What does search ranking mean to businesses?

Every year, Google releases an end-of-year list of the fastest rising search terms from Hong Kong. We call this list “Zeitgeist” because we think it reflects the “spirit of the times” and the people, events, and memories that made this year unique.

In 2012, TVB, Apple Daily and the Hong Kong Jockey Club topped the list for top three most searched local brands on Google in Hong Kong. In sectors, A&F, H&M and Zara topping the list of most-searched fashion brands, BMW, Toyota and Mercedes Benz were popular car brands, while TaoBao, Amazon and eBay attracted most attention among online shopping arena.

These achievements are no mere coincidence as these companies must be doing something right to interest their consumers.

Understanding online behaviour and search trends is increasingly crucial for marketers, as more people research and purchase on the Web. For companies, Google Zeitgeist provides insights about user behavior and brand popularity.

Marketers are aware that customers are online and searching for their brands. However, oftentimes they are at a loss in approaching this new but ubiquitous platform.

Reaping the opportunities online do not have to be complicated. Start with fundamentals like building a great website and then use free online tools to understand how customers are finding you online. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Get a website and invest in it
The first step in building your online presence is to get yourself a space on the web. This sounds easy, but whether you choose to go with a ready-made site or to design your own, keep in mind that your website is a virtual storefront - a way for millions of people around the world to visit your business 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

That means that you should invest in your site as you would in your brick-and-mortar store. Find out what parts of your site your customers like - and what parts are sending them packing. With free analytics tools, you can understand where your visitors are from, how they’re finding your site, and what pages they’re visiting the most.

Make sure your customers can find you easily
However, just owning a site won’t guarantee that the right audience will find you. The next step is to use basic tools to increase your visibility online and attract potential customers.

Your business needs to be in search results when customers are searching for your products and services. You can do this two ways. Through website dashboard tools, site owners can understand how they can improve their ranking in search engines.

Also, you can leverage search advertising to reach more shoppers. The beautiful thing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, so you can be sure you’re getting high-quality leads for your business.

Measure, test, adapt
One of the real benefits of advertising online is that you can get almost instantaneous feedback on how well your ads are performing, and use this data to make your ads even more effective.

You can get real time feedback about which terms attract the most clicks and use that data to adjust your marketing campaign. Say you’re a retailer based in Hong Kong with a growing jewelry business.

You’d like to identify new markets for your jewelry, but you don’t know where to start. Apart from extracting insights from the yearly search ranking, you can also use the online keyword trend tool, which helps you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Using this tool, you can see where customers are already searching for your type of jewelry, and compare search volumes on the country and even city level.

External tools like Consumer Commerce Barometer help identify and compare countries with high tendencies for online research and purchase in your vertical, giving you a good indication of where to think about expanding your business.