Google Is The New Phone Book

Last year, social media guru/ sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer rented an office for the summer in a 41 unit building outside New York. On the day he moved in, the local phone company dropped off 41 phone books in the building's lobby. All summer, as he came and went, he watched those books. They sat there. And sat, and sat, and sat. At the end of September, as he left the building for the final time, curious, he counted the phone books still sitting and gathering dust. There were thirty nine.


Your customers don't look you up in the phone book anymore. A cattle hauler from Wyoming who breaks down on the Pittsburg bypass doesn't go to the nearest gas station for a phone book- he googles diesel mechanics.


Where are you going to be when someone googles your business? First? Near the Top? On the first page? If you're not at least on the first page you're business is in trouble, whether the receipts show it or not.


The beauty is that it's easy to get near the top of a Google search. You don't have to understand search engine optimization, you don't have to pay a company thousands of dollars. All you have to do is take advantage of business social media.


Have a business Facebook page that you post on at least three times a week. Have, and use, a twitter page.  Make sure your Twitter profile contains all the words and phrases someone might use in a search for your business. For example, my Twitter page says I am a "Profitability Improvement Specialist- Credit Card processing, Merchant Services, Electronic Payments at Central Payment". It may not flow off the tongue, but every time I tweet Google is reading, and saving, those words and phrases in conjunction with my name. ( A friend calls using key search words in this way "spreading Google dust").


Have, and use, an account with LinkedIn. LinkedIn especially gives you four or five different places for you to use your key words. In my personal opinion, it is also the best place for posting valuable content that gets noticed by your peers.


When your done with all that, start a Youtube account. After you post a value message, record yourself speaking it, and post it to your account. And- you guessed it- use your key words as often as possible.


It is not time consuming to set this up. You can set up accounts, with your key-word laden profiles, at all four sites in less than an hour. And you can set it up to when you post a message at one site, your other sites pick it up. In other words, you can post a tweet on twitter that automatically shows up on Facebook and LinkedIn.


Now comes the fun part. At night, while you are warm and comfy in your bed, the Google fairies scan the web, collecting your Google dust and applying it to your name. 


It is amazing how quickly this will rocket you to the top of Google searches for your name, your business, and your keywords. If you have never set up a business social media site, try this experiment. Google your name, and note at what page and page location you find yourself. Do the above for one week, and Google your name again. If you are not in the first five entries on the first page I'll eat my shoe.


Track and play with your keywords. When I started using Google dust my name would come up near the top of a search for 'credit card processing', but not 'merchant services.' I found new places in my  profiles to use the phrase 'merchant services' and for a week every time I posted anywhere I used the  phrase in the title of the post. When I tested again at the end of the week, mine was the second name to come up when I searched.


Google is the new phone book. And you have control over the size of you r phone book ad. You can have a little two inch square ad and never be found on Google, or you can have the back cover and come up first in Google searches for your business. The cost is the same- the centerfold takes a little bit of work.