04 56 88 773 
41A Bay St, Petone 
Use our online designer studio to create your own personalised flyers, business cards, greeting cards and more.
Order NowWhen it comes to professional printing and advice on your business marketing, we are the team to call! You can call us direct on 04 568 8773 or fill in our quote form.
Request a Quote
‘What’s the point of having business cards, when you have google on your phone.’ That seems to be the attitude these days for a lot of people in business. They think because everything can be found by using a search of the internet, why bother with something as bulky and old fashioned as carrying business cards. A few words into the search box and a customer will be able to find you in mere seconds. In practice, it never works out that way. Why? Because Google is not your friend.In this piece I’ll explain the reality of being searched for on the internet and what you can do to improve your chances of being found.
Firstly, while I’m using Google as the example here, since it’s the dominant player for search results, the same principle applies to all of the search engines. This also applies to social media, such as goliath that is Facebook, and any other digital platform that you could use to promote your business. The underlying factors that drive them are all the same, so explaining how Google decides how to present the results will help you understand the situation for all of them. From that we will discuss what you can do to deal with the issues coming from having to use a digital platform.
This is something that people often forget about when it comes to using search engines. It doesn’t cost anything to use, but all those tens of thousands of computers and thousands of people managing the searching the internet for information and compiling the results cost money to run. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is a publicly owned company that has to return profits to their shareholders. In 2020 Google’s Ad systems generated $147 billion US dollars. While this is spread over everything from net searches, youtube, ads put through android phones, etc, this is still where they earn their money and naturally they structure their business to maximise their revenue from it.
This means the people who generate the most revenue for being searched for are the ones who get promoted first on the results. It’s more than just the paid adverts that appear at the top of the results. The sites that get the most website traffic (people clicking the link to go to that page) are promoted higher on the list. Which means for a small or medium sized business, they could easily end up at the bottom of the results page on a page after the first, which is a place no business wants to end up on.
If you have been following the tech news on even the most casual of levels, you would have seen the spate of legal cases taking place about Google’s influence in the internet. The short version of this is that because of Google’s dominance of the process of searching the internet (we say to ‘google it’, not search for it) they have been accused of striking up deals with larger companies to give them preferences in the advertising results. This gets even stronger when in reference to them frequently having their own products first in such results. These cases are beyond both the scope and expertises for me to give an opinion here, the accusations are worth considering. For the SME trying to be found on the internet, there’s largely nothing you can do about it. While there are various court cases to try to fix the problem, the EU being very aggressive about this for example, Alphabet owns the system and as a business they can run it how they want. You have no choice but to accept it.
What do I mean by bad actors? In this case these are people who will look for and exploit any quirks found in the results generated by the search engine. An early example was meta-data overload, a site or page would have hundreds of keywords visible only to the search engine, and sending people to the wrong page so the page’s ads would generate revenue (in many cases from google’s own ad systems.) Today you might have someone buying ‘clicks/likes/retweets’ from some shady account farm that uses bots or worse people working slave-like conditions. And every time the search engine companies block one abuse of the system, the bad actors will always find a new one.
Does this effect your business? Directly not so much. Unless you’re a multi million dollar corporation these bad actors will not be targeting your business. But the outfall from their actions can distort search results that will change how you appear in the search results. So it’s something to be considered if you’re going to be relying on internet searches for your promotion.
In the end, the vast monolith of the Google empire is nothing but software running on computers. As anyone who uses a computer or smart device can tell you, things will freeze up or glitch out in unexpected ways at random times through no fault of the user. This can directly affect all businesses small and large as they can’t be found through searches or the databases that register the fact they are valid safe sites no longer become available. Worse than that the system can go completely offline for a region, nation, or world wide. All of them have had various periods of black out which means your business details are no longer available.
No software is perfect, and it doesn’t matter how much time, person power, or money Google pours into the search engine it will still have problems. The reality is that unless people are entering the exact terms to find your business, the system often has to make assumptions based on general information it already has access to. The fact that it can pull up the right information ~99.999% of the time is a testament to how well it works. But when it goes wrong, you’re stuck with it. Some would say that unless you’re loud enough or famous enough to generate enough bad publicity to embarrass them to fix the problem they otherwise wouldn’t spend resources on fixing. The reality is that you have to accept that if Google gets things wrong occasionally you’ll have to work around it. It might mean adding more metadata, adjusting your site structure, or adding extra domains and landing pages with their own unique metadata for Google to index.
All searches rely on the information supplied by the person typing in the search command. As such depending on the wording it can result in a too broad set of results or results that aren’t local or relevant to the customer. Sometimes things can get completely confused because of a business name being mistyped or autocorrected to a different spelling that links to a different company all together. Having watched its progress over the last 20 odd years, the results are far more accurate than they were back in the 2000’s but it doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The sheer number of searchable pages is exponentially larger now than when the first google spiders started their searches. This means that things can still go wrong and things can be confused. For your business making sure you have plenty of accurate meta data, frequent activity, alternative landing pages, and other background information that the google bots can scan and update their databases is important to keep things accurate.
The internet is instant to the average user, type in a query and have the answer back in a couple of seconds. What happens behind the scenes shows otherwise. There are estimated 30-50 billion pages indexed in the Google database in 2021 which is generated by ‘bots crawling the internet’ or dedicated computers running programs to examine websites and follow their links. To make things worse, out of an estimated out of a billion active websites which may have hundreds / thousands / millions of ‘pages’ that are indexed by the Google web crawlers. (For example Amazon sells over 12 million products and each of those ‘pages’ that the crawlers check.) Google has stated publicly that it can take 3 to 28 days for a new website to be found by their crawlers.
How often an existing website gets searched again depends on quite a few factors. How frequently it’s updated, how many people click on the links to it, how many other sites link to it, the amount of positive reviews, how often and how much people pay for advertising, and many more things that aren’t always publicly known. That time frame varies hugely from site to site but you can assume that unless you’re a larger company or pay for frequent advertising, it’s likely you’re only going to be indexed on a monthly basis at best.
If there’s one thing that you can be sure of when it comes with Google, they just can’t stop changing things. While some of the changes are necessary, like stopping the bad actors from abusing the system as previously mentioned, many others are experiments to ‘improve’ the system. When we say improve, we mean improve it for them to make more money, not necessarily improve it to help their users. What it leads to are methods that previously worked for high search ranking may no longer work under the new models / rules that generate the results. And there’s no guarantee that those fixes will even stick, as they are well known to just stop the ‘experiments’ as quickly as they set them up. What can you do as a business to deal with it? Just practise frequent reviews of how well your business is ranking in the results, and then adjust your site accordingly.
As we have said previously, Google indexes billions of pages and deals with hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide. That means it’s going to tailor the operations of the search engine to maximise the best return for lowest cost that will keep the majority of their customers happy. If you don’t fit within their assumptions, then you’re not going to score high on their results. Likewise as they seek the methods to maximise their revenue generation, they will act to ensure interests over yours. If you’re a multi million dollar company, or have so much social media clout that what you say can become mainstream news, Google is not going to even consider how they act effects your business. Your business is a few bits of data in the vast sea of information they use to run their business, and what they say goes. You have no choice but to work within their rules and change how you operate your internet presence to be more acceptable to their systems.
The reality is this. Being found by the results from a search engine or social media system is the primary way businesses are located. But this is a far from perfect system as you have no control how it is managed or what the product of their process is. Yes you should build a presence on the various systems (google, facebook, etc), but you can not do it once and walk away from it. You have to review and compare your website frequently, at a minimum quarterly if not more often. Look at the search results, examine how you compare to your competitors in the same market space. Make sure your underlying information, meta data and structure is current and accurate. Be willing to add new information to the page/s to keep it fresh, be it manually with things like testimonials or posts pulled from your social media accounts. Invest in more than one domain name to link to unique versions of your landing page themed around a specialty product or category.
We also recommend that you don’t rely on being found on search alone. No matter how much effort you put in and what you might pay people to improve your search engine rankings, you can not guarantee to appear in that first screen full of search results. Don’t rely on it, it should always be backed up by other methods to supplement or complement what you do digitally. While I’m not saying you have to have ads in the yellow pages or local newspapers, which do have their place for marketing for many types of businesses, you do have some forms of physical marketing presence. It can be as simple as having business cards or warranty cards/stickers with your contact information. Flyers dropped off in mail boxes or sitting on counters. Street signs if you’re working on a client’s property. And so much more.
You want to make it as easy as possible for existing customers, and potential new ones, to find you. Make sure you’re easy to find on an internet search but also make it easy to find you by physical means so you don’t have to rely on those internet services that you have no real control over. For more ideas on how to take control of your marketing presence in simple low cost ways, keep an eye out for our latest blog posts or contact us directly at Copy Express.