Google has changed – have you?

A brand new website selling plumbing equipment does sales of over £100,000 in the first month (www.plumbnation.co.uk), another one selling used photocopiers (www.copiersforsale.co.uk) recoups it website investment in six days.

These are reasonably typical stories about the success that can be achieved through websites nowadays. What’s surprising is not the success stories but the number of companies still not using the power of Google to generate sales.

Both these companies harness the power of ‘Google Base’, here’s an example (note the ‘shopping bag’ icon next to the snippet)…

This is a free service from Google and is immediate. (see http://base.google.co.uk/) and terribly effective given the way the item stands out at the top of the list.

You’ve always been able to use this service – the big difference is that now through ‘Google Universal Search’ (GUS) these results are shown on the main Google Page.

‘Google Base’ is only relevant if you have something to sell. But you can take advantage of GUS even if you don’t. For example Google News, Videos and Images are all items you can get to appear at the top of the Google listing now. Probably the most well known is appearing on the map…

This is not just relevant to hotels and other ‘local’ services, its relevant to most businesses because over 40% of searches now include local variables (eg data cabling Liverpool, search marketing company Cheshire, business mentoring Leicester)

The point is Google has changed, there are now opportunities to appear on the list in more relevant and striking ways than the conventional list of blue search engine links. Google has changed, and we need to change to harness its huge sales delivery potential.

Jan Klin is Managing Partner of Jan Klin & Associates, a Cheshire based Internet Marketing company. www.janklin.com ; 01928 788100; jan@janklin.com.
Jan is a speaker through experiential business learning® specialist, The Academy for Chief Executives and more information and free lessons can be found on the above topics at his blog (http://janaklin.blogspot.com)