The importance of Google
Most people realise the importance of Google when applying for jobs or getting clients for their business, but they don’t know how to manage it for their benefit. In this blog, we will show you a simple and effective way of getting you on top of Google.
We already know that a lot of the best jobs and clients can’t be searched or found online, they will have to find you, or in most case, will be referred to you if you have a great network.
Start with a strong personal brand so that you can be found online and e-ttract these opportunities via a referral. Other people need to recommend you and when they do, you need to be easily found in Google, otherwise, you will lose the opportunity. If you missed the first blog on this topic please check it out here.
Do great work
Before we give you the Google tips, it’s important to realise that you will only be recommended if you do great work. You need to delight whomever you serve or work for, otherwise, they will not talk about you with enthusiasm. Without providing quality work as the basis for your referral, the personal branding effort will be wasted. So ensure you get this right first.
A great way to measure your referral readiness is to ask the ‘Ultimate Question’. This one survey question called the Net Promoter Score trumps all others according to the creator Fred Reichheld, who wrote a whole book on the topic!
You can read a review of this book here, but to make it easy for you to adopt this method into your personal marketing, begin asking your work colleagues or clients this question:
‘Out of 10, how likely would you be to recommend me to your friend or client?’.
If you score between 0-6, you get a negative point, 7-8 is neutral and 9-10 is a positive point.
Add them all together and you have an easily measurable score on how others perceive your work. This is a very short summary of a complex system, so check their website if you are interested in learning more.
Three Google searches
Most people don't realise that there are three ways clients can find you:
Your name
Your business name, and
Your product name.
It's important you can be found for all three and it applies equally to job seekers and business people. When was the last time you did these three searches? Do you even know what your product search terms are? To help understand what we mean, let’s use an example.
Imagine Lisa is wanting to boost her career and be found for the perfect next role at a new company. She is a digital designer and is really passionate about merging the technology and design functions at her work as it speeds up development time and increases client satisfaction. Her current company isn’t keen to change so she wants to find a company that is adaptable to her ideas and also meets her package requirements. She has tried looking for a role on SEEK but they seem to be generic design roles.
At the same time, there is a smaller digital design business, called Milk Design, that is looking for new talent. They want passionate people with new ideas to help form their growing business. They can’t pay as much as the big guys but offer many other benefits. They stopped advertising on SEEK as it was too much work to process the hundreds of applications they received.
The CEO of the design agency, John, asks his employees and business friends to keep a look-out for fresh talented people that might make a move to his agency for creative freedom. One of John’s friends used to go to uni with Lisa and know’s she is looking for the next step. He refers Lisa and John checks out her LinkedIn profile, Instagram and Pinterest board of previous designs. He can tell she has the talent, but isn’t sure if she will move, so he reaches out on Facebook messenger to have a chat.
As you can see from this example, a referral is the most efficient way for companies to reach out and get quality talent. But what about in business?
Imagine that Lisa is now working with John at Milk Design and they want to grow the business. Their new work can come from three main areas. Firstly, the personal networks of Lisa and John. The people who know them and trust their work can refer them to others. The referral would likely be for their name, not the business name because that’s how they know them. We know the most popular search for a person’s name is LinkedIn so that would be the entry to the sales process. This is generally where most smaller businesses get their work.
The second referral is via the company name. This is when the business network, such as clients, partners and suppliers, refer you to others. When they refer you by the company name, your business website will likely come up first.
The final way clients can find you is via an unknown search on Google. That means they don’t have a referral and will search for your service. Getting found for a generic service, in this case, ‘design services’ in a large city is challenging. You can purchase Google AdWords to be the top of the page, but it is expensive and it is difficult to know the exact search terms to choose. Plus the click through rate for ads or unknown searches is only 1%. Much less than the 50% click through rate from a referral. The solution to this problem is having a uniquely defined niche, but more on that later.
It’s important that you can be found for all three searches so over the next three blogs we will provide details on how to maximise each one.
P.S. If you are looking to boost your career or business in 2017, download our
“E-ttractive Personal Brand Calculator” to measure how e-ttractive your current brand is and how to improve it.
P.P.S if you missed Blog 1 you can see it here.
