We have been operating as a business insurance broker, on the internet for over 10 years now. This really is not much time at all in the whole scheme of things. When we started out we used a combination of good quality web content and adwords. This worked for a few years. Whilst we were in no way pioneers, we offered customers the ability to get a very quick, comprehensive business insurance quote.
We always thought that the web wanted good quality, in the main independent businesses to appear at the top of their search rankings. Here we are including Google, Yahoo and Bing. Many others have fallen by the wayside but, it has got to be over 99% of home pages fall into one of these three categories.
We have found that being a lean, mean, independent that really cares about it’s customers is no longer what is needed. We have stopped using Googles adwords, not because it didn’t work, but because we could not afford to compete with bigger companies with bigger marketing budgets. We have also kept our website up to date with as much information as we think customers need. We up date our blog nearly every single day, not with rubbish content designed to get us back up to the top, but with content that we think people looking for a quote may find relevant.
But, the big boys, and girls, have muscled in on this as well. We all know that a new website will suddenly appear in the top of the rankings and then a few weeks later it will settle down to it’s natural position. But, we are seeing nowadays companies appearing from nowhere and staying there. Now, if this happened over a period of a year or two, then fair play to them. But, when they pop up from nowhere and stay in the top 10, you just know that this is not “natural”.
Having said all of this, it is not a criticism of Google. They are the home page of choice for most of our staff. Maybe it is just a natural change and evolution for the big G to start to let these things happen. We do not believe that this the search engine results accurately reflect what customers want. If you stick in the term business or commercial insurance, you do not get a single independent business insurance broker appearing on page 1. Instead, you get a huge list of the companies that we know spend over 50% of their income on advertising. With a fair chunk of this on SEO, we have no chance. But, we are happy to carry on because, when a customer does get to speak to us they sometimes say it is like a breath of fresh air to speak to a human being.
So what of the Google +1 button? Facebooks like button is slightly different and, if a friend has lots of likes agaisnt a comment or picture, it does not elevate them to the top of your home page.
So, with the strength of their marketing budgets how much do we bet that all of a sudden, the top entries that are returned on Google, get lots and lots of +1 clicks? This is sure to happen, however Google is clever enough to weed these out one would hope. The only worry for us is that it is going to become like ebay feedback. Whatever you buy off bay, however cheap it is, you tend to get bombarded with emails saying, please leave me nice feedback etc.
We hope that custoemrs are not goign to have to suffer this, but how long before you start to receive emails with “if you like us, please click here and +1 our site?”