profiling, you’re number one in the rankings. Not that useful if you’re searching from your office PC in the exact location listed on your Google My Business page.
At worst, you’ll not show up at all. And you’ll then spend an hour looking at competitors who seem leaps and bounds ahead of you with their SEO.
It’s important to remember that the rankings you see are NOT the rankings seen by everyone else. Your search results are tailored to you. As a result, googling yourself doesn’t give you the big picture. It just gives you an (often misleading) indicator of your performance based on narrow criteria.
There Are Better Metrics Out There
Thinking that you are googling your business to ‘see how things are going’ is about as sensible as trying to buy pet food from your favorite ice cream place.
To find out how things are going, you need to look at your KPIs. You’ve got access to your analytics dashboard, and your sales performance through your marketing agency who can provide these stats for you. These should be the main indicators of your performance and how well your campaigns are paying off.
Beyond that, tracking your conversion rates, click-through, and inquiry volume will provide data that drills into your success rate. Search isn’t everything. What use is ranking as number one if your lead volume has dropped through the floor?
Rather than being hellbent on securing the top spots, take a holistic view of your digital marketing. Yes, SEO is important for small businesses and will help your ranking. But so is your content strategy and the CTA’s on your site. If in doubt, a professional marketing agency like Optic Marketing Group can make sure you’re looking at the whole picture.
You’re Not the Customer
Ever discovered that you rank for a keyword that you didn’t plan for? It happens! Your prospective customers aren’t always googling the way you expect.
After all, you have years of experience in the field and know all the terminology/jargon inside out. Your prospects, on the other hand, are at the beginning of the journey.
Google estimates that 15% of their search volume is unique. That equates to around 500 million searches a day that Google hasn’t seen before. This means there are going to be new search terms thrown up constantly. Searching for the term, you think your prospects will use is useless. You need actionable insights that will help improve your targeting.
Searching for Yourself Online Has Negative Impacts
One of the worst effects of googling yourself is that you sabotage your online presence by trying to monitor it. Clicking on your PPC ad is the equivalent of emptying your wallet and donating it straight to the search engines. And even if you don’t click, you’re going to create an impression which skews your performance stats.
Plus, when ads appear but aren’t clicked on, they’re shown less overall, and the cost goes up. Meaning fewer genuine prospects will see your ads, and you’ll pay more for the same level of visibility.
The effect on organic rankings is less powerful but still shouldn’t be ignored. Clicking on your website could artificially inflate your visitor numbers. Whilst clicking on competitor links gives Google the nod that these are useful sites, so they’ll rank higher in the future.
Googling Yourself Doesn’t Reveal Your Position in the SERP
Back when Google was just an infant, googling yourself made sense. Their search criteria were simple, and there was less content on the web, so your search position was relatively static no matter who was searching.
Today, it’s a lot more complex. The search engine results take into account many factors to determine which pages you’re shown and when you see certain ads. Your result is different from your boss’s result, even if you use the same search query.
Here are some of the factors affecting SERP:
The device you’re using; mobile searches see different results to web searches and so on
Searching with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home
Your physical location, which is determined by GPS or your devices IP address
Being logged into a Gmail account
Past search history
The search engine used, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, have different algorithms that affect the results you see
Googling yourself won’t reveal which factors are affecting your performance—but using SEO management tools will. With tools like Google Analytics, you can see which devices are used, where your prospects are searching from, and more.
Stop Googling Yourself and Test Your Rankings Professionally
Googling yourself is a fruitless exercise. It won’t reveal much about your position in the rankings, but it could lower your performance. And who would want that?
Get in touch with Optic Marketing Group, your full-service marketing agency today if you want to get a handle on your rankings and stop googling yourself for good!