Sales and Sales Management Blog

Can your business survive a drop in Google ranking?
by Donald Farber

Have you heard the term Hilltop when someone is talking about Google? No, it’s not a big mountain of money that Google piles up at their corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California.

What about Google Caffeine? Maybe it’s what happens when you drink too much coffee and spend an afternoon querying random things.

Not the case either – Google Caffeine and Hilltop are what are known as algorithms, or search architecture updates, that are used by the search engine giant to determine relevancy when you look for something on the internet.

That’s fine but what do these algorithms mean to your small business?
Many small businesses live and die by their Google rankings and it’s factors like these algorithms that decide where you rank.

Some small online businesses generate almost all of their revenue from ranking for only one or two keywords in Google. So when someone searches for those terms, their website will come up near the top of the listings.

Having to rely on ranking well in Google for a few keywords is a risky way to run a business. What if your ranking dropped tomorrow and didn’t come back for another 6 months? Could your business survive?

Typically you have to do something against Google guidelines or the algorithm’s formulas to see this kind of drop in rankings but it’s probably not worth the risk. Many sites have been knocked into obscurity for various reasons.

How do you protect yourself?
I know a lot of you aren’t going to like to hear this but the best way to protect your online business is to spend the time (or money) to build a great website:

• Make it a vast resource and continually add pages of content
• Have content that interests and engages your visitors
• Make the website easy to navigate
• Get an excellent design that makes your site stand out from the competition

Unless you’re multitalented this isn’t going to come cheap but there is a lot of software out there that makes this easier for small businesses on a budget.

These factors will make people want to talk about your site and link to it, which will bring better rankings and more visitors. You still need to get the word out about your website but having a site that is linkable will make life much easier.

The other thing about building a great website is that people wont forget about you. They’ll bookmark your site, write it down, send it to friends by email, tag it, and remember it later. They’ll do this because you’ve built a great resource on the subject, product, or service that they’re interested in.                                                                                                       

Build a brand
When most people think of online auctions they think of eBay. If someone is on the Internet looking for the new Coldplay album there is good chance they might go straight to iTunes without looking anywhere else.

Some companies are known for selling shoes, pipes, cat toys, pencils, or ornamental grasses. If you are an ornamental grass connoisseur than you might immediately think of Grassgardens.co.uk when you’re looking for grass for your garden.

Being known as “the website that sells ornamental grass” might not be as lucrative as the “company that sells laptops” but the competition isn’t as strong so you can own that niche more easily. Owning a niche is not easy but it’s not impossible either, especially with the amount of lazy webmasters out there.

Brands don’t need to be big but they need to be well known within that group of consumer. If you’re a small businesses offering anything then you need to own that product or service to be the best online. It’s starts with a great website.

Content content content
Without content most websites wouldn’t get any traffic from search engines. The more pages of quality content you have, the greater chance that someone will find your site from Google searches.

Google estimates that 20-25% of all searches are new so by creating more pages of content, you will increase the chances that your website has what they are searching for regarding that topic.

Creating quality content is important because it gives someone a reason to link to you and it also gives the visitor a reason to trust you when they get to your site.

Interaction
The problem with advertising on social media sites like Facebook is that the user is not looking for a product or service. They are on the site to interact with their network of friends and family. But when someone searches “buy new Coldplay album,” chances are they are looking to purchase the new Coldplay album.

What Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and other social platforms do is allow companies (and more specifically people at the companies) to interact with their customers directly. This allows the customer to build trust in your business and to show them that you see them as a real person rather than just money.

It doesn’t work for every online business but chances are, with a bit of ingenuity, almost every small business could find a way to interact successfully with their customer base in a way that your competition isn’t.

It’s no different than that local deli you keep going back to because a) they have good food and b) the couple that run the place are very friendly.

The competition on the internet is getting harder by the day and there is no easy answer for making money online. The key to getting on top and staying there is to build an outstanding site and then promote it.

Donald Farber is a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) specialist. He currently works with the web team at LifeCover.ca: a Canadian life insurance website.