Google's "Something Different" Offers Your Competitors Brand to Customers Looking For You. Should You Care?

A couple months ago, I talked over on Mike Moran’s blog about whose brand Google wants to build. (I’ll give you three guesses).

So, today, I was doing a little research and ran across this, ahem, nifty little feature Google offers:

Yep. Google thought it might be nice if you tried “something different.” Y’know, like the competitors of the brand I’d searched. Nice, huh? Brand marketers are going to love this. Except, y’know, not at all.

As I mentioned in the Biznology piece, this doesn’t make Google “evil.” They’re just trying to find the best answer for their customer. And, sometimes, your competition is a better answer for your customer. But only Macy’s Santa Claus is thrilled with the idea of sending customers to another store when his place of employ doesn’t have exactly the right toy for little Johnny.

So, what can you do about this? Here are a couple of ideas:

• Continue to put emphasis on long-tail terms. So far, it looks like Google is only doing this for brand-level terms, not products or locales. Which, makes a certain sense. A customer looking for a brand is likely further up the purchase funnel than one looking for a specific product.
• Encourage your customers to search for products and locales. Just the logical extension of the above but worth thinking about.
• Don’t drop your paid search ads on brand terms. Yes, I know this plays right to Google’s benefit. But evidence suggests it plays to yours, too. (Yes, your mileage may vary. But, brand terms often work for brands and increase the visibility of your site when a customer searches those branded terms).
• Continue to look for other customer acquisition channels. Look, search isn’t going away anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean you should put all your eggs in Google’s basket.
• Don’t panic. Yes, this is a challenge. But, remember, if Google is showing your competitors to customers searching for you, they’re also likely showing you to customers searching for your competitor. (At least it looks this way in the quick testing I conducted). Depending on the number of competitors for your brand, you’re getting more exposure than you’re giving up. That’s (possibly) a Good Thing.

What do you think? Are there other ways to put Google’s “Something New” to work for your brand? Let me know in the comments below.

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