Google…The Rhyme and The Reason

By Chris Behan

After consulting with countless companies over the years it is easy to understand why business owners and marketing directors are often confounded by how Google ranks websites. This problem is compounded by many Internet marketing firms that take a fairly straightforward topic – how to gain placement in search engines – and make it unnecessarily complicated.

This article will shine a bright light on exactly what Google cares about, demystify its search results, and explore why the free, or "organic," listings it generates are directly tied to Google’s revenue.

Let’s begin by understanding Google’s stated mission: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This sounds like a fairly ambiguous statement, but let’s take a deeper dive into some of the specific words the statement contains.

Information – The word information can mean a lot of different things to different people, but keep this in mind: Google caters to end users, not the business owners trying to reach them. It gives preference to sites that provide users with what they want. So what are they looking for?

Readable Content – Google users are looking for readable content on the page. This sometimes makes business owners cringe, but it’s only logical. A user did not go to Google, conduct a search, and ultimately come to your website because they were not looking for content about your company’s products and services. The good news is that investing in readable content for your website is a very reliable way to gain new placements in any search engine. I am sure that just about everyone reading this article has heard of Wikipedia; it is the best example of a content-rich website that ranks universally in search engines.

Video – While less of a factor than readable content, video can also help improve your site’s placement. In some cases you will even see videos in search engine result pages. Video becomes of greater importance when you have a complex, demonstrable product or service that written content alone could not accurately portray.

Information certainly can be defined in other ways, but the two outlined above are the types that speak to the core of Google’s mission statement.

Useful – This is the second critical part of Google’s mission statement. Here’s the question you need to ask yourself: “Is my content useful?” Or, in other words: “How does it serve the interests of my website’s users?” There are two examples I usually use when helping someone determine if his or her website is “useful”:

Duplicate Content - Does your website contain content that also resides on other websites? This happens more frequently than you would think. For example, if your company resells a manufacturer’s product line and the content on your website came directly from theirs, then it is duplicate content and in turn not useful to Google. Google wants to deliver diversity in its results, not just the same content over and over again. This is one reason why original content is king when it comes to gaining position in search engines.

Small Sites or Redirecting Sites – Small sites simply lack information that users seek. We would all agree that we are more likely to find what we are looking for at a website that has 100 pages of good information than a website with only 10. Furthermore, in an effort to offer more information, some business owners choose to link out to their manufacturer’s websites. Unfortunately, the only message this sends to Google is that your manufacturer’s website contains the information that yours lacks, again making your site less useful.

But why does Google care so much about the "organic," or free listings?

That’s simple. Money! While Google is the best in the world at organizing and serving useful information, that does not get its stock above 500. The pay-per-click ads that appear at the top and right of search engine result pages and throughout its content network do, but without original, useful information, users would never choose Google as their search engine in the first place.

Search engines that cannot organize their free, organic results effectively have a hard time generating ad revenue due to a lack of users. MSN.com is the classic example. More often than not, people have conducted a search in MSN and the results were not relevant, thereby driving more users to other search engines like Google.

In Summary…

Google’s mission statement really boils down to one word: relevant. Is your website relevant to users? Does it contain original, useful information that furthers Google’s stated mission as well as its stock price?

About the Author
Chris Behan is the President and Chief Optimization Officer of Socius Marketing, Inc. (www.sociusmarketing.com), Tampa’s top-ranked search engine optimization company, which provides Internet marketing services to small, medium, and large businesses looking to expand their online presence. With offices in Tampa and Atlanta and clients across the country, Socius Marketing is one of the largest, and fastest-growing online lead generation firms in the United States.  Specializing in organic, white-hat search engine optimization, Chris has more than 11 years of Internet marketing experience and has helped hundreds of companies generate leads online. Chris can be reached at chris@sociusmarketing.com or by calling (813) 282-8300. – Offices Rocky Point, Tampa