Why Google?
There are other search engines. However, Google has over 85% of the global search engine market. Microsoft’s Bing has about 6%. So Google is the one we’re going to pay attention to, because it’s where your customers are.
You may have tried paying for Google advertising before. If so, what was your experience? Poor? Mixed? People who ‘dabble’ in paying to advertise their website on Google might not have got results and so write the platform off. But remember that Google made $160 billion dollars last year. That huge amount of revenue allows them to take on equally huge projects, like mapping the world from eye-level or developing new robots and self-driving cars, but none of these cool projects are responsible for much of their income. 70% of all of Google’s earnings comes from paid advertising. Google attracts nearly 90% of the world’s search traffic. If you want to know or find anything, you Google it.
And because of this, if you want to capture a customer while they are searching for something, Google is still the best place to do it.
There are two ways to get your website (or a link to your Etsy shop or Facebook page) to the top of Google’s search results. The first is what we call ‘organic’ ranking. This is where out of all the sites Google could show someone, it rates your site so highly that it puts it right at the top of its results; or at least in the top three. Getting your site to number one on Google for a target search phrase almost guarantees success, and that is exactly why you are very unlikely to get there for free.
If your whole business strategy relies on you getting to the top of Google, or even the first page, without paying for it then I hope you’ve got something else to pay the rent for the next few years. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible – someone HAS to be number one on Google, but it’s unlikely to be you. You either need to be the only person in the world selling what you sell or you need to become a full-time expert in building up your site’s credibility, creating unique and remarkable content and building relationships with other sites and communities over a number of years. You might run a vegan recipe blog – but if you search on Google for ‘Vegan Recipes’ you will get 1,550,000,000 results. And you’re going to have to fight BBC Food, Jamie Oliver and Good Housekeeping to get anywhere near the top three.
Even if you are aiming to get to the top of Google for a really specialist search term such as ‘vegan restaurants in Bristol’, Trip Adviser, Happy Cow and Vegan Food & Living magazine are in the top spots. Why? Because these are long-established websites that have proven their authority, with hundreds of thousands of pages on their sites. Google can see that people interact with these sites, that lots of people link to them, and that they are generating new content every hour of the day. Google puts these websites at the top because they are likely to give a user everything they are looking for all in one place.
And this is why Google makes so much money from paid adverts. The only way that you can get past this log-jam at the top of their organic results is to pay. And over the years, Google have evolved how they display their adverts to the point where many users may not even realise they are clicking on ads. Let’s take a look at Google’s front page at the moment:
I just did a test search for ‘vegan sweets’. Google says it has about 1,800,000,000 results to show me. That’s a lot of vegans with sweet tooths out there! What you may not have realised though is that the first ‘organic’ result on Google (eg the first result that isn’t a paid advert) is actually a third of the way down the page. You want to put in all those years of hard work to get to the top of Google you say? Well, you just keep on scrolling down until you find that top unpaid-for result. Everything that Google first displays on your screen when the search results load are paid-for adverts; to see anything else you have to scroll down.
