How to increase your online Sales using Google Search?
Please read this only if you are serious about growing your business.
Whether your business is B2B or B2C, almost all the decision-makers are available online, whether it is through social media platforms, email, messaging platforms or through online forums etc.
Internet is vast and cluttered, placing your product online doesn’t guarantee that your product will reach your potential customers. You will be just another product or service vying for their attention.. Blindly spending money on paid marketing means to generate leads won’t do you much good in the long run. You will be spending a lot of money on very few leads which will not give you the ROI expected. Knowledge is everything and knowledge and innovation has helped the human race evolve to what we are today. .
Follow these three simple steps to organically grow your business online
Step #1 Study your market & your product placement
To grow your business online the first thing you need to do is study your products similar to yours online. You don’t have to hire consultants for it. Just a basic check can give you a fair idea of where you stand in online space.
Your product could be already available or very unique. In the former case you can search for the existing products like yours and get some ideas. In the latter case you can search for the overall market and your competitors.
For e.g. If you are a manufacturer of routers. You can search for the word “router manufacturer” on google.com and observe the first page results. The search words are also called keywords and we will be using this term often below.
Here you will see many sections where the information could be useful.
1 Wikipedia Section: This is an open-source platform where contributors around the world add information and it gets audited by moderators. This is publicly available information and google highly marks this as unbiased. Getting your company name listing over here with other players can boost your exposure to a great extent. However, we cannot edit and directly place our brand but by constantly being in the domain can get your brand known. This can be done by following the steps below.
2 Ecommerce Section: Here the best products available in the market are listed with the relevant links to the popular eCommerce websites. This is a very important section and if you are a regular seller on amazon, Flipkart, eBay etc there are chances of your product showing up here. If your product gets listed over here on the first page it will be a sure win since people tend to click your product first and then browse through the e-commerce website. The best products are listed on the basis of popularity on the e-commerce website. These are the top products selling in that category. To get on top products you need to get more exposure by selling these products on the eCommerce website. If your business is B2B then there are other popular B2B platforms which can get you listed and show your services.
3. Basic Queries: This is the most ignored section but a very important one. Here, unbiased answers to google search queries are provided. Usually, these are best available curated articles which google has found during crawling various sites and converted into the question-answer format. To get into this listing you need to create content relevant to the keywords which answers the most frequently asked questions by the users online. You need to write articles which are relevant to the product and give unbiased knowledge of the products. Also, the articles are based on the most important frequently asked questions. These answers are curated from different blogs/ articles sometimes even one blog for one question. This will drive genuine buyers to your website, who want to explore the products and have some queries about it. If the queries get resolved the next product they are going to search for is yours.
4 Best Sellers: These are the organic search results. There are no second thoughts on who are displayed here, google internally ranks websites on the basis of relevant content and having most organic traffic. The exact internal parameters on which google ranks is still not open to the public but it is for sure some parameters like content relevancy, most time spent, views, viewers geography, article relevancy with a certain region, how many times the articles have been shared or quoted and by which websites play an important role here.
5 Google Business Listing: This section gives details about the business in the vicinity of the user searching the keywords. That is why google listing is very important. Whether your product is B2B or B2C a Google Business listing is a must. This gives a lot of exposure to local businesses.. Someone trying to search the product in the same city you are selling it will have more affinity to buy it locally due to logistics and service.
For B2B services as well, anyone looking out for a service which is locally available will give him more confidence in the delivery of the service.
Google showcases only a few of the businesses which are ranking first on that particular keyword in terms of location search. This data is pulled from google maps
Step #2 Share your knowledge and develop your niche
As we said before, this is a cluttered market and many businesses are vying for the attention of their customers. Search engines don’t always completely understand what the user is looking for, so they develop certain parameters for the websites and make them compete amongst each other. The competition helps both search engines as well as businesses.
The rules of the competition are simple but not every business understands them. Those who understand become the front runners and get their piece of the pie. Search engines want to portray themselves as knowledge repositories and users visit search engines to find which product best fits their requirement and one they find the product that they think ticks all the right boxes, they start searching for unbiased views and recommendations.
In order to differentiate yourself from competitors, it is important to showcase how your products solve the end users problems rather than simply listing the very many features. Say for example a router manufacturer may be tempted to add as many features as he can to show how different his product is from his competitors but at the end of the day, they may not be the decisive points for the end user. The reason is simple when they browse on the internet every manufacturer does the same and tries to differentiate or match up with the best product in the market. This causes clutter and in all, it helps the one with the maximum market share to win the race. This is because the bigger brands have made a mark through various means of marketing and spending huge marketing budgets. A smaller brand may not be able to match that and may never see themselves in the first few searches, here what will help them is their content knowledge and how they can help their customers overcome a problem.
Step #3: Keep your friend close, enemies closer and competitors closest
Competitors help assess what your shortcomings are. In a healthy competition, knowing what your competitors are offering can give you good insights into what strategies are working for your product or service. Also, reviews of competitor’s products and overall market perception can help strategize next roadmaps. It could be that you are the market leader in your space but the journey doesn’t end here, you need to constantly innovate and be ahead of the curve.
Your competitor’s shortcomings could be your shortcomings too. Simply observing your competitor’s content can give you a lot of information about where your competitor is going in their vision. A simple online search of a competitor can give you a lot of insights about the points it is working on. For example, another router manufacturer could be writing about a new and upcoming technology. This could mean that their upcoming models may include that technology. Also, observing the topics covered by your competitor gives you an idea of what topics and content you should write about to benefit your customers. This can easily be done by searching your competitor name with generic product name on google for example: cisco router.
The search result will indicate the popularity of the brand, however, don’t get overwhelmed by the number of links the engine throws at you as sometimes they are repeated links or mentions. Normally, the most searched product or latest product appears at the top of the list. Then the next most important pages make the way. This helps us understand what is popular for cisco when it comes to routers.
Customer feedback and questions are the next part of the search, these are the queries which will help your product to be at par if answered. As mentioned before in the article, such queries will be answered from the popular blog articles which creates an opportunity for you too to be listed on the question and answer section and gain coverage for your product.
The e-commerce section is sponsored so it comes from the google advertisements of the various e-commerce websites to list the products relevant to search there. You can click on the sponsored tooltip and see why this ad was shown.
By constantly performing the above steps and executing your digital plan through organic means can definitely help your brand grow organically rather than putting a lot of your budget in paid channels.
These 3 steps will turn you in the right direction in which you need to move and strategically make use of the publicly available information which is often ignored.
If you are a marketer and want to organically grow your brand during the COVID times, you can download the FREE guide to 10 things a marketer should do during COVID times to increase your brand traction.
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