The “search engine game” is a multi-billion dollar industry on which the fate of many businesses seem to rest
The last article I wrote gave some of the awesome statistics associated with size of the Internet and the number of searches that are conducted both in the United States and worldwide. And I focused on Google’s terrific dominance of that search engine game. So this article is a continuation of that because we need to add some information about what this means to you and your business. This is the subject of “search engine optimization” or perhaps more realistically, “Google optimization.” This is something you need to know about.
I will add a proviso here, that search engine traffic is only one method of getting potential clients to your website. It is not and cannot be the be-all-and-end-all for a business seeking growth and stability. Even Google just said so (but finish reading this article before you go there). So bearing that in mind, let’s continue.
To the right here, you will see a typical Google search engine result page (SERP for short) for a general search on “dog food.” Now because I didn’t search for “buy dog food” or some such thing that indicated I was interesting in purchasing a product, I got a mixed bag of results – both information on dog food and who sells it.
But the reason I am using this result is to show the parts of the page as some people don’t realize that a large part of it is made up of paid ads, especially the first few listings. That’s how Google makes its money – Google Adwords – and our own Ronda Jordan will undoubtedly do an article about them because she is a Google Adwords specialist.
Now if someone clicks on one of those ads, Google makes money. If they don’t, they don’t.
What you and everyone else is fighting for are those other results – the free ones or as they are called, “organic” results. They are called “organic” because they are generated by the Google search program without interference by human hands. It gives you the impression, using such a term “organic,” that these results are natural, healthy, non-GMO, raised without hormones and unsullied by man. Of course, the truth is that Google’s human hands are continually making changes to their search program (the fancy word is “algorithm,” a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, esp. by a computer.) to tweak the results. It is totally human in its design, origin and execution – there is nothing organic about it. I recommend a short video by Google’s main spokesperson to the web community, Matt Cutts, for information about how Google gets its results.
Now the really depressing part for businesses is that despite the millions of websites and trillions of searches, the fantastic numbers we’ve already gone over (you can see from my example SERP that Google has in fact some 648 million results for this search), that for any one search it is only that first page – the first nine or ten results that drive traffic to your website. The unfortunate truth is studies have shown that 36% of users click on the first organic result and 76% click on one of the first five and roughly 92% are out by the end of the first page. It’s a sort of first page or go home sort of thing. (Mmm. Is that why Google has three ads at the top that appear to look like regular search results to the uneducated user?)
So if you are in an industry or business with more than ten competitors, something has to give if you depend only on web searches.
However, in relation to the search engine game, this is where “Google optimization” comes in.
A whole industry has been built around trying to guess how Google’s search program decides which results end up on that first page and how to get business listings onto that first page (well, as high as possible). Google doesn’t tell anyone the specifics of how their program decides this – they instead publish guidelines that people should follow to get the best results.
And there are those who will follow Google’s guidelines and there are those who try to do things to beat Google – meaning to trick Google’s search program into ranking a website higher in results than Google would ordinarily place it. Google really doesn’t like that and within the last year and a half has been going to great lengths to weed out such practices and punish those websites which practice them.
But these are topics for further interesting articles.
If you have questions about the above, feel free to contact me at al@www.targetpublic-com-staging.k0bdwxs7-liquidwebsites.com.
