Google is Your Homepage – Fix your Search Presentation

Google is your homepage.

by Rusty Bishop

Google is your homepage. Of that there is little doubt.

Mark and I have now analyzed over 20 life science websites from design to content to code to product search rank through our free QuickCheck Service.

Several companies have granted us full Analytics access in order to serve them better.  In every case, Google sends the most visitors to these sites. In fact, its not even close.

This means your customers are searching Google to find your products, not your homepage, not Science magazine’s full page ads.

If you want to prove it to yourself, just ask your webmaster to print out or show you the Traffic Sources Readout from your analytics program (I’m digging into Webtrends right now, crazy!). If I’m wrong then your company is named Facebook.com or something is really wrong, e.g. you have no traffic.

What Google Is Your Homepage Means

Most scientists are not familiar with all your products even if they are very familiar with your brand. Researchers ready to buy are searching for very specific products and services for a specific diagnostic or experiment.

If Google really is the vehicle by which >70% of site visits come from, you must carefully plan every page to present key information when a scientist see’s your offering in the organic results.

If they can’t determine from the presentation of your offering in Google’s Search Results, why would they click through to you?

What You Can Control

You absolutely have control over what Google and other search engines present to potential customers. Web marketers call this Search Presentation.

There are three elements that appear in Search Presentation. I’m sure your familiar with them, you just don’t know it.

1. Page Title

2. Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Each one of these are entirely within your control to dictate what is seen by searchers.

Take the example above, where I searched for “multiparametric immunoassays systems”.  Which gave me Biomerioux’s VIDAS instrument. Let’s break it down.

1. Page Title – “VIDAS/minVIDAS:Healthcare”.

The title tag helps searchers make a more informed decision about the results they click on. A descriptive title tag can help pop out a result better for searchers.

Constructing Great Title Tags

You have 60 characters to write a great title tag, that means you gotta seriously think about the keywords. Google suggests you imagine the Title tag is the only thing you have to tell searchers what the page is about.

So what’s this page about?  Vidas is an automated, multiparametric immunoassay system for clinical diagnostics.  That’s 83 characters with spaces so we’re close.

How about – “Vidas-Automated Mulitparametic Clinical Immunoassay System”

That’s a pretty solid page Title. It contains keywords that describe the product and it pre-qualifies searchers that are interested in Clinical products.

How do I change the Page Title?

This is a pretty common question from marketers and sales.  The page title is part of the code that underlies every page on your website.

To see the page title, you browse to your product page , then select View > Source from your browser’s tool bar.

The page title will be designated with the code <title>Your Title</title>.  If you’re having difficulty finding it just perform a find on the source code (Command F) and search “title” that should bring it up for you.

In the above example, Biomerioux’s title code is on line 154 – <title>VIDAS®/miniVIDAS®: Healthcare</title>.

To change, you need to add the new text you want into your source code via the backend or server and you’re done.  Or just ask your webmaster to take care of it, since that’s what you pay them for!

In the next article, I’ll dig into methodology for crafting the meta description for a scientist Searcher Presentation. So please bookmark us or subscribe to learn more.

Rusty Bishop

Rusty’s expertise rests in his ability to apply his Scientific Experience to the Marketing and Sales Funnel. Something we call the Red Funnel. He has developed a deep understanding of the web and the toolset needed to analyze websites as well as sales and marketing tactics both online and in the field.

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