Google Changing the Game Again
Good SEO = More $$$
If your eCommerce business is anything like ours, you rely on organic searches for a fair amount of your traffic. We've always tried to apply best practices for SEO and for the most part have been very successful at earning high rankings for target keywords, especially on Google. The more organic traffic we get, the higher our revenue stream.
The search world is undergoing the most serious change I can remember seeing since we started this business with the introduction of Bing and the new Google search enhancements that are starting to be introduced in response to Bing.
As I grazed through many different searches this week on our target keywords, I realized that maybe the importance of being #1 in Google's rankings is starting to change. Here's what I found and why that #1 ranking in Google starts to mean something different in the future.
Test Drive the "New" Google
We've been getting a lot more traffic lately from many of our target keywords on Google, so I decided to evaluate whether it was because there are more searches on those words or because our "rankings" are highter. So, I did a google search on the phrase "gemstone beads". Our website, abeadstore.com was ranked #5 or #6 in my first pass, which is lower than we usually see. Then, I realized I was logged into Google Analytics, so I logged out and did the search again. This time we were ranked #3.
Then, I tried the same search in Firefox instead of Safari and this time our search ranking was still #3, but the PPC ads that were presented to me were completely different. I saw 3 "image ads" in the right column from Target that were for "bead" books for kids. All the "standard" PPC ads were showing below those 3 images. I was unable to see those images on different searches in Safari at all no matter what I tried. Being the curious guy I am, my searches continued....
I then started playing with the new "Show Options" choices at the top of the Google search results page. I tried "related searches", "images from the pages", "recent searches", "wonder wheel (very cool by the way)", and all the other choices. Guess what? You GET DIFFERENT SEARCH RESULTS in almost ALL the scenarios. Sometimes I got PPC image ads from VERY BIG retailers in the top 3 ad positions for useless and unrelated items, and sometimes I did not.
My brain just went WOW, what's this going to mean to our organic search in the future? Where did these PPC image ads come from and what does that mean to my campaigns. And why is a Walmart PPC ad for toys showing up on a search for glass beads?
I did much more casual testing on our top 30 keywords or so and found that overall, we still performed very well organically in most of the "options". But, each and every keyword performed differently in the various options. Results also sometimes varied based on my browser and whether I was logged in, not logged in, or using a private browsing session.
Conclusions & Recommendations
Not sure I have any firm conclusions to share at this point. But, here are some observations and a recommendation:
As we all discover the "New Google", we will slowly change the ways we search for things based on our own preferences as Google intends.
Being #1 in a keyword ranking may really mean that you are #5 for standard results, #1 with the "image" option triggered, #3 for "recent" and #20 with some other option selected
We will not fundamentally change what we do for SEO which is use good HTML structure, have relevant content, leverage internal and external links, and so forth until we learn something different is needed
As a consumer, I don't want useless image ads on my search results page. I hope Google gets rid of that immediately. If they don't PPC advertisers will have to evaluate their strategies and positioning below those ads
This is just the beginning of the "Search Wars", so I expect much more rapid change forthcoming - I saw Google may license Twitter and Facebook content......that would really change the "recent" search results
My recomendation is for all of you to get out there and test drive the new Google yourself. You can't rely on any type of automated ranking program to evaluate this for you. For some of us, it's all good, for others it may force change in your SEO practices.
I'll check in on future thoughts as this evolves over the coming months.
8 Comments
Kerry Murdock says:
This is a terrific post, Dale. Thank you for sharing your SEO experiences with all of us.
Kerry M.
PeC
LexiConn says:
The question in my mind is: Is there a way to measure what types of searches clicks come from? i.e. Can you tell that a particular keyword search came from an image search, recent search, blog search, etc...? This type of metric would be important to help focus SEO efforts in the right place.
Rob - LexiConn
OCI says:
The problem with being on page one is that everyone else wants to to.
Imagine if Google was quietly introducing user demographics to SERPs. This would add a third dimension to SEO: ranking for relevant keywords WITHIN relevant user demographics.
An interesting concept and one, I think, who's time has come.
gpolk says:
Great post, thanks for sharing. I've noticed different results for our key words in the past too, but I am glad you took the time to investigate.
Christopher James Foote says:
Logging into Analytics moved you up? I wonder how that worked.
I find that the quality of Google results has been declining. I like a lot of their features and have signed up for lots of their apps and love them but if I think I can get better results on any other engine, it won't take long for me to jump ship.
altwire says:
Google started personalizing search results a while back. When you log into your account, you will get different rankings than when not logged in. You can even move results around. If you're logged in, look for the little arrow buttons (promote and restore) on the right side of results.
Jill Kocher says:
Thanks for the post, Dale. I wrote a post about the customization of results between different people, but yours is the other side of that coin -- same person, same day, different personalized results.
Sure makes SEO trickier, but is just reinforces the need to focus on the true measures of success (traffic & transactions) vs ranking position. Looking forward to reading your next posts.
Idris says:
Nice post. Thanks for sharing this to us. Google is smart in understanding user's need and shows the result based on it.
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