Friday Protip: Search For Your Product Like a Customer

By Sanya Weathers

You spend so much time generating content, building relationships, and planning campaigns that you’re at the risk of losing the forest for the trees. Schedule a monthly task on your calendar to go back to basics. If you were a random person who has just heard of your product, what would you do?

Google and Facebook would be involved.

When you google your product, don’t forget variations. You might love the first page results you see when you google the title, but you might be horrified at what you see when you use “product title quests” or “product title developers.”

If you are horrified by your results, go straight to your in-house expert on SEO (search engine optimization, for the uninitiated). There are lots of things you can do to make sure the good stuff is on top. The number one thing you can do, of course, is to be proactive. Keep your official site active and brimming with linkbait. Keep a steady flow of content to fan sites and web media. If there’s a particular area that constantly returns negative results, fix it – and invite the most visible parts of your community to be part of the solution.

Don’t neglect Facebook, by the way. I searched for a number of popular games before I wrote this post, and found multiple “fan pages” for every product. The top one wasn’t always the official one, either. If you’re going to have a fan page, you need to set it up before your fans do, because the first page in existence has an advantage. But if you missed that hurdle, you still have one big advantage. You can promote it on your site, in your product, and reward users who join your page with coupons, tips, advance notice of contests/betas, and more.

Google and Facebook abhor a vacuum. If you don’t fill the space, someone else will.