I was sitting up there on the river Ebro the other day fishing (or rather “blanking” would be a better description) and getting pretty bored when I began to think. I make no excuse about this, as thinking during leisure time is a common human failing.
Anyhow, I began to chew around with the Google success story and the brilliant psychology behind it all.
Dredging back into the far history of modern civilisation (around 10 years ago) we had the Internet and online services to help us find the document we were looking for. Now Google was around then, along with a host of others, actually providing quite a useful service and all trying to find a way to make a few pennies out of it. They could not really charge the searchers so the only way was through advertising.
Most tried selling banner ads and some, like Yahoo, charged a fee for putting you in their index – and then Sponsored Listings came along!
Google were not the first to try it by any means and they obviously thought it through really carefully. Finally they pitched in with their amazing, unstoppable strategy and, in one single accomplishment they simultaneously invented –
Truthfully, it could be said that optimisation was around from the beginning but it never had the importance that it has now but lets just think about how
SEO engineers warrant their fees.
Lets take, for example, Company X that is spending $500 a month on Adwords and getting 1,000 hits. Meanwhile Google is publishing all kinds of advice about how to improve your position and ranking so Company X decides to give it a try.
They end up spending quite a lot of money using their own staff but, because there are so many whys, what fors, perhaps and maybes about the whole thing that nobody really understands it all – not even Google.
Company X then decides to employ an
SEO expert, who is a bit better at second-guessing Google and – success, they are getting their 1,000 hits a month for (say) $400.
Now their competitors see this and also go to a
SEO firm. Eventually there are so many
SEO experts competing for the same keywords and the whole thing is becoming so labour intensive that they have to put their fees up to $800 a month.
Company X then say “To hell with all this, we could be getting our clicks with Adwords for $500” and go back to Google only to find that the price has risen to $1,000 a month – so on and so on.
Overall, who are Google’s competitors? Perhaps Yahoo and MSN - but no real danger there, as Google are in a fairly unassailable position. The
SEO sector? – not all, they are Google’s strongest supporters!
Google cannot possibly have all results in AdWords, in fact they cannot even have a tiny percentage of them because they need the generic results to pad out the pages and provide an incentive to get within the first 10 results (or even higher).
As long as there are
SEO firms charging big fees to get their clients there then Google will be able to make equally high charges for AdWords.
Perhaps it was all trial an error and Google just lucked on to it – I think not!
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Google Brilliance? 
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