How does a small company generate internet sales when Google is dominated by the big players?

This week’s blog is a little shorter than usual as a lot of my time over the weekend was spent putting together Questions and Answers on redundancy to publish on my blog as I mentioned last week.

Thankyou to those of you who raised redundancy questions. I have replied to all of these personally, and also included your questions and the answers in the above blog articles which I will release this week. I’ve kept you anonymous of course so you don’t receive lots of redundancy marketing material to depress you even further in these miserable times.

As to this week’s article, I don’t actually know the answer to the question I pose so will explain what we’ve done at 186hr to try and achieve online business whilst competing against well resourced major players but if you or any of your contacts can give any insight into what has worked for you or companies you know we would be really interested to hear how they did it.

As part of my 186hr Limited Human Resources consultancy we have put together a number of ‘how to’ guides with a view to selling them over the internet along with HR support to personalise the content to the customer, and that is the area this blog article focuses on.

Our USPs for this part of the business are that the guides are written by a Fellow of the CIPD with over 20 years senior experience, they come with ‘free’ telephone consultation to adapt the guide’s content to a company’s particular situation, and the model policies and letters included in the guides are either CIPD or ACAS recommended documents so can be relied upon to be best practice, legally compliant and well written.

The guides receive great feedback and I am confident they are the best on the market. The main competition insists on expensive annual HR support subscriptions costing thousands of pounds a year or involve eye-watering solicitors’ fees once the customer has been baited by a ‘free’ initial chat.

Because of this I honestly believe we’ve found a gap in the market and it’s a potentially great proposition. But getting sales is proving to be incredibly challenging.

Sorry to sound like an ambulance chaser trying to make money out of other peoples’ misfortune but the guide I am heavily promoting at present is our Practical Guide to Making Redundancies

With furlough coming to an end soon I am sure that many SMEs will be wrestling with this awful decision of whether, and how, to let people go in a legally compliant but compassionate way. The answer for those who don’t currently have HR resource is to use either the above costly options or our guide. But whereas our product is good, getting it in front of these potential customers is proving to be elusive.

This is something we have wrestled with for over 8 months now. Initially I naively thought that the process was to simply put the guide together, sell it on Google and watch the business come rolling in.

But we soon found that our guide was so far down the Google rankings you’d need to employ DI Mooney from Death In Paradise to find it! Yes I watch it too – my guilty lockdown pleasure.

I was recently reminded by Steve McKevitt, an impressive recruiter who briefly joined my team in my interim HR Director role at CHEC, of the old business joke ‘where do you hide a dead body?’ with the answer of course being ‘page 2 of Google!’. Well our redundancy guide is not even at the page 2 dead body stage of Google yet – despite our best efforts we’re the Google equivalent of the fossilised remains of Norbert the Neanderthal, well hidden on page 8!

Our initial actions to try and climb up the Google charts and generate interest was to create a free shorter version of the guide which can be found at https://186hr.co.uk/8-steps-to-making-redundancies/  and to also produce a short video explaining about the guide.

We did this in the hope that companies who saw the video and read the summary would be interested and buy the full product. Google liked the free guide and the video and they have had many views but it became clear that more was needed to get significant levels of business.

So around six months ago we started the 186hr weekly blog covering HR issues we felt would be interesting to SME businesses and HR professionals alike and again, the analytics show that these, and the website, are well liked by Google and we are slowly climbing the rankings in all areas. But it’s not happening quickly enough.

As we are approaching what is likely to be one of the worst periods for redundancies in recent living memory, this week we have been researching the questions people ask Google regarding redundancy, and have created ten questions and answers that we’ll publish over the coming week to improve 186hr’s Google rankings regarding redundancy in general. We’ll do ten more each week until all the questions we can find that have been asked on Google have been answered.

Through networking at Chamber of Commerce and Federation of Small Business events, plus various networking groups I’ve joined I have met some impressive online marketing agencies that can do a lot of the blogging and Search Engine Optimisation work that may help with our goal to improve our rankings, and the work they do sounds very impressive. I must admit I am tempted to buy this service.

But then I spoke to several people wo have paid quite hefty fees for this type of service for over 6 months and haven’t really improved their sales so I’m a little hesitant to go down that route.

I appreciate Rome wasn’t built in a day but it can be frustrating when you know you have a good product but can’t seem to get it in front of potential customers who would benefit as well as it saving them money compared to the other options available.

It seems to me that we are probably going to have to admit defeat and pay Google via one of their Advertising schemes to appear close to the top of the rankings if we are going to get significant levels of business from our guides, but our budget will inevitably be small when compared to the large organisations that dominate the top of the rankings such as Croner, Peninsula and some of the big solicitors. 

So I come back to my original point, in my opinion our product is so much more relevant, and better value, to SMEs than what these behemoth companies can offer but try as we might, getting the product in front of them at present seems about as likely as my beloved Liverpool Football Club having a VAR decision go in their favour!

There must be an answer to this conundrum. If any of you can help or know someone that can then we would be ever so grateful to hear from you. We are absolutely not going to give up on it, we have come too far for that and as Professor Cox and his 90’s band D:Ream will tell you ‘things can only get better’.

Working evenings and weekends on this after long days carrying out my interim role can be a challenge. Fortunately I have a fabulous family and group of friends that keep me going but I won’t lie to you – this is tough!

I suppose that all of this will eventually be an advantage when we do get some traction with the guides, as clearly the odds being stacked so high against start-up companies such as ours trying to compete with well established players with big pockets means that there are huge barriers to entry into this market for any competitors who wish to do something similar to us in future.

So wish us luck and, as always, if we can help further regarding anything in this article or HR in general please do not hesitate to contact us. Have a great week.

Best wishes. Pete.