The fact that brand names continue to dominate Google’s result pages is obvious. This makes Google look biased for bigger brands and is quite discouraging to small regular business and website owners. But is Google really biased toward brand names?
The truth is that it is. It may not be company policy for Google to show bias towards big brands, but the nature of search makes their algorithm inherently biased. What does this mean?
It simply means that the same factors that search engine algorithms view to be favorable are the same factors that big brands already possess.
The objective of search engines like Google is to provide useful, relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative results for each query entered by their users. Brand names score big in these points since they have been spending big bucks for years, usually decades, building their name. Naturally, search engines will recognize the fact that brand names are already trusted by their users, and as consequence would also trust information they find on these big brand’s official websites. Following this logic, it is not surprising that you’ll see lots of big brands dominating Google’s results pages.
So if this is the case, does this mean that it is futile for small businesses and websites to do search engine optimization?
The answer is no. The truth is that you won’t be able to compete with big brands relying solely on SEO. However, even if you can’t snag that number one spot, SEO will still help you at least rank respectably. What you can do though so that your SEO efforts won’t go to waste is to not focus too much on highly competitive keywords and try to rank better with long tail search queries. You won’t get as much traffic as big brand websites do, but you should at least get a reasonable amount of traffic, hopefully enough to keep your business afloat, even grow.
Once you get the traffic that Google sent your way, it is now your job to make sure you keep them, and get them to come back, even refer their friends to you. You can do this by focusing on the content of you website. However, even useful content is sometimes not enough. If your content is solid but it offers nothing different or new from the “more authoritative” sites, then your visitors will just opt to keep coming back to the other site, not yours. Find ways to offer something extra to your visitors to keep them coming back. You should also make it really easy, even desirable, for them to refer you to someone else. You can do this by offering promos or bonuses for referrals. You should also make linking back to you a breeze by offering buttons they can embed on their own sites and blogs. Once you start getting traffic, it should keep on coming if your website is worth visiting. And once you’ve got the vote of confidence from countless visitors, then your ranking in results pages will also improve naturally.
Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com
