TomAllinder.com

Excerpt from my book, New Thinking for Publicly Traded Companies:

Like it or not, even if your company makes tin cans or something else that is not “sexy”, in order to be successful in today’s world YOU MUST BECOME AN INTERNET MARKETER… Do not mix up Internet Marketer with Network Marketer. Once, someone wrote in a Twitter “tweet” “Misery, thy name is Internet Marketer”. I can understand why someone would say that because generally, Internet marketing and Network marketing gets mixed up. Network marketers sell a “program” that is supposed to make you rich. They are most often pyramid schemes that few make any real money with. I will explain two types of Internet Marketing later.

HubSpot pointed out in a recent webinar something I already knew but nevertheless, it made a big impression on me: With each passing day, more and more people are using search engines to find supplies, goods, services, information and just about everything else. Would it not stand to reason that people are now using search engines (which means they are probably using Google) to find companies to invest in?

Given the sorry state that most “stock message boards” and “stock chat rooms” are in, it is an undeniable fact that investors are seeking their information elsewhere.

I received a comment to a blog I did recently from a gentleman that was a retired high-ranking military officer of about 60 years old. He said that never in his life did he see such a mess of disinformation, hype and disruptive communication as he saw on the message boards of a company he was invested in. I wrote back to him and told him that that was just the way things were now and he would find better information on social media platforms. I also showed him how to search and filter the information so that it might be of use. On social media platforms, for the most part, people that are disruptive and spam have no audience or are suspended by the platform. The quality control is better whereas message boards and chat rooms are pretty much “anything goes” and are of little or no use to investors anymore. Not to say that all threads on all message boards are bad, but many are, especially those of micro and small cap companies.

Let’s say an investor is looking on the Internet for companies to invest in. Notice that I did not say the investor was looking for “stocks”. Investors invest in companies, traders trade stocks. Can our theoretical investor find any information about your company by doing an Internet search? He or she probably can if they type in the exact name of your company. What if the investor does not know of your company? Can your company be found? If your company cannot be found in the first couple of pages of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a search term, they will never know you exist.

If the name of your company is XYZ Widgets, Inc. and is publicly traded it can be found if they put in “XYZ Widgets”, probably the top result. But investors will be looking for something like “investing, “widgets” or “investing in widgets”. Would your company be on the first page? In most cases, probably not. Your company may not even in the top 2 or 3 pages of the SERPs (depending on the number of Widget companies).

Just for the record, the search term “investor relations social media” yields tomallinder.com at number TWO on Google and my article on Investor Relations 2.0 at Wikinvest.com the number ONE result. My philosophy: I would rather dominate a niche than compete with everyone else for the most competitive search terms…

Another interesting study that HubSpot did was to share where searchers clicked on SERPs on Google. The presentation had a great name and you can download/view at HubSpot; the name was Marketing Detox: How to Get Off Google AdWords PPC Crack (PPC is pay per click). I loved the title by the way…

HeatMap Showing where majority of clicks occur on Google SERPs

They clearly stated how people are smarter now with regard to searches. Paid search, while very useful and money making and lead generation for some, by in large is not beneficial for most. I know companies, IR firms and promoters that have promoted their business via Google and had no good results. There are certain techniques and combinations one has to know to be successful. It is like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in that manner; as long as you are willing to pay for the secret it will work; if you don’t pay for the help, you get nowhere.

On slide 17 of the webinar presentation, they showed where the clicks occurred on the typical SERP. They were all concentrated in the organic areas and mostly in the top 5 results. There were only a few clicks in the paid ads in the top and right side of the page. It reminds me of stock promotion via email, fax, phones or the other tired old stuff; people keep paying for it even though it doesn’t work. The next slide revealed the actual stats – clicks in the organic results outnumbered the clicks in the paid areas by a 3-1 margin.

One thing that turns people off of the paid clicks is when you are looking for an item or information, the results often yield totally useless results. One time, I did a search on Crumpler, NC, the town that I lived in just to see what would come up. More than one of the paid results indicated that they were selling “Crumpler” at a really good price.

Let’s get back to why Google is important to your company… As more and more investors use search engines, and about 70% are using Google, you need to be found in the first couple of pages on the SERPs. The first page would be better and that can be attained over time. There are two ways to get on the first page of Google:

An organic SEO plan… which you can do yourself if you spend a lot of time learning about it and get all the right tools.

Or… pay to get on the first page of Google.

For some reason though, I can’t figure out quite how a publicly traded company would do PPC advertising or any sort of advertising for investors on Google or any other advertising platform. I have written about paid advertising for one reason: There are a lot of SEO hackers out there running businesses that target companies under the guise of doing SEO. They promise “Page 1 Results”. They will get you on the first page via the paid ads but… once you stop paying for the ads you disappear completely. There are a lot of other “SEO” programs out there that will do a little for you and pay for some ads with the budget and improve your results somewhat; again though, it is temporary results.

With an organic SEO plan, progress made does not disappear overnight. A lot more people will click on your link because they know you “earned” the spot on that particular search engine. SEO is complex with all of the variables but really pretty simple in concept. There is a lot of SEO documentation out there both free and paid. But I will assure you that the knowledge required to move your company to the first page or two of Google is not free at all.