No.1 on Google for your company name? Really?

Not running a Google AdWords campaign? Go and Google your company’s name, and if you have any brands, Google them too.

Done it? Are your competitors – or even irrelevant companies – appearing above you in the Google results in a bright yellow panel? Or even over to the right of the page? How much traffic do you think you’re losing from people who’ve typed your company name into Google, then mistakenly gone to a competitor’s site? Or been distracted by a competitor’s advertising message? You probably don’t want to know the answer.

The fact is, Google will be the top source of traffic to your website (I’ve seen it account for 80% of the traffic to some companies’ sites) and it’s quite permissible for anyone to put a Google AdWords ad next to searches on your company’s name or products. Someone could be hijacking quite a lot of your traffic in this way.

For some reason, many marketing managers seem to think Google wouldn’t allow this. Why on earth not? Would a magazine publisher turn down an advert from one of your competitors if they wanted to place it next to an article about your company? Of course not. The only thing you can’t do is to put someone else’s trademarked term in the actual text of your advert.

So, if you can’t beat them, you need to join them. Running a Google AdWords campaign against your own company name puts you up there at the top of the page, in the yellow panel, above your own company’s natural search result. Most sensible organisations do it now, and you should too.

And as you might expect, we’d be delighted to do it for you. It might cost you a couple of hundred pounds a month, but it’s a lot better than letting potentially a lot of visitors get away. Just email us and your ad could be running on Google by this time tomorrow.