How To Keep Up With Google’s Search
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/article-small-businesses-grapple-with-the-decline-of-googles-organic-search/
It’s interesting. You might think that as Google becomes more popular, a new website might get more traffic. After all, if more people are using Google to search for things day in and day out, why wouldn’t more searches be funneled through a certain website? Well, one reason might be saturation. As Google’s search engine has become more popular, more websites have sprung up as well. So, Google has to index more websites, and more websites are competing for a spot on the first page of a Google search.
Another reason might be that Google itself has changed, as the article linked above points out. Since its inception, Google has added services to its repertoire of products. Google Images, Google Maps, etc. have all now become attached to a Google search. The article observes that the first page of a Google search now days is often filled with Google-related results. This didn’t use to happen. So called “organic results” (non-ad-based, non-Google-based) used to be almost the only set of results on the first page of a Google search. Now a large amount of space on the first page of a Google Search is taken up by results from Google Images, Google Maps, etc. As the article points out, this has made it harder for small businesses to get themselves out there. In the past few years, fewer clicks have been “organic” clicks (clicks that direct you to an “organic search result”, such as the website of a small business).
So, how can small businesses adapt to this new environment? Well one way is through SEO, or search engine optimization, as was briefly mentioned in class. Search engine optimization revolves around analyzing how a search engine, such as Google, ranks pages. If you can figure out exactly how Google ranks every page it indexes, then you can “game the system”. You could theoretically build the “perfect website” such that the website is the first result in one, two, or even more given searches. This, of course, is not realistic. Google simply does not release to the public the all the details of how they rank pages. We do know a general idea of the Page Rank algorithm, as was shown in class, but there are many other details missing. Search engine optimization then tries to take a best guess at those details.
For example, the article talks about how having a sort of question-and-answer-type of page on your website may help boost a website in terms of its page rank. Why might this help? Well, on a Google search result page, there is a “feature snippet” box, or a part of a search result page that appears before the organic results. It does not always appear, but when it does, the search is in the form of a question. So, logically, if you have questions and answers related to your website on some page on your website, Google might see those Q&A-type sections and rank your page higher when it comes to displaying results for a question-type search.
Another SEO trick that might drive more traffic to a small business’s website is getting the business into Google’s other services. For example, business owners can create a free listing for their business inside of Google Business, adding their business both to Google Business and to Google Maps. Because Google search results have been populated more and more with Google-related results, by getting your business into other Google services, you may get more traffic to your website.
So, although it may be becoming harder for your website to appear as an “organic result” in a Google search, thanks to SEO, there certainly seem to be ways to improve your situation.