Weekly Column: 2017-03-17
In an age where you can look up anything online, it is crucial for online marketing to produce top search results to give you great exposure, especially with the search engine giant Google. It is a given that you will pop up in the search results, but your exposure to customers changes depending on what page you’re on, which can have a decisive impact on your business. Most businesses hope their contents and websites will appear on the first search page of Google. Since there are many people who want the same thing, the competition is fierce and getting on the first page becomes more difficult than plucking a star from the sky.
This is why we need to take a closer look at the elements of Google Search. A good understanding of these elements will give you a clear understanding how to optimize the search engine and you will be able to see the different ways other businesses get good results.
Google’s main goal is to deliver accurate search results quickly. In order to do that, Google needs to collect accurate information, so it sends out a program called Spider to each site do something called crawling. It first collects information on the web page, then follows other links on that web page to other web pages. On the new web page spiders follow the links to yet other pages to gather information. However, in this way, there is a vast amount of information which contains duplicates as well as contents that are inadequate to present. Since it is impossible to present all of this information as is through what is called indexing, the information is prearranged in advance so that when someone puts in a search query, it can quickly pull up the information.
When information is presented in this manner, the Google search engine is tasked with showing certain contents first and does it in a way called search modeling. This is done by showing the most suitable contents first by accurately identifying the needs of the search user. Experts calculate the search preference at this stage through various tasks and by applying feedback which determines what is shown on the top search.
It is true that the top results on Google Search have a huge impact on marketing performance. Because of this, those who do not have knowledge in this field will pay for things such as Google Adwords in order to get a certain amount of clicks per keyword in their online marketing. That's not to say that this technique doesn't work, but the most efficient marketing is to minimize costs while maximizing results. Of course, it would be nice to have a sufficient amount of money to invest in advertising such as Google Adwords, but if the results are not living up to the investment, then it's a failed marketing plan.
You can increase your exposure in search results by using similar keywords to get near the top results if your exposure is weak due to competition vs just focusing on the top search results. Another way to increase your exposure and get top results is to have content that people can identify with or increase your brand trust by responding to feedbacks and comments.
Unfortunately, there are people who call themselves experts but are abusing the situation. They claim all you have to do is pay a certain amount of money to increase your exposure and get top results. What this does is deliberately increase the number of clicks from those searching by constantly putting in the same search query and manipulating clicks. However, while this technique may raise your search results temporarily, it will be short-lived. This is not an approach that will continually bring the results you are looking for because it's not an accurate search. In the end, you cannot say that this is a very efficient use of your money.
Ultimately, accurate and reliable content is more important than just getting the top search results. This is because when you have content that people identify with, that they can comment on and share, there is greater feedback and increased reliability which naturally leads to getting more exposure and top search results. As I mentioned earlier, the first thing Google’s algorithm does is to pull up accurate information in the shortest amount of time possible. Many people still work toward and emphasize top search results which I am not denying its importance, but I believe it is a better approach to decide what your priorities are and go from there.
Online marketing is not about getting ahead of your competitors at this moment in time. If you steadily grow your presence for the long-haul, you will ultimately get ahead of your competitors, who spend a great deal of time getting ahead in the short run, without investing a lot of money. Although this may seem complicated, the concept is actually surprisingly simple. Rather than focusing too much time on the top results, focus more on reliability so you will be able to steadily move forward and be able to engage in effective online marketing.