At times it seems that every second word out of my mouth is Google. We eat, breathe, sleep and.... the rest Google. Why? Well quite simply, The vast majority of searches in the Uk are performed via Google. There is of course competition. You have
Yahoo who are certainly a major player and
MSN and who can ignore the power of Microsoft? In all seriousness, you need to give consideration to both Yahoo and MSN. They have market share and that means potential clients. The client demographic is also shifting and we'll see increased shift over the next few months. Google
tends to get more pure research and search traffic, in other words, people who are looking to learn. However, due to its' partnerships and focus on advertising via Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo can be an excellent place for gaining consumer oriented traffic. MSN will of course become a major force because they have so much money to throw at it and in effect, they are already at war with Google. However, for the time being Google sits top of the pile no matter whose metrics you look at.
So perhaps you are concentrating on trying to achieve great results for search on Google. You check your pet term that you want to rank for and find that you are page one on Google, so you ring your chum to brag. They search and they see no sign of you. You check the way they are spelling the search term, it's correct, and they try again with absolutely no sign of you. So what's happening? Well you have to consider that Google is an amorphous thing. It isn't just one big computer somewhere that you question and it spits out a consistent result. That would be marvellous for us, but it doesn't. First of all there are many
Google data centres round the world. Places where there are huge amounts of computers churning and calculating and spitting out results. The data in these data centres across the world is not consistent, nor are the methods they use to calculate the results you are after. It's almost like a tidal system of information. Then consider the amount of switches and filters that you can control from your browser. Do you select to have results only from the UK? Have you got
Google desktop search enabled on your PC? Were you looking for a commodotised product and did you get a Froogle excerpt at the top of your results?
It's going to get worse, or better, depending on your opinion. We think you'll see increasing focus on localised results. Getting results for your query that are appropriately locally based that is. From the client point of view, that's possibly very good as long as the supplier of product, knowledge or service is up to the job. What that means for you is that you have to consider what your online presence is about. Do you offer good quality information that's easy for all to understand and relevant to your subject area? Are you using the right channel to take your product to (online) market? If you don't know, talk to someone who spends a bit of time working with these things.
That actually reminds me why I started this post. We'd been seing drops in ranlings for some of our key search terms. They're back up if you use google.co .uk and reasonable if you use google.com. We took some remedial action, nothing too drastic, just appropriate. We expect to see more fluctuation as Google makes ongoing change but in general we're ahead of the game and we see good sign up our
internet isps. Hence revenues stay excellent.
