Knowing there is easily searchable information about ourselves or our businesses online stokes a natural curiosity within us that makes us want to find it and obsess over it. This is perfectly understandable, especially if you are paying for digital marketing services. Who wouldn’t want to try to see themselves as their clients or website visitors do? Unfortunately, Googling yourself on the regular almost always does more harm than good, which is why we discourage our clients from doing so. In this post, we’ll delve into this a little deeper.
1. It’s a time waster.
If you’re devoting precious billable hours to stalking your law firm online every day or week, you’re exerting energy that would be better spent on following up with those leads, generating social media content, or interacting with your clients. Another way to look at it is this: you’re paying the hard costs of digital marketing, then paying additional soft costs by expending time and emotions on your online presence.
2. Your perception is skewed.
This is a big one. Without going into great technical detail, it’s important to realize how search algorithms work and how that changes what you see when you Google yourself from how others see you when they Google you. When you search for something, Google shows you results that are unique to you, drawing upon your specific location, search history, past purchasing choices, locations you frequent, and more. Naturally, Google tailors these results based on all of those things for every user. While you may be concerned that you’re not seeing what someone else reports seeing, that’s simply the nature of the Google beast and is not something to stress over.
3. You’re eating up your AdWords budget.
If you’re paying for Google AdWords, Facebook ads, or any other platform’s paid media service, you have set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget. Each time someone clicks on your ad, the cost-per-click automatically comes out of your budget. When you’ve exhausted your total budget for the allotted time, your ads will stop running until you’ve increased your budget or moved into the next timeframe. Unfortunately, digital platforms can’t differentiate who is clicking on ads. Therefore, if you are clicking on your ads to see where they go and what they look like, you’re spending all of your budget on yourself and preventing prospects from seeing them. Big oops.
What To Do Instead
If you need more reassurance as to what your online presence is shaping up to be, request mockups or screenshots of your profiles or ads from your marketing partner or people who come across them organically. Approve copy and images ahead of time and if you have specific requests, voice them so that you aren’t worried about what’s out there about you and your firm. We encourage you to be an active participant in your marketing, without cannibalizing it.
