By Carl Weiss
With right around 80% of the
worldwide search market, Google is the King Kong of search engines. According to ComScore, 1n 2011, consumers
made 4,717,000,000 searches per day on Google.
That accounted for more than 65% of all searches made worldwide. In comparison, the number two search engine,
Yahoo, only accounted for 16% of the search market in 2011. Since then, Google
has gobbled up even more of the search engine market and it’s getting stronger
all the time. Aside from being one of
the most profitable companies on the planet (their Q3 earnings in 2012 were in
excess of $14 billion), they also own a number of other wildly popular sites,
such as YouTube. When it comes to succeeding online, you need to make friends
with this largest of all online primates.
As the saying goes, “What do
you feed an 800 lb gorilla? Anything it
wants.”
In case you haven’t noticed,
Google is one picky eater. He wants what
he wants. And what he mostly wants is to
be fed his own brands. Therefore, when
you think video, think YouTube. When you
think blogs, think Blogger. When you
think social network, think Google+. If
you want the gorilla to like you, then you have to feed him what he likes to
eat on a regular basis.
The Game has Changed, but the Name Remains the Same
When Google started back in
1998, there were a number of viable search engines that offered the opportunity
to create page 1 placement in as little as 24 hours. Back then, everything you needed to generate
page 1 placement was right on your homepage.
In 98 there were no blogs, no social networks and no YouTube. Bandwidth was so tight that it could take
several minutes for a website to load if it sported a lot of graphics. So all the search engine spiders had to use
to make their ranking decision was contained on-site.
Jump ahead fifteen years and
while many of the names remain the same, the whole game had radically
changed. Nowadays on-site SEO only
accounts for 25% of the ranking criteria used by search engines. The other 75% is made up of blog posts,
social posts, videos, podcasts, etc. In
other words, in today’s World Wide Web, content is king.
Here’s where many people fall
off the wagon. You see, it isn’t enough
just to have blogs, videos and social networks connected to your website. If you want to succeed at search engine
marketing, you need to create content on a regular and continuous basis. With blogs you need to post at least once per
week. When it comes to social networks,
you need to feed the need on a daily basis.
As for videos, the more the merrier.
If you’re going to play the game, you might as well
play to win.
When it comes to working the
web to win, there are winners and there are losers. Just as in the casinos, the players with the
most chips tend to dominate the game. In
the case of the Internet, this means that big businesses can muscle their way
to the top of most searches. That’s
because they can afford to hire armies of bloggers, and social networkers, and
video producers galore to create content, content and more content.
Most small businesses on the
other hand find it hard to come up with enough chips (re content) to even get
into the game. Does that mean that small business owners
should throw in the towel? Hardly. What it does mean is that you need to find a
way to if not exactly level the playing field, then at least tip it in the
right direction so that you can walk away with more chips than you started
with.
Together We Stand.
Divided We Fall.
The same principles that
built our nation can be used to build your web presence. What I am talking about is people power and
guerilla marketing. Use people power to
create an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” mentality and use
guerilla tactics to hit the big guys where they ain’t.
Having trouble writing a
weekly blog? Either outsource the task
or get a blog buddy. What’s a blog
buddy? That’s someone who will read and
more importantly comment upon your blogging efforts week in and week out. (It’s what used to be called an editor.) When writing a weekly blog it sometimes gets
hard to see the forest for the trees. A
blog buddy can let you know if you are going off the rail, or are chasing the
wrong story. They can help you clean up
your copy and can even suggest new blog topics.
The catch is that in order to avail yourself of these services you need
to either pay for or trade out these services.
(My CFO is my blog buddy.)
Writ large you can use these
same guerilla tactics to create a peer group that not only produces, but reads,
comments upon and reposts each other’s blogs to the social nets. This is the concept we used to create Club W
Cubed, the Internet blogging, social networking and search engine marketing
club. We recognized the high value that
Google placed on blogs, reviews, recommendations and reposts and created a
mechanism that allows members to efficiently provide these services to one
another.
Lights, Camera, Online Action
Another thing that Google
loves is called mixed media. This
consists of visual elements such as photos and videos. A properly optimized video can jump from
YouTube to Google page 1 way faster than a properly optimized website. Plus a video is five times as likely to
generate a click as is a website. Video
content doesn’t need to be lengthy or flashy.
A sixty second video that is entertaining and /or informative is all
that it takes to get into the game. You
can either hire the job out or you can shoot your own videos using your laptop,
tablet or smartphone. (Please invest in a tripod if you plan on using your
cellphone, since there is nothing more annoying to a viewer than Shaky-Cam.)
Even better is the fact that
YouTube now includes a complete editing suite on the site that anyone can use
to spruce up their efforts. Everything
from image stabilization to royalty free music tracks are there for the
taking. So there’s no need to spend a
bundle to let out your inner Steven Spielberg.
The Table is Set
When it comes to putting on
the feedbag for the 800 lb gorilla, it doesn’t take bushels baskets of cash to
bring home the bacon. All it takes is
patience, persistence and a bunch of bananas to get you into the game and on
Google’s good side.
Carl Weiss has been feeding the gorilla
since its birth in 1998. His company WSquared Media Group specializes in helping companies generate online
results. He also owns and operates
Jacksonville Video and can be heard weekly on his Working the Web Radio Show
that is broadcast on Blog Talk Radio every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern.
One thing I have learned is that if you don't feed the gorilla, then he won't feed you.
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