It’s ironic that many insurance companies fighting for high ranking in Google are not aware of the potential downside of their search activities – you’d have thought they had that covered.
Forget the admirals hats or black cloaks, the senior directors of these companies should be finding out what colour hat their SEO agency is wearing to get their company ‘above the fold’ in Google search rankings.
Because while the rewards are high, so are the risks. The number one position on Google typically gets, 40% of the traffic, the second rated position only 8%, third 4% and so on down. If the SEO agency a top ranked company is using isn’t playing by the rules and gets spotted by Google for ‘being evil’ they’ll remove the site from the rankings altogether.
Suddenly losing 40% of traffic for a top ranked insurance company means millions of pounds a month immediately lost – it’s a financial disaster for any company, yet board level executives are unaware of this.
Part of the problem is that many of the tricks SEO agencies use are so devious that only other SEO agencies can spot them and let’s put it this way, this sector isn’t particularly known for its self-regulatory zeal.
You can draw parallels with some of the more arcane areas of banking, where many of the directors simply didn’t know what the derivatives were they were trading – they were just too complex but so long as they seemed to be making money, nobody worried too much.
Until one of them got caught out so publically that the entire world changed.
Board level executives in any company with a significant online retail operation need to understand the downside, before Google shows it to them.