Google your own company name

You type your own web address into the browser from memory. You have probably never typed your own company name into Google, because why would you: you know where your site is.

Your customer does not. They saw your van at a set of lights, got your quote that evening, or heard your name from a friend across a kitchen table. Now they are on the sofa with a phone in their hand, typing in the name they remember. They are not looking for a plumber. They are looking for you.

Somebody who types your trade into a search box is still choosing. Somebody who types your name in has already chosen and is checking whether they can live with it. That results page is the last step before the call. And it is a group photograph you never posed for: every row on it was put there by somebody, and most of them never asked you anything.

Your own line is the quietest one on the page

Top to bottom. Somewhere near the top is your own website: a blue heading and two lines of description. Very often the heading reads "Home - Company Ltd", or simply "Home", with a sentence underneath that a designer left in as a placeholder.

Those two lines are the page's meta title and meta description; what they are is explained in the first sheet of words in one line. What matters here is something else: they are the only place on the whole results page where the words are yours. And they are almost always empty.

Two more things. Google may rewrite your heading if it decides the page says something different, and the small links underneath it, "Prices", "Contact", "About", are chosen by Google rather than by you. You supply the material; it decides what to show of it.

On the right, and on a phone right at the top, sits the map block with your business profile: opening hours, a rating, photos, a phone number. How to claim it and what actually counts in it is an article of its own. One observation: in a search for your name, that block is often larger than your website and gets read first.

The state says more about you than you do

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board publishes, every quarter, each company's paid taxes, its turnover as calculated from its VAT returns, and its headcount. Your annual report is public in the business register. The tax arrears query is public and works by name. And alongside the state's own pages sit several private companies that gather the same data up and turn up under your name in search.

We will say this plainly, because it surprises almost every owner: your turnover for last quarter is one click away from a customer. Not because anybody goes looking for it, but because that row exists under your name and the eye passes over it.

Your customer does not read that row the way you read it. You see a figure and wonder whether it is large enough. They see that the company exists, that it has employees and that its taxes are paid, and they move on. The number itself rarely does you harm. The harm is done when the state's row is the only row that says anything about you at all.

Somebody else's advert can sit above your name

Sometimes the first row on the page is marked as an advert and does not carry your name. It carries a competitor's, because they bought your company name as a keyword.

This is allowed. Anyone may run an advert on any keyword, including one that happens to be your name. If your name is a registered trade mark you can complain about the text of the advert where it uses your name, but not about the fact that the keyword was bought. The searcher sees their advert before your site, and some people click wherever the eye lands first.

The antidote is a dull one: your own advert on your own name. It brings in no new customers; it keeps the ones you already have on your own page. Whether to do it is a decision rather than a question of price, and it is not a decision you can make before looking to see whether anybody is standing there. If nobody is, you now know that too.

The rows you left there yourself and forgot

The bottom half of the page is your own history.

• The old website on the old domain. The new site was built at a new address and the old one stayed standing, because somebody is still paying its invoice. Old prices, old phone number, old name.
• The "coming soon" page. A domain registered for one idea, and a placeholder still promising that something is on its way.
• A job advert from years ago, which a portal is still holding. All it tells a customer is that you were once short of people.
• An entry on a review site with two reviews on it, one of them poor, whose existence you did not know about.
• The images tab. Your logo, one photo of an old office, and something belonging to a company with a similar name.

And the Facebook page whose last post is years old. That row does not say you are on Facebook; it says when you last had something to say. What such a page can and cannot do is worked through in another article.

None of these rows is false. Every one of them was true at some point. That is exactly why they are there: you moved on, and the page remembers.

What you can change and what you cannot

An honest division, because most of this page cannot be "optimised away" by anybody, whatever you are promised.

Yours to change:

• Your own page's heading and description. For the heading, what you do and where; for the description, the sentence you would say to a customer on the phone. Google may still rewrite it, but mainly when the heading says something other than the page does.
• The business profile. Ten minutes a month, set out in the map article.
• Old pages. If the domain is yours, point it at the new site. If the page sits on somebody else's server, write to whoever hosts it and ask for it to come down. There is nothing to ask Google here: while a page is up somewhere, it exists.
• An about page that answers what the register cannot: the register says what you are, that page says who. How to write it so that it says anything at all is a subject of its own.
• Your own advert on your own name, if the search showed somebody standing in front of you.

Not yours to change:

• The state's data. It is public and it stays public. The only move available is to put your own answer in front of it, so that a customer reads you first and the figure second.
• A tax arrear. It shows whatever you do. A clean, current, specific website beside it says more than silence, because silence says something too.
• What Google shows of your heading, which sublinks it picks, and the order the rows come in.

You cannot make the picture clean. You can change how you yourself appear in it, and that is usually the part that is missing.

Search the way a stranger searches

A search from your own computer and your own account is not what a customer sees: a signed-in search takes your past behaviour into account, and you have opened your own site hundreds of times.

1. A private window, or signed out. That gets you roughly what a stranger gets.
2. On a phone, not a computer. Your customer is on a phone. The first screen there is short, and an advert plus the map block often take the whole of it.
3. The name as people misspell it. Without the Estonian letters, run together and split apart, without the legal suffix. A customer types what they heard, not what is in the register.
4. The name plus "reviews" and the name plus "experience". Those are the two searches run by somebody who already has your quote and is still hesitating.
5. The same question to an assistant. Ask what it knows about your company and watch where it takes its sentence from. How to do that, and why the answer wavers, is set out separately.

The whole round takes a quarter of an hour. Usually it is done in five minutes, because the first screen has already said everything.

Five rows and three words

This week: run that search and write down the first five results. Beside each one write who put it there: you, Google, the state, some private company, a competitor, or your own self of three years ago. And beside each one write one word out of three: change, cover, accept.

The honest part. We sell search work, and it usually starts from a list exactly like that. But the first half of it is nearly always doable without us: a heading, a profile, one redirect and one about page. If the second half sticks, the search audit is free and looks at the same page, only for longer.

You do not send invitations to a group photograph. You choose neither who is in it nor who stands in which corner. But one thing you do choose: whether you are in it as you are now, or as you last happened to be.