4 Reasons why you’ll never beat Google.
Do you Search or Google? It’s not a particularly important question, the result is the same, however the answer to this question tells you a great deal about how us as users perceive the Search Market. The real question is do we still see Search as Searching or has search become Googling? There are a lot of changes in the Search Market going on. We not only have the three big engines fighting for superiority which has become somewhat of a desperate struggle but we also have plenty of start-ups, the recent of which is Cuil. Google is starting to really dominate a market it already has control over. So how do you exactly beat Google at their own game?
This was the subject of a recent post in Sitepoint, the core of the post actually makes some good points, however rather than 4 ways of beating Google it should be called 4 reasons why you’ll never beat Google. By actually looking at Cuil, they’ve started to rhetorically answer the important question can it actually be done? In their four ways they’ve proved at present that’s not possible which really makes the whole post pointless. Their 4 ways are Creating Superior Technology, Disrupt their Ad Market Stranglehold, Get to New Markets before they do and Be Mediocre but be Persuasive.
Technology.
This is why anyone falls at the first hurdle, Technology alone. Ultimately Technology isn’t enough. Google have spent over 10 years developing the technology that is their search engine. In my opinion someone’s going to have spend 20 years developing something better and personally I don’t think that’s going to happen. Ultimately is that even going to be enough? I don’t think so.
If you look at the history of the web then there have been many elements of the internet that have revolutionised the product itself the two most important of these are Search itself and Social. Google have been the only Search Engine to truly respond to the dramatically changing landscape of the web. Ultimately Search will continue to change and ultimately search as we know is dead.
Google are not relying on their technology to keep them their stranglehold on the market, ultimately Google are investing in the Search of Tomorrow today while all the other engine’s play catch up by investing in the Search of yesterday today. It will only mean one thing that Google’s grip can only tighten and ultimately there won’t be any ways of beating Google at their own game because simply Google are playing a different Game now.
If you’ve been following all the ho yah on our blog you’ll know about Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo and Yahoo instead trying to get into bed with Google, blah blah blah. You also know while all this is going on Google quietly under the radar have bought Digg, which is one of the most eminent Social Bookmarking sites, the question in relation to everything that’s going on is why have they Google done that? Then why are Yahoo and Microsoft doing what they’re doing?
Yahoo, in my opinion, have spent the last several years playing catch up technology wise. Today Yahoo is as reliable as Google, sometimes I find Yahoo more so. Being better than Google isn’t enough. If you look at the market then Google’s share is increasing and Yahoo’d decreasing. In the eyes of the consumer Google already have a far superior product and that’s when we come to the arena of Branding which is the fourth point, being persuasive which is key to understanding everything else so we will deal with it now.
Persuasive
While we’ve hit this point we may as well deal with it and it’s critical in relation to not just the previous point but others. Having the best product isn’t about having the best product! It’s about having the best product in the eyes of the consumer. If the technology gives Google a tight grip then their branding does so much more. Google’s golden ticket is Brand Loyalty, if something else that is better comes into the market then it will take that product many years to prove itself before we consumers will even start thinking it’s possible. The two best brands in Search are firstly Google and secondly Page Rank, and for me that says it all. Google has most webmasters around the world worrying about their Page Rank when actually in today’s landscape it’s not even that relevant.
Ad Stranglehold
Google makes it’s money from PPC, so common sense tells me if I really want to hit Google hard this is where it’s really going to hurt, the wallet. Common sense says tells me it never will. Unless someone can be Persuasive which we’ve just looked at this isn’t going to happen. Firstly Google’s popularity means Advertisers are always going to use Adsense as their main online advertising outlet and in some case only outlet. Google have the best platform and if you look at what Yahoo are doing then there actually tightening Google’s stranglehold.
New Markets
I’m not actually sure this is possible. There are no real untapped markets out there, pockets maybe but markets no. As we’ve already stated the real new market is in changing nature of Search and Google again are completely dominating.
If we’re ultimately asking the question how do you beat Google, well if your living in the real world that’s not possible in today’s Search climate.
Google to buy Digg
July 25, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News
If you’ve read all the hoo haa about the on off sarga with Yahoo and Microsoft you may be surprised to learn that Google have agreed to buy Digg, the social bookmarking site for around $200 million, something that has very definitely slipped under the radar. The deal is apparently all formerly ratified. Google will be experimenting with Digg in it’s News search.
While Live struggles to claw back some market share from Google, Google has been busily pulling off deals like this which look at adapting it’s search for the future. This has confirmed to us something we at WMA already knew, Seach as we know it is dead!
Keyword Research Followup
July 24, 2008 | Google, Keyword Research
In this post we will review the results of our Adwords Keyword Research Tool Trial which was a follow up to our synopsis of recent happenings and changes by the Search Engines.
To recap Adsense have recently change the figures they show - this is a massive, massive deal. Why? Well lets start from the beginning.
If you want to optimise for Rankings in the Search Engine’s then you now have 5 tools to choose from for doing Keyword Research. Google Adsense has always been the best tool. Personally I have to be honest and say a couple of years ago I didn’t always use Adsense I preferred Oveture’s tool because it gave actual figures which Adsense never did up until now. i found optimisation for Google wasn’t always effective so I switched to Adsense and Overture then stopped reporting actual live figures anway, simply Overture didn’t tell me what Google uses in the main use for keywords.
The thing is if you want to generate traffic then Google has entirely in the last few years dominated that traffic. A few years ago it was reported Google had just over half the market and nowadays it’s around the 70% mark, Yahoo currently has about 20% and Live 5%.
I can understand why anyone would have been fooled, which is no disgrace ad you’d be like me, into using Overture’s live figures. However the fact is you cannot target a market like Google’s nowadays with tools from Overture and Microsoft, ultimately users will use at least slightly different terms and if you want to dominate a market, in the case of Yahoo, you can’t do that with stats that cover less than half of the same market or, in Microsoft’s, a snippet. Ultimately you want Google rankings right? That’s what all our clients say. That’s not to say that either data from the other two or rankings for that matter are irrelevant, but Google is the top dog and the trend is Google is increasing its strangehold.
If you want to know what terms keywords are used in Google then only Google has the answer. It’s not just a fad where the whole SEO industry has got it wrong, but actually there are some authorative big hitters out there who are also not just using the wrong data, they’re telling you to use it to. No names mentioned.
So let’s look at the data. First thing to say is whatever results we gauge from this what actually most people are looking for when doing keyword research is niches, long tail SEO and gaps in particular markets. SEO is not a niche market and we’ve only pulled out figures from the top two keywords in Google. If the results are skewed, twisted, missing and in some cases plain wrong. This is going to be far more exagerated in these other, far more used, markets:
Firstly it’s confusing over what time period and what markets the data is being pulled. Hence the ratio’s, because just a brief glance and the figures are very, very different. As has been stated before and as you can see from the figures, Overture have stopped using live figures and instead use ranges. It took me some time to find out but Google is very simple you have monthly live data and an average from a year, no one else provides both except Adlabs, which you have to work out and frankly I don’t have the time to do that for every search I do. Everyone else isn’t, in fact I got sick of trying to find out the exact date ragnes so I gave up, hence the data for ratios, as it doesn’t matter about time periods because they produce the same ratio. Overture have always published monthly data though this wasn’t stated, MSN I guess would be the same, though looking at the figures they are possibly yearly to me. You have to click on those annoying ? images in Keyword Discovery (a year) and Wordtracker (130 days) to find out.
So this our first problem, we do keyword research by the bucket full to manually get relative data from all sources is quite an issue here, doing a ratio tells me something that relates to all of them, though it isn’t enough and I still don’t want to be doing that for every search . So if we start with the one search on “SEO UK” to 20 on “SEO” in Google. That sounds about right to me. Ratio of same is rubbish in Overture - the data ranges make the actual data pretty much useless, though the data they are presenting isn’t wrong. MSN goes up to 1 in 35 that’s plainly wrong to me. Now we look at the data and it could be over a longer time period. The difference between MSN and Google for month of June highlights another problem that is markets.
Before we continue with ratio’s let’s look at markets. Google and Overture is very simple you pick your markets. Most of our customers aren’t going to want to think about trading overseas, and if they are, they’re going to concentrate on specific markets. Adlabs and also for the other two this isn’t possible which for definitive data makes the figures useless. We don’t want to be optimising for Keyword based in the US, this is the huge problem for particularly Keyword Discovery. I hear from Yanks it’s a great tool. However whenever I look at the figures it’s greatly biased to me towards US market. Simple question if you look at the figure for KD is do I think only 5 people in the UK have used “SEO UK” as a keyword for the whole year. My answer is you must be kidding right?
Back to ratio’s. WT is completely on another planet compared to Google, least said about KD your better. This reinforces the fact of it’s key where the tools we use get their data from. Search Engines is simple. However what KD and WT do is buy their data from ISP’s which makes them extremely inaccurate and in KD’s case it looks like they pretty much get all their data from US ISP’s which makes it totally useless for me.
Why is Keyword Research so important? Well imagine, which is easy to do if you don’t use Google as your prime tool, if your using the wrong keywords. Doesn’t matter if the one’s you do use are all ranked number 1, doesn’t even matter if your getting a double listing. Fact is you missing out on quite a large chunk of your market, and depending on what your actually using that could be whole chunks. Personally I don’t think either KD or WD are useful for indicators of Search Terms for any sort of SEO. In fact isn’t it be better to be ranked lower for the right keywords then be ranked number one for the wrong ones. Therein is the key to understanding why Keyword Research is so so important.
Adwords Keyword Research Tool
July 23, 2008 | Google, Keyword Research, SEO
In our previous post we really wanted to talk about Adwords Keyword Research Tool and recent improvements that Google have made. What used to happen for those who don’t know is some figure between 0 and 1 which really meant you had to guesstimate the actual figure very carefully. This for most of us meant pulling some pie in the sky figure out of the air and trying to convince ourselves that it was 100%ish correct. Well they now provide actual figures. That was from our post about recent happenings and changes inSearch Engine Land.
Upon a re-read the actual big deal of it all wasn’t made out to be such a big deal. It rather got swamped by all the other going ons and I rather think that actually the amount of interest it should have genearated on the internet was minimal because of the hoo haa with the Yahoo / Microsoft deal and the Google / Yahoo deal. Personally I think this is one of most significant changes to have happened ever! Certainly in terms of changes it’s the biggest thing to come out of Google since the Dig Daddy algorithm change years ago. Simply I think Keyword Research is that important.
Folks I can’t stress how big of a deal this actually is. If your running your own SEO or you even hired a company then either you or they are going to have to the whole thing again. Why? You may be running the wrong keywords.
Note: while I check this after the event the data below tells me if your not actually one of those smarty pants that used Adsense for keyword research in the first place, like us, you definitely are using the wrong keywords. That means your not getting the traffic you could be and your not generating the revenue you should be!
So I’m going to stick my neck out on the blog and run a live trial - that is I don’t know what the figures will be because I haven’t checked them yet. The important point to remember is that pretty much everyone tells you, you must run keyword research using Overture, Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. In my opinion these tools don’t tell you what Keywords you should be optimising for Google. So with my head in the guillotine that’s start by checking stats on “SEO” keywords starting with the top 2 phrases on Google and comparing what everyone else says.
SEO - 301,000 (average) / 246,000 (June)
SEO UK - 14,800 (average) / 18,100 (June)
Ratio - 1 in 20
Overture.
SEO - 240 - 9,193 (average)
SEO UK - 240 - 9,193 (average)
Ratio - same
MSN Adlabs
SEO - 242,571(June)
SEO UK - 6,977 (June)
Ratio - 1 in 35.
Wordtracker
SEO - 1737
SEO UK - 10
Ratio - 1 in 137
Keyword Discovery
SEO UK - 18,974
SEO UK - 5
Ratio - 1 in 3795
I don’t think i need to say anything much - I’ll leave that for another post. However the results are if you want a tool that provides authorative and precise data it’s Adwords keyword research tool.
Google’s Android
July 22, 2008 | Google
If you’ve read a post or two recently such as the Search Engine Land post, you’ll know we quite often say Google’s getting up to some quite extraordinary stuff recently, never is this more so than in developing Android which is a race (with mainly Nokia) to produce the next platform for mobile phone applications. Want to know more… well the nice folks at Google have made this video:
