Google Finance links blogs and brands

Google Finance means that people are just a click away from blogs about your brand…I was at the Financial Marketing inaugural The Next Generation workshop yesterday, presenting on the impact of branding in search engine marketing.

One point I made that really got a lot of conversations going was that “blogs are only one click away from a search on your brand in Google”.

What I was talking about was Google Finance which is US focused at the moment but is likely to roll out in Europe as well. As well as all the financial and market information you would expect there is a section linking to blog posts about the company.

It brings home to me (once again) how important social media is becoming for brands and in search engines.

On the same panel as myself was Heather Hopkins of Hitwise who was kind enough to mention me on her blog and made some very interesting points, specifically about eBay, which has a Google Finance link as the first result on the Google search engine:

In preparing for a presentation yesterday on financial services marketing, I noticed that the term “ebay” is the third highest term sending visits to the Business & Finance Stocks and Shares category. Google Finance is the 6th ranked site receiving visits from searches for “ebay” in the past four weeks, receiving 0.69% of all UK searches for the term which accounted for 33% of visits from search to Google Finance last week. Note that the term “ebay” is the highest volume search term in the UK – ranking ahead of “bebo” and “argos”.