If you want to grow your business past the stage of word-of-mouth, then you need to be taking a serious look at search engine marketing. Below, we list the 3 main reasons why you NEED to be paying attention to Google. If you want to find out more about how to build your online profile, feel free to check out our other blogs!

1. Users Are Ready To Buy

When do people use search engines? In fact, when do you use search engine yourself? 99% of the time, it’s when you need an answer to a question. In marketing terms, you are aware of a problem and you need a solution. You’re ready to buy.

Let’s say you are a clothes outlet for women. Someone types into Google:

“Women’s Formal Dresses”

This query has a relatively high buyer intent. Meaning the person asking, is probably looking to buy a formal dress. And guess what? If you can get your website to be the first thing they see, you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them than if you weren’t visible on Google at all (aka page 2!).

How is this different to other forms of marketing? Google is pretty unique in that it allows you to market directly to people looking to buy asap. You don’t have spend time nurturing leads or warming up cold audiences. The people that are ready to buy can be directed to your website with one click.

According to Junto digital, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Which means that if you’re not on Google, you’ll never be able to compete.

2. Free Traffic At The Top

Okay so this is a little bit misleading – getting returns on Google is definitely not free – whether it’s your own time and effort or whether it’s paying an expert to do it for you.

But, when you are ranking high organically for a particular keyword or set of keywords, then you are pushing traffic to your page for free. Of course, you can pay to get to the top of Google using ads, but when you are up there organically, it’s free. If you want some tips on how to rank higher on Google, take a look at our blog post on Inbound Marketing.

3. A Revenue Generator

Google is huge, and it is only getting bigger. More and more businesses are using it to advertise – so its up to you not to get left behind. And if you don’t believe us, take a look at these stats from HubSpot:

1. Google gets 3.5 billion searches made every single day.
2. 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within five miles
3. 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else
4. 88% of searches  for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours
5. 92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results

So, if your business isn’t on Google, you can probably agree that you are missing out on sales. If you want to know how we can help get your business on Google, or boost it higher up the search rankings, drop us a quick message today!