Should you google your name or practice?

One thing that business owners and doctors often do when they start getting serious about their marketing efforts, is google themselves. 

The desire to search up your company name in a search engine makes sense, but unfortunately googling your practice or your own name can harm your SEO strategy and mislead you about how your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies are playing out. Continuously searching for your business or name can negatively impact your online marketing.

What You See in Google Isn’t What Others See 

The first reason you should avoid googling yourself too much is that what appears for you in Google results is not the same as what appears for someone else. If you google your name or medical practice and it appears but you don’t click the result, you could be sending Google the message that the content is not relevant and adversely lower your ranking.

While this is true across all industries, it is even more relevant for local businesses and medical practices because Google takes location data into consideration when generating results. This is important in location targeting, as some campaigns may be set up to include or exclude certain geographic locations.

While everyone knows that data about themselves is being tracked when they use the internet, most don’t know how that data is being used to customize their online experience. Google uses information it knows about you, your device, your location, and countless other factors when displaying results for your searches. 

At the end of the day, this means that the results you see when you google your name or your practice name, could be drastically different than what a potential patient would see if they performed the same search. 

If You’re Running Ads 

If you are running an ad campaign through Google, it becomes even more important to refrain from googling keywords that you’re hoping to show up for in search. 

Googling your terms can affect everything from Smart Bidding to Ad Scheduling and even drain your budget, depending on how you’ve set up your campaign. 

If you view your ads and click, you’ll be paying for that click. 

 If you click but don’t stay on the page for very long, you’re signaling to google that your page wasn’t a good resource. 

If you view your ad but don’t click on it, you’re harming the data you will receive from Google about click-through-rates and more! 

This is not a point to stress over - coming across your ads a handful of times in regular search engine use isn’t going to affect your overall ad strategy. But, repeatedly performing searches to try to track things or see how they look is damaging your long-term growth strategy and should be avoided. 

How to Get Accurate Data About Search Results 

Now that you know not to Google your practice, the question is, how can you get accurate data about how you and your practice are appearing in search results. 

Google provides several resources to help you gauge your average rank in search results. You can learn your average position, what type of results you’re showing up in, which pages are doing better than others and even data on the devices that people use to access your site. 

Free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are a great place to start when it comes to measuring your success in search engines. From there, you can get more data from a suite of paid tools that allow you to really understand how your website is viewed from a user perspective. 

The information provided by these tools can be challenging to interpret and requires tracking over long periods of time for best results.

There is no shortcut to achieving an accurate representation of how your site is performing to build a comprehensive search strategy around real-world data. 

A Google Strategy You Can Trust 

At MOXY Company, we specialize in Search Engine Optimization and understanding the latest tools and resources on the market so that we can create your search strategy around the current search algorithms and best practices. 

Not only is our team well versed in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, but we provide you with the data you need to be successful in search, without you having to learn multiple new platforms, figure out the complex language around SEO or download weekly graphs. 

Let us do the work for you, so you can focus on what matters - your patients and making sure they can find you online. 

Get in touch with our team of experts today so we can help you show up in your future patients searches.