The 3 Most Common Searches Critical To Your Business
If Google+ is the new phone book, knowing your Zero Moments with Google (or any other search engine) is being in the customer’s conversation as they move through their purchase cycle. Zero Moments drive business.
Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it makes the vast majority of its income selling ads around the results for searches of useful information. The higher your business website shows in these searches, the more likely you will get a click and thus traffic from Google searches. The more time the consumer clicking spends on your website, the more likely they are to purchase and the more likely your rank in Google searches will climb.
The more useful you make any search engine, the easier it is for the search engine to keep consumer searchers coming back — and to sell more ads.
Your Zero Moments are where your website ranks in the most common Google searches with purchase intent. We first learned about this in 2011 from Google’s Zero Moment of Truth ebook, written by Jim Lecinski, Vice President, Americas Customer Solutions, Google.
Jim explained the Zero Moment of truth was critical to online success on page 12:
ZMOT is now core training for all members of the Google sales team. It’s part of our DNA — not just in the U.S., but around the world. (Our Australian team, naturally, calls it ZedMOT.)
We’re in a unique position to observe the power of ZMOT: its power to help shoppers make great decisions and its power to help companies tell their stories at the moment of highest impact. ZMOT turns small wins into huge ones — and potentially big wins into letdowns — millions of times a day, around the clock.
To define the impact of ZMOT in numbers, we commissioned a major study from the independent research firm Shopper Sciences. They reached 5,000 shoppers across 12 different subcategories with surveys specially designed to show exactly which sources influenced shopper buying decisions.
The book has some very interesting research across sectors. Stephanie Tilton provides a great summary at Content Marketing Institute here. If you prefer something breezier and more visual, Douglas Karr, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at CircuPress, offers a great round-up on Slideshare here. To share my favorite slide from his presentation (slide 8), the top two sources of ZMOT are online searches and word-of-mouth — the oldest driver of business meets the newest — followed by online comparison shopping and websites.
To sum up the theory of ZMOT, all consumers do research before a purchase. That research across the purchase journey are the Zero Moments. Online that is marked by the searches consumers type in as they have questions and how they engage online to find recommendations.
Are you there to answer or inform your potential customer’s search and does your local online community recommend you?
The book recommends that businesses start to find their Zero Moments in online search with 3 types of queries:
1. [Your Brand, Product or Service] [City Name]
2. [Your Brand, Product or Service] review [City Name]
3. best [Your Brand, Product or Service] [City Name]
To localize these results, we recommend expanding Google’s definition of “brand” to include product or service and we add the city name to the search. For a plumber in Omaha, the MoT would like this:
1. plumber omaha
2. plumber reviews omaha
3. best plumber omaha
Where does your business rank in these searches? If you’re the top organic search result, as much as 30% of clicks. That can be a HUGE driver for your business.
The 2nd position gets about half of the top position, the 3rd gets about half of the 2nd and the 4th gets about half of the 3rd. Results with map markers (red teardrops) get about the same number of clicks as the 4th or 5th organic search result. Adwords do about the same on average.
If you’re not on the first page, you’re splitting a very small amount of overall clicks.
In August 2014, Lecinksi revisited ZMOT to report its universal application has only increased as searches grow and mobile allows many more moments.
Next week we’ll look at how we can use Google Adwords’ Keywords Tool to further explore the Zero Moment of Truth. A little later we’ll look at how Google’s arch-nemesis is quickly expanding its footprint in the search space, opening up a whole new ecosystem for Moments of Truth.
