It’s so easy to dive into that endless rabbit hole and look up yourself, old flames, rivals, law school tyrants and the first person you had a crush on in elementary school. It’s not doing you, your law firm marketing data or your estate planning law firm any good. Distractions are a huge issue for anyone who spends a large part of their day in front of a computer monitor. And if you’ve got more than one monitor, you can always open a window on one and use that for the web, right?
Here are more reasons not to Google yourself.
Skew your own numbers and increased costs. We aren’t naming names here. But if you have a Google AdWords campaigns and you are busy clicking on your ads, you’re racking up your own bill. The cost per click includes clicks from you, and clicks into the website from the ad count.
Create more confusion. Remember that the algorithms change frequently, so you might get one result on day 1 and a different result on day 4. And if you are doing this on your mobile phone while moving around town, the variables will change even more.
Wasting time unnecessarily. How you rank is not going to be an accurate reflection of how a living, breathing prospect searches for you or estate planning law firms or Elder Law firms. You can try all the search terms you want, but their search will be using their phrases, from their computer or phone. You may as well be playing Words with Friends or posting silly videos on Reddit. It’s not helping your firm’s rankings.
You could risk penalizing your estate planning law firm or yourself. If you haven’t figured it out by now, Google and it’s army of software developers and its AI (Artificial Intelligence) elements are really, really smart. If a person is searching and clicking repeatedly in an attempt to boost their rankings, they are actually sending up a big red flag for Google that could end up with a lowered quality score. Unless you are a “black hat” marketing expert who knows how to game the system and not get caught—which is highly unlikely—you may be doing more harm than good.
The bottom line: What really matters is if you are getting visitors to your website who are converting—filling out contact us forms or calling to make appointments. You could rank number one on page one and not convert—that’s a far more important problem.
If you’re not happy with your website performance, which is what really matters, submit a support ticket and let’s talk about what’s going on so we can fix it and you’ll be too busy to Google yourself!