EP151 Google Has FOMO

Google ranking can mean the difference between a sale or the death of your website. If this has been a challenge for you, you’re in for a treat! In this episode, Ken Courtright shares some website traffic hacks and shows you how you can take advantage of Google’s FOMO (fear of missing out).

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Google Has FOMO

Is there anybody out there that knows they need to grow their business? They can’t wait. They’re even willing to pay for advertising if they knew it would work, but they also want something that has some sustainability. This episode is for you. I’m going to start by saying that Google has what’s called FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. What that means in English is if Google sees activity or action on other social platforms regarding a page of your website, they take notice of that. Often, they look at how your site is ranked for that page and they raise the ranking sometimes within days. Let’s say you’re a hairstylist and you have a page that describes your unique, an up-do that you do on kids before they go to prom. Maybe you have a list of the five-step process of how to do that up-do. What if people are all over social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and they’re talking about and pointing people back to your page.

What if Google had you ranked on page three to come to find out the whole world’s talking about that page of your website. Google might go, “This belongs at the top of page two or the bottom of page one.” They have a Fear Of Missing Out and they have a fear of misranking what the world thinks is great content. It’s called FOMO. The bottom line is if they see a lot of social signals exploding elsewhere about a page that they deem poorly, they’ll raise it instantly. Here’s a question for you, what single page of your website is the most important to you? Which single page of your website, if you could increase the rankings, say 3 to 5 spots would make you a ton of money? The best way to look at it is which page on your website makes you the most money?

If you don’t know what page makes you the most money, you might want to find out. The question is how important is it to move one of your pages up 3 to 5 spots? Let’s say you’re at the bottom of page one and you’re getting decent traffic, converting some sales, making some money, but you know that if you’re in the 9th spot on page one of Google. If you’ve read some of my older episodes, you know if you move up to the 8th spot, it doubles your traffic. If you moved from 8 to 7, it doubles it again. If you move from 7 to 6, it doubles it again. If you can get yourself into the 1st or 2nd spot, you’re going to get 40% of all the traffic on that phrase. Let’s presuppose that you do have a page that’s either at the top of page two getting almost no traffic or it’s at the bottom of page one and it’s a money-making page for you.

Here’s what I recommend you do, go to websites like Captive8 and pay a celebrity or a high-ranking influencer to push your page or maybe tweet your page. There are endless stories of the Kardashians that made a plug for Johnson & Johnson product or this or that and the laws have changed. The FTC has cracked down big time on non-disclosed paid celebrity endorsements, but an influencer isn’t deemed a celebrity. You’ve got to do some homework on this. Here’s what’s cool. We have a plumbing website with a gentleman named Sean Kavanaugh.

Sean, years ago, wanted to do something fun and do a stream of the ten funniest plumber’s butt crack. He has a relationship with the actress Jenny McCarthy. He called up Jenny and said, “Jenny, can you do me a favor? Would you review this post on my website? I want to ask you something, would you mind if you laugh and you laugh hard at any point when you look at these ten pictures? Would you mind tweeting this page for us? It would mean a lot to us.” She goes, “No problem. If you can get me to laugh, I’ll tweet it for you.” Needless to say, she was 2 or 3 pictures in and she could not stop laughing. Within five minutes, the traffic coming to that page of Sean’s site was explosive. We looked at analytics and there was a chance we might have crashed our site had that continued because it went to her millions of followers.

Here’s what’s awesome, we didn’t pay for that, but we could have. Had we paid for that, we would’ve had so much traffic to that one page and if it was a sales page, there’s a statistical chance we could have had instant sales. I’m not in the game for instant sales. I’m in the game for forever sales. What’s phenomenal about what happened is that page exploded from one tweet from Jenny McCarthy. Guess what Google did 72 hours later? Three days later, all of a sudden, that page, which was currently ranking at the top of page two for plumber’s crack, was now in the middle of page one for plumber’s crack.

Not only that, we found out that Google had raised the rankings on over 100 different plumbing terms because of it. It’s absolutely fantastic. Google gets FOMO almost instantly. Not only do they increase the rankings of the page of whatever was being talked about and this is typical. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens almost every time. They often increase their rankings across a whole website. What are some creative ways to instigate FOMO? Number one, you could do paid endorsements. There are many sites like Captiv8 that allow you to find an influencer, find a celebrity, and they’ll help you negotiate that.

There’s also ego bait. If you’re not up to speed on that, you’ve got to check out episode 91. I’m not going to take the time to go through that. You can also use what are called leading finishes and put them on social media. I should make a whole episode on this, but a leading finish is when you post an article that adds tremendous value and then at the end you finish with, “If you’d like to see three techniques for growing X, click here.” You added tremendous value and now you’re saying, “If you want more value and you want me to teach one more thing. Click here.” Send them to the same page you want to increase the rankings on. If you can do that on a number of social platforms, that’s going to create what’s called roadways definitely. You’re going to create 3 to 6 different roadways of social that’ll live forever and continue to bring traffic in.

Finally, if you have any relationships with influencers yourselves, you want to take advantage of that. The bottom line is if you can get social signals, which are people sharing a page of yours on social media, and you can get especially get them from different roadways, meaning different social platforms, you will create a social storm to that page. No question. Google is going to get FOMO and increase your rankings. Episode 151. Google has FOMO. Take care.

Important Links:

• Captive8
• episode 91 – Previous Episode

• Here’s How »

• kencourtright.com
• Today’s Growth Twitter
• Ken Courtright LinkedIn