Sun Tzu once said in The Art of War, “Who wishes to fight must first count the cost,” and SEO and PPC are the same way. For example, optimizing your pages and posts has no direct monetary cost, but it does cost you the time, effort, and manpower with the work that goes into it. When you’re just starting to optimize for SEO, your non-monetary costs can feel high. If you want to look for ways to reduce that cost, you have to first understand the online search engines that own them.
Online search engines like Google and Bing have their own profits to make. How they make their profits decides how their search engines will work more than anything else. If you’re not taking into account the long-term goals of Google and Bing, you’ll struggle to make content that will appeal to their search engines.
Search engines like Google and Bing are more than verbs in our lexicon. They are run and owned by some of the biggest corporations in the world, and their services and applications have the same goals as any of the businesses that use their services. We can explain how they make their profits.
How Do Online Search Engines Keep Users?
The first thing to remember is that search engines like Google and Bing can only turn profits because of the number of people entering keywords into the search bar. Google alone gets an average of 5.4 billion searches a day and 227 million searches an hour. That’s 5.4 billion different chances for an advertiser to capture a lead and many advertisements try.
Google only receives this many searches because it does a really good job of connecting people with the information they want to know. If Google were to stop doing this or do a poor job of it, people would stop using Google and start looking for alternative search engines. This fact alone drives a lot of the guidelines for improving SEO. Your page and post content has to be quality because Google has a big stake in it. If your page does provide users with the information they need, despite having a good number of the right keywords, they turn their frustrations toward Google.
This is why you can’t just add any keywords to your page or post and expect it to succeed. Having all the links, good keyword placement, and quantity of content isn’t enough. You have to have quality content because if you don’t, Google can’t keep its users, let alone turn a profit.
The Three Ways Online Search Engines Turn Profits
The two biggest online search engines in the world are Google and Bing. While there are some search engines like YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook that may be used more than Bing, searching for information and websites is not their main purpose. Of the search engines that focus solely on providing people with information and connecting them to the best source, Google and Bing have no equals. They are ubiquitous, Google especially.
For this reason, they also have similar ways of turning a profit. These ways are incredibly different from the other search engines that do not link you to other websites.
Data Collection
As all advertising companies know, data is powerful and the key to success. You can’t advertise to a demographic you know nothing about. But who knows all demographics better than Google and Bing?
But what do they collect? Google, for example, says in their privacy policy, that they “collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like email you write and receive, photos and videos you save, docs and spreadsheets you create, and comments you make on YouTube videos.” What they don’t include, is that they collect data on your searches as well. Whenever you search for something on Google, they follow where you go, how long you spend on that page, what pages you go to next, and how long you spend on that page.
While there’s reason to believe that they collect even more data, this information is enough to create a whole character profile with the right categorizing tools. This data is what Google provides to advertisers so they can make effective advertisements and give Google more marketing dollars.
What Does This Mean for SEO?
This is why web pages and posts need internal and external links for SEO. Online search engines want to collect more and more data, as much as they can to give to the advertisers who pay for PPC ads. If your web page or post is an online cul-de-sac with nothing to link to or from it, Google doesn’t want it to come up in search results. It doesn’t benefit them and their ability to turn a profit.
Online Advertising
First and foremost, Google in its entirety, and the Bing portion of Microsoft, are advertising companies. Their online search engines have created online locations that people flood to en mass every day.
While not every search is a good potential lead for everyone, every search is a good potential lead for someone. Online search engines have tools that allow advertisers to go after good potential leads, but also to compete with each for them.
Search engines then have advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their pages or sites, and the highest bidder gets to advertise to potential leads in various ways. This can be in the form of search result ads, banner ads, and more.
What Does This Mean For PPC?
When online search engines show ads, they need to be relevant. Search engines don’t want ads for baseball accessories showing up for searches for soap. To try would see your marketing dollars blocked or wasted as search engines make you pay absorbent amounts of advertising dollars for the disingenuous keyword.
For example, someone with more advertising dollars may notice that an irrelevant keyword is getting more traffic than keywords connected to their product. If they were allowed to post irrelevant ads in the search engine results of that keyword, it would drive Google’s users away. Google either blocks this or charges this advertiser more than someone who is actually advertising a relevant product or service. That person with the more relevant product or service would likely also still rank higher than the advertiser dumping his marketing dollars into an irrelevant keyword.
Contact a Marketing Firm Who Understands Online Search Engines
You cannot succeed in marketing without knowing search engines inside and out. They are both the greatest tool and obstacle for any business to overcome when getting into marketing. Whether it’s SEO marketing or PPC marketing, you need to be prepared to help search engines like Google and Bing get what they want, so they’ll help you get what you want. For a marketing firm that can help you do this, contact ENX2 Marketing. We know all about SEO, PPC, and the search engines that make the rules.
