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<div align=justify>Now that I’ve got your attention, let me explain. Google is a great tool for online shoppers. But from the perspective of online merchants, Google search results are just lists of failed brands. The basic problem is simple: If your customers have to Google, your brand has failed.


Did Google create these branding problems? No, but the way people use Google reveals them. Think: Who needs Google? Shoppers who don’t know exactly what they want, or where to get it. A customer who knows what she wants and where it is online can just go find it – say, by typing the URL into her browser, or by clicking on a saved bookmark.

Take, for example, the case of Amazon.com. Does anyone type “books online” into a search bar? Everybody’s aware that Amazon is where you buy books online. Sure, Amazon spends on advertising with Google, but I suspect that very little of it has to do with books. In fact, on the day Google was formed, Amazon was already a publicly traded, $600 million bookseller growing at more than 1,000 percent per year. Amazon doesn’t need Google to sell books – it never did.

Similarly, nobody ever has to Google “online auction,” either, because everybody knows there’s a brand for that: eBay. Like Amazon, eBay was a widely successful publicly traded Internet company before Google was conceived.

Who is advertising on Google? Well, judging from Google’s reported revenues—$37.9 billion last year alone—lots of companies.  But if you take a closer look, you’ll find that most of the companies buying ads on Google are ones you’ve never heard of, the Plain Janes of their respective industries. The elephant in the room is this: Online shoppers don’t Google brands nearly as often as they Google generic categories and phrases. If Google had to make its living strictly off searches of brand names, you would have never heard of Google.

Of course, it’s not Google’s fault that most brands don’t enjoy widespread name recognition. As I said above, Google isn’t the problem, but Google exposes the problem. And if you’ve read some of my recent columns, you may already know where I’m going with this. This is fundamentally a story about brand power. Thinking about it in terms of Google searches just clarifies what we’re all doing when we have a need for a certain product: trying to find a match for that need in our mental rolodex of brands.

If you want a sense of how strong your brand is, try this. Select the key words or phrases that you think would be used by consumers searching for the goods or services you provide. Then calculate the percentage of traffic coming to your site from searches on those key words and phrases versus traffic coming from people who knew your brand name to start with and simply typed it into their search bar.

If most of your search traffic begins as a generic word search rather than a search for your brand name, put down your dog-eared copy of SEO for Dummies and dust off your old marketing texts, because you have some serious brand building ahead of you. While you’re at it, remember: Great brands have to be built, but they’re not built on Google.</div>

''Taken from http://www.forbes.com, by Jerry McLaughlin,''
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