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You are here: Home / Archives for googling yourself

Why Googling Yourself Won’t Tell You What You Need to Know

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Finding out how you rank on Google should be pretty simple, right? It feels like a quick search for your business name is all you’d need to do. Unfortunately, Google makes this way more complicated than it has to be.
Although it’s perfectly logical for you to assume you can check your ranking just by googling yourself, that’s not the reality.

Keep reading to find out how googling your own company name doesn’t actually give you a clear picture of your site’s performance. We’ll also give you some tips on what you should look at, instead. So read on!

Google Personalizes Your Search Results

Why? Well, it all boils down to Google’s search algorithm.

You’ve probably heard about this elusive “algorithm” many times before—maybe even right here on this blog. The algorithm is a tool Google uses to provide each individual user with a personalized experience. In other words, it’s designed to provide you with the search results it believes you want to see. Often, this means you and your friends, relatives, and coworkers could all get different results for the same search terms.

How does Google customize your search experience? It does so by factoring in things like:

  • Your browser’s search history
  • Your search terms
  • Your browser’s IP address (i.e. your physical location)
  • Whether you’re logged into your Google account (thus sharing even more personal data)

So, right off the bat, you can see how a quick Google search won’t give you a clear, objective picture of what your ranking looks like.

But that’s not the only bad thing about googling yourself…

Clicks Skew Results

The practice of frequently googling your company name can actually become harmful to your business over time.

This is because Google also keeps track of what you click. (The purpose of this is so Google can learn your habits and deliver results it thinks you want to see.) So, if you continually search for your company name and don’t click on the results, Google will assume you don’t like those results, and it will eventually stop showing them to you.

The reverse is true, also: If you search for your company name and always click on your website in the results, you’re bound to see it appear in a higher position every time.

In other words, whether you click or don’t click, you’re driving your company’s placement up or down in your own individualized search results. This gives you a skewed perception of how your site is actually performing for other people.

Does Ranking Even Matter, Anyway?

It may seem like you’re stuck in a losing battle, but here’s the good news: Your website’s ranking doesn’t even matter!

[record scratch]

You read that correctly. Although it may seem reasonable to expect your ranking to be a solid indicator of how well your website is doing, there are many other data points that can tell you this with greater accuracy.

After all, your placement in search results is only relevant to a very narrow, specific set of conditions, as we outlined above. So, instead, you should be focusing on other metrics like:

  • Your overall website traffic
  • Website traffic trends (i.e. whether your visitor numbers are going up or down)
  • Sales funnels (i.e. the series of steps leading a potential customer to your site and then to take further action, like filling out a contact form or calling you directly)
  • Conversion rates (i.e. how many sales you’re making as compared to how many people are visiting your site)

Check out Google Analytics for all this info. It’s a free tool, so don’t hesitate!

Focus on Your Site Visitors

In simpler terms, you should be focusing on your website visitors, instead: Look at how they’re getting to your site and where they’re coming from. (After all, they could be coming from word of mouth, social media, local business directories, etc.)

Then, look at whether you’re doing a good job of turning those visitors into paying customers. These are the factors that actually have an impact on your bottom line.

Ranking is more or less irrelevant.

Don't Let Pay-Per-Click Turn Into Pay-Per-Search

Last Updated: August 22, 2017

Curious about how your PPC ads look? Googling yourself to check on your pay-per-click campaigns is understandable. However, it’s also ill-advised.
That’s because frequently googling your company can sabotage your AdWords campaign.
Don’t believe us? Keep reading.

How Googling Yourself Tanks Your CTR

Your cost per click is substantially related to your ad’s click through rate (CTR). This is the ratio of passive ad views (impressions) to active ad clicks. If your ad gets lots of views but few clicks, you can end up with a low CTR—and paying a greater cost per click.
Why a greater cost? Because your CTR affects your AdWords Quality Score, and your Quality Score controls how much you pay per click. Google wants to show ads that are interesting to its users: otherwise users may get fed up and choose a different search engine altogether. To make certain ads are as high quality as possible, it relies on Quality Score.

Quality Score and Cost

Your Quality Score is heavily impacted by two factors: CTR and relevance. If either metric is low, it will drive down your Quality Score (and drive up your price per click). Relevance can be addressed by targeting ads using both keyword and location. Click through rate is a bit trickier to fix, though. Under normal circumstances, your marketing agency will test different ad versions to get your CTR as high as possible.
However, you work against your marketing agency’s efforts when you frequently google your company’s name or other search terms to check your ads. This is because frequent searches increase the number of impressions. And since you know that clicking on your ads raises costs, you probably never click. As a result, you’re driving up impressions but not clicks. This leads to a lower CTR for your ad. No amount of testing by your marketing agency can fix it as long as you continue to depress your CTR by googling yourself.
This is where the domino effect starts. Once CTRs are low, your Quality Score follows. As PPCHero explains, “If you have a lot of low CTR ads in your ad groups, they could be contributing to a low Quality Score since AdWords considers all of your ads when calculating your scores.”
Unfortunately, a low Quality Score ultimately results in higher costs for you. The short version of the story is that if you frequently google your company, you’re spiking your own PPC bill!
This isn’t just a theoretical problem. At Prospect Genius, we’ve seen it firsthand. In fact, we had one client snowball their cost per click from $22 to $31!
We don’t want the same thing to happen to you. So if you’re thinking about checking your PPC ads by googling yourself, just don’t!

Stop Tanking Successful Ads

This issue goes beyond cost. When you continually google yourself, it’s not just that you end up paying more money per click for no good reason. You also single-handedly undermine your own advertising. If that doesn’t frustrate you, it should!
You see, PPC, by nature, targets a motivated audience. The searcher is already looking for your product or services, so they are more likely to click when they see your ad. So, when you go the extra mile and actually target your ads to a specific service in a specific area, you get maximum results for minimum cost.
Except when you search for your own ads.
When you’re searching for your own products or services just to “check” on your ad, you can end up substantially warping your results. The more specific an ad, the smaller the number of impressions it’s going to get. Usually, this isn’t a problem because you’re offsetting the low impressions by reaching an audience that’s more likely to click.
But that’s what makes these types of ads especially vulnerable to sudden dips in CTR. Because impressions are already low, you’re relying on a high number of clicks to keep your CTR up. So when you google these ads, look at them, and don’t click, you’re preventing the CTR from growing.
And if an ad’s CTR is low because you’ve been looking at the ad and not clicking, it could spell major trouble. If you’re working with a reputable PPC provider, they monitor your ad performance regularly. So when they see a surprisingly low CTR, they will try tweaking the ad to improve performance. However, nothing is wrong with that ad: the CTR is just low because you’ve been googling without clicking. Ultimately, you’ll be spurring your PPC agency to change an ad that otherwise could have been successful for you!

Safe Ways to Monitor Your PPC Ads

Please note: we’re not saying don’t check on your PPC campaigns. On the contrary. It’s very important to stay updated on how your ads are doing, so you can make informed decisions about your return on investment. But unlike googling yourself, there are ways to check your AdWords campaign without also inflating your costs!
Your best bet is to work with a professional pay-per-click advertising agency that provides clear tracking features. At Prospect Genius, our clients have unlimited access to their account’s call logs, leads, and other reports right in the Client Portal—letting you see your campaign’s performance without having to resort to Google. If you’re not sure what metrics are the most relevant for assessing your campaign, check out this analysis.
Or, if you’re a staunch do-it-yourselfer, you can use the AdWords dashboard to look up your ads’ performance, preview appearance, and more.
At the end of the day, we hope you now recognize that googling yourself can be harmful to your PPC campaign. Do yourself a favor and opt for alternative methods of checking performance instead. Keep your costs down by NOT googling yourself.

A Google a Day Keeps the Doctor Away… Or Does It?!

Last Updated: July 17, 2017

Curious about where your company is showing up on the web? You might think, “Where’s the harm in quickly googling my business name?” And that’s where you’d be wrong!
Googling your company name may seem harmless enough, but it can actually have surprisingly negative results. Here’s how.

Google Keeps Track of Your Search Habits

Google’s algorithm is designed to return personalized results. Factoring in your search history, search terms you favor, what location you’re searching from, and other data, Google’s search results are tailored specifically for you. So when you search, you get different results than your neighbors or coworkers, even when you search for the same terms.
One way Google compiles data for personalized results is by paying attention to both your past searches and how you interact with search results. This way, it can deliver the most satisfying results to you. So, if you frequently search for a specific keyword phrase—perhaps your company name or your town name paired with a service you provide—Google takes note.

More Importantly, It Keeps Track of What You Click

Frequently googling your company name becomes problematic when you factor clicks into the equation. Since Google personalizes its search results for each individual user, it only wants to deliver results it thinks you’ll like. So, for example, if you search for your company name and don’t click on any of the results, Google’s algorithm assumes you didn’t like any of the results listed.
No big deal, the first time. But the next time you do the same search, Google is likely to display slightly different results. After all, you told Google (by not clicking on any of the results) you didn’t like the answers it gave the first time. And if you don’t click on any of the results the second time—or the third time, fourth time, and so on—Google will yet again assume you don’t like the results and try another variant. The cycle will continue.

Negative Consequences

That’s why it’s so easy to drive your company’s placement down the list in your own personalized Google search results. And it’s also conceivable that if you search for your own company or the same service phrase frequently enough, you could impact the results displayed when other people search, too.
So, while there can definitely be reasons to occasionally search for your own company or keywords, don’t make a habit of it! If you search too frequently, the only thing you can be sure of is that you’re skewing the results displayed.
If you’re definitely not getting an accurate picture of your company’s placement on the search results page AND you might be driving your listings down the results page, why do it?!

It’s Not Always Bad

Now that we’ve scared you straight about not googling yourself frequently, we do want to note the two reasons to OCCASIONALLY google yourself.

  1. Managing your reputation. The old saying, “All press is good press,” isn’t actually true. Bad PR can ruin a business by destroying your reputation and running off potential customers. That’s why it’s important to know what’s being said about your company online. The occasional Google search can help you do that. Alternately, you can let Google do the work for you by setting up Google Alerts. This service enables you to set specific keywords you’re interested in (such as your business name). Google will then send you a notification when it finds new results containing those search terms (blogs, articles, websites, etc.). This lets you keep an eye on what people are saying about your company WITHOUT constantly googling yourself.
  2. Keeping your competitors in line. Did you know that Google AdWords allows companies to bid on their competitors’ company names as keywords? That means when someone searches for your company name, your competitor’s ad could display on the results page. There’s no way to know if this is happening without doing the occasional Google search. And, unfortunately, you can’t prevent this kind of ad from appearing (Google won’t take them down, as these ads adhere to current AdWords policies). You can file a complaint if a competitor is using your trademarked name in ad copy, but the competitor can still bid on your name as a keyword. Googling yourself occasionally can turn up these kinds of ads. Once you know a competitor is bidding on your name as a keyword, you can decide how to proceed. For example, you may decide that turnabout is fair play and bid on their company name as a PPC keyword for your ads…

Find Your Balance

Balance is the name of the game when it comes to searching for your company on Google. Too frequently can create problems, but too infrequently can miss other problems.
Perhaps the best approach is “an occasional google keeps the doctor away,” but that doesn’t have quite the same ring…
Have questions about your company’s web presence? We can help!

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