If you are a CEO of a small-cap company and don’t have a search engine strategy to target and attract new investors to your story, then are seriously hampering your company. In fact, you are probably guilty of being downright incompetent. (If you are an AGORACOM client, then you are a search engine wizard 🙂 )
If it’s empirical evidence that you are after (like there isn’t enough already), then you’ll be very interested to read the following quote from JP Morgan in reference to Comscore’s May search engine report:
“Total US core search volume increased 32.9% Y/Y in May. The total growth in the first two months of 2Q accelerated to 36.1% Y/Y.”
Translation? People are using search more and more everyday. Investors are people. As a CEO, I guarantee you are using search engines to find information everyday. If so, getting you to incorporate search engine marketing into your investor relations should not be difficult. Why? If you use search engines to find information, then simply start using search engines to be found.
Regards,
George
[…] Small Cap CEO Lesson: Is Search Important To Investor Relations? Yes, Total Searches Hit An All-Time… […]
Excellent article. Right to the point. It befuddles me how CEOs and management teams cannot seem to understand this simple principle. The world is changing so fast around them that they don’t even see it.
In the USA, Marketwire clients (IR/PR practitioners) have really started to see the benefits of SEO for their press releases. Small cap companies that have trouble getting eyeballs on their news and story are starting to take advantage of the 2 goal process: 1) better search engine rankings and 2) drive traffic back to their site.
In Canada however it has been a slower adoption. Our larger cap clients get it, keywording appropriate products and services. Small caps however have traditionally just been looking to meet their basic disclosure requirements and target appropriate analysts (which is fine) but why not give your press releases a stronger online presence since that is where investors are absorbing their news?
David, how are you finding Web 2.0 investor relations adoption amongst Marketwatch clients? Do they understand the power of search? Are they listening to your optimization strategies?
What % of your clients are implementing these tools?
Regards,
George
George, fantastic post and so very true.
Long are the days when investors would open the business section of their daily newspaper and flip to the back to look up ticker symbols and their daily valuations.
Now, investors will just enter a ticker symbol in Yahoo Finance and get all the information they need. Stock performance, press releases, analyst ratings etc.
It’s important for companies to understand proper search parameters. Attempting to optimize key words such as “mining” or “small cap” won’t get you too far. Recognizing relevancy and appropriate content is the first step. Company news on high traffic sites like Agoracom.com is a very powerful seo tool as well.
Here’s a list of additional tools that can be used to help with your search engine optimization/marketing strategy’s: http://www.marketwire.com/mkt/PDF/SEO%20Tips.pdf
Google’s algorithms are always changing, however relevancy and content will always be king!