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How Google Can Make or Break A Small Business
securitas writes "USA Today's Jefferson Graham reports on how Google affects small business through its rankings and text ads. The feature describes how the fortunes of small companies turned when their Google ranking rose or dropped, as well as the effects of Google's paid search text advertising model. Search Engine Watch says that Google now performs an estimated 80% of the searches (200 million) on the Internet every day. The result is that Google has become a critical part of any online marketing strategy and has spawned a whole Google-optimization industry where consultants can charge $5,000 per site for tweaking. The feature is light on technical details but the stories of those who prospered and suffered due to Google make a good read."
Helpful Tip:
I use Google Alert for my personal site. I use it to track when other pages link to my site.
Per their About page:
With Google Alert, you can automatically keep track of anything on the web! Google Alert is the web's leading automated search and web intelligence solution. It runs daily Google searches for you and emails you when new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or projects they are involved in. You can use Google Alert to keep track of any time someone mentions your name on the web. You can also track mentions of your website, your place of work, or your favorite hobby or celebrity -- the uses are limited only by your imagination. Click here for some great search ideas and some useful tips. The Frequently Asked Questions provide more detailed information about Google Alert. Selected as BBC's Website of the Day and USA Today's Hot Site, the free Google Alert service enables people in over 120 countries to stay up to date with their interests. Users include journalists, marketers, IT professionals, lawyers, doctors, salespeople, educators, researchers, and government employees. Click to start using Google Alert right away - it's easy and free!
My Tech Posts on Twitter
If you want to spend money on better placement, send it to the people who are providing the service -- Google -- and buy up ads.
I've paid for ads on google to try it out, and was pretty damned pleased.
The process was simple - you tell it what words to bring up your ad, how specific like "games" versus "pc games" versus "first person shooter pc games". The more generic, the greather the chance of getting clicked, but the greater the cost. The ad is unobtrusive - just a text link (not a gigantic banner that will offend everybody else).
You can specify how many ads to pay for in advance. So if you only have enough money for 1000 clicks, it stops at 1000 - and you can either renew, or just leave it be.
Overall, it's just simple. The article mentions the bed and breakfast "Honeymoon Haven" or whatever that was worried about the service - I'd tell her not to be worried at all.
And I think that's why Google is doing the best so far: it's simple. No huge Yahoo like directories that make little sense, or extra ads cluttering the way. It gives me what I want, and if I want more, I click on it.
Perfect? No - some sites are optimizing themselvers to annoyance, like entering "'resident evil' walkthrough" and getting in the top 10 links annoying search engines or porn sites adding words and linking to each other to build up their Google score. But for 90% of the time, it's "good enough".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Leave litigious out of it, and look what you get.
I just checked Google, and got 39000 hits on "roll forming". Probably the bottom 30000 of these were various articles saying "We built our airplane parts using roll forming" or whatever. But yes, Google tries to rank interesting articles first, without actually using humans to determine interestingness, so writing an article that's not only interesting but gets other people's web sites to link to it _because_ it's interesting is a good start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and in a new twist, the latest version of the google toolbar returns results with the page one results being filled with nothing but ads related to the search. you have to go to page 2 for the standard results.
The solution's simple -- switch to Mozilla and install the Googlebar -- it contains even more functionality than Google's official toolbar for IE and returns results as though you'd searched from Google's main page.
Or, if you don't want to switch browsers, you can install the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search even without a browser window.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Take a look at this usenet thread where someone describes a similar problem. In this case, it appears that the person was infected with the "QHosts Trojan". Message #3 in the thread gives some links.
Sounds like you had some crappy ad copy. They don't ban you for "too few clicks", they ban you for "too low of a clickthrough percentage". They'd rather show an ad with more people clicking it, rather than waste their ad space on something that nobody ever clicks. Write something more relevant and you'll get a whole lot better than 0.5% (some of mine are in the 10% CTR neighborhood).
Josh Woodward
If you are just talking about small businesses that have survived for the last 20 years, yes, Google does not break these small businesses, but if you are talking about small businesses that were established after ... mid-90s, then yes, Google can break these small businesses.
... if Google decides to tweak its algo and your rankings suffer, your business can break. Your small business can break. Google can break small businesses. It happens.
Internet is THE media today; a lot of businesses utilize media to market their business. Sometime it's essential to their survival. So these new small businesses reply on the internet to market their business. Today, it can mean that having good rankings in Google. So