Should You Be Worrying About Google?

Search engine optimization is a process that has developed in recent years. As the marketing potential of search engine giants like Google was recognized, marketers started to believe that Google held all the answers to successful online marketing. Because millions of consumers use Google every day, it’s perfectly understandable that marketers would try their best to rank well on a Google results page. Obviously, if your website appears early on a results page, more traffic is going to flow toward your website.

With new search engine bigwigs flooding the market and constant changes to Google’s algorithm causing SEO headaches, many marketers are wondering if they’ve put too much emphasis on Google and its chunk of the consumer market. Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, and micromanaging content based on algorithm updates can be exhausting and inefficient. The trick, however, is to focus less on which search engine is more powerful and focus on the big picture regarding search engine optimization.

Why Search Engines Are So Important

Search engines are important from a marketing standpoint simply because so many consumers use search engines to gather information. If consumers didn’t have to use search engines to organize web results, nobody would care how Google evaluated web content or be so preoccupied with Google’s clear monopoly of the search engine market. However, the web is simply too flooded with content for the average consumer to make heads or tails of the information contained on the Internet. Search engines are necessary, and this necessity means that marketers must care about how they are evaluating websites.

The Consumer-Google Relationship

For years, Google has been the only search engine that marketers spent time evaluating. Marketers understood that Google commanded one of the biggest chunks of the consumer market. Millions and millions of consumers visited Google every day to perform billions of web searches. Because Google is so close to a search engine monopoly, other search engine algorithms are not as important. Marketers determined, sometimes accurately, that ranking high in Google was the only immediately effective way to drive traffic to a website. If your site ranked low with Google, your website would likely never be seen by interested consumers. Marketers responded to this revelation by analyzing the ways in which Google ranked pages. The process of evaluating an ever-changing algorithm started to absorb the majority of marketers’ time and energy.

Change Your Focus to Consumers, Not Search Engines

When marketers and business owners start focusing all their attention on which search engines are the most powerful, they are likely missing the bigger picture. Marketing efforts that have only the search engines in mind are marketing efforts that cannot be successful in the long run. This is one of the biggest reasons for the prevalence of bad SEO writing all over the internet. When marketers start panicking about Google algorithm updates and black hat SEO strategies, they begin to lose sight of the customer’s needs. When the customer is neglected, it will not matter how predominantly your business is featured on search engine results pages. If a consumer visits your site and you offer nothing of value, that consumer will simply look elsewhere to find the information he or she needs.

This is why it is so important to put the search engine obsession to rest. Whether Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine commands the biggest percentage of the consumer market is irrelevant. Consumers are looking for websites that have helpful and informative content. They won’t stop searching until they find this content. If you focus your marketing efforts on taking care of the consumers’ needs, your website will rise to the top of the pool.

R. Ramkalyan is a tech savvy web master and a passionate blogger. He enjoys guiding folks on how they can make their own websites without programming or technical skills

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