How a medical device exposes the algorithm.

Hey Rankers! Apologies for my scattered videos at the moment. Too busy making money for our clients. Wanted to talk to you about one of our long-term clients, Rapid Test Systems, which has taken a hit. In light of recent events we’re not going to chase rankings for Rapid Test, rather double-down on their brand. Brand ads offer you more control over your results and avoid the algorithm messing with your results via interpretation. By the way, we’ve got a client vacancy, so hit me up if you know anyone who might be interested.

What I learned

• Why brand search can fall off a cliff.
• When to double-down on your main brand.
• Spending money on brand isn’t always bad.
• Take control of your brand in search results.

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. How’re you going?

I want to talk to you a little bit today about one of our clients, great client, but just wanted to say, sorry for intermittent videos this year. Just had a lot on, been busy. Hopefully, that’s okay. Someone said to me the other day, “Oh, it’s great to see you’re still alive,” and I said, “Well, thank you very much.” I do respond to comments on YouTube. So if you have a YouTube account, please ask questions if you have them there.

Unforeseen brand damage

This is a client’s data and in the industry, we would say this traffic has fallen off a cliff, died in the arse, a number of other phrases we’d probably use. The concerning thing about this is that it is brand search, and you would think, “Mmmm, that’s not good.” And you might go, “Ooh, penalty?” No. “Google algorithm update?” No. “Gee, what could it be?”

Well, the client hasn’t done anything to their site and we haven’t done anything to break anything. The world has changed, basically, which is why this client’s brand search has died in the arse, and this will be made very clear to you once you see the name of the client.

It’s Rapid Test Systems. So Rapid Test Systems, great Australian company, great Australian business, innovative, awesome idea, but basically what they do is they have a service and a system, process and products where you can remotely test and check all your residual current devices across all the properties that you manage.

For a large organisation, like a mining company, where they’ve got a lot of power boards and all those sorts of things, previously you’d have to go out and check these one by one, test them, data, all that just for compliance. With these, it’s all done remotely. You can log into the portal and check it and it’s all done in seconds. So it’s safer, you don’t have the sparky sitting in front of the power board, all that sort of stuff, cheaper, reliable. Great. So if you need something like that, go and see them.

But of course, why did their brand search die in the bum? Are we going to try to rank higher for Rapid Test now? No, we’re not going to try to rank higher organically for Rapid Test.

The reason for that is what would you do and why would you do it? The majority of people looking for that phrase right now aren’t looking for our client. So we’re better off doubling down on the main brand, which is Rapid Test Systems, looking at some, unfortunately, spending a little bit more on brand with Google, probably, and a lot of people get upset about spending money on brand, but I’ll show you something in a second, which is why it’s stuff like this, I mean, this is unusual, but there are other things like this that happen, which you can’t control in organic. So that’s why a brand ad will actually give you more control over your brand in Google search results.

But have a look at DuckDuckGo search results. So DuckDuckGo, we’re still number one for Rapid Test, but you can see there the ads have changed, or the organic results apart from we’ve got two, well, to the front page of DuckDuckGo, miles apart. But the reason for that is, is that DuckDuckGo isn’t looking at search or intent. They’re not looking at entity search, primarily keyword indexing, that sort of stuff.

That’s not the case with Google. Google is just trying to understand the intent of the search and the searcher, where they are, what they’ve done previously, where they’re travelling, all that sort of stuff. There is so much more data that Google collates about its users than, say, any of the other search engines.

Why brand ads work

But the reason that you might want to do a brand campaign and I often hear old school SEO say, “Oh, doing a brand campaign is a waste of money because you get that anyway because you rank number one organically for your brand.” Yeah, you do most of the time and then extraordinary circumstances like this where you don’t.

But the other thing that can happen in Google search results, especially organic, well, is that only organic, they will or can change the page title of the result of your page to match what the searcher’s intent possibly was.

Now, if you’ve got a sale on and like who hasn’t this week, “Jim, we’re doing a sale, end of the financial year,” it’s like, “Ah, great. It’s Monday. Let’s go. We need you to get that up quickly and those campaigns out quickly,” you just can’t do that with organic. You’ve got to wait. You don’t know whether Google’s going to show that result, or it’s going to show something else, or it’s going to show an internal page. So the fastest and most effective way of doing that is through a brand ad, of course, Google also allows other competitors to bid on your brand, which sucks, but you’ve got to be aware that’s happening as well.

But I mean, this is just one-day sales for a client’s brand campaign. They spent $6.40 and they made $1,200 from it. So you might say, “Well, it’s a waste of money. It’s like $6.40. Are you going to make that $1,200? Are you going to get that 5% ECR with organic?” Probably not and you can’t control it. That’s why you use brand ads and there’s a myriad of other reasons as well.

But hopefully, that’s helpful. Hopefully, that helps you understand a little bit more about the way that Google works and what it’s trying to do. Oh, we have a client vacancy. If you know an eCommerce retailer, or if you are an eCommerce site owner and you would like some help in growth, in revenue, then please, we’d love to chat. If we’re a fit, we’ll let you know. If we’re not, we’ll let you know as well and you might let us know, too.

But we only want to work with people who we can high-five with at the end of the month because we’ve hit our goals because that’s what we love doing. That’s what keeps us going is the motivation of making our clients happy and changing their lives for the better because it really does. It’s not like you’re looking at rankings and trying to work out how many more rankings we need, which don’t necessarily deliver the revenue.

So if that’s you and if you want to have a chat, then please just email me, [email protected]. Thanks very much. Probably won’t see you next week, but soon. Thanks. Bye.