Even though Google Revenues continue to soar, the hidden problem that may stifle growth and may even allow Yahoo or MSN to overtake the paid search market in the future lies in two critical phrases: Customer Support, and Customer Training
Approximately 40% of the small businesses we have surveyed have tried Adwords in the past and failed, and some of them have tried multiple times. In some markets the percentage is closer to 60%. Why because the program was designed by Google engineers, and heavily favors companies with the type of resources that most small businesses do not have. Unlike MSN and Yahoo who have programs that are much simpler in terms of use for small business people, Google favors a technology driven solution that relies less on customer support, and expects users of their system to become more sophisticated.
The problem with this is that it is working quite well for professional internet marketers and search engine marketing companies employed by big corporations, but many small business people who are not web-savvy are by and large left out of the mix. This is unfortunate because this is a huge segment of potential income that is left up for grabs and may be scooped up by MSN and Yahoo who are developing simpler, easier systems with better customer support.
All the major search engines recognize this problem, and getting those offline advertisers online is a high priority for all of them, but so far there has not been great success. It is a knowledge and training gap, and neither Yahoo, MSN, or Google has so far been able to address it adequately.
Googles recent acquisition of urchin, a web analytics program illustrates the problem Google is trying to solve. Big Companies getting involved in paid search will still continue to drive big revenues, but the new internet is about verticals and niches, and Google simply isnt making the grade in terms of training their customers well enough.
Where do small business customers go after they churn Many of them go back to what they were doing successfully before; email marketing, direct marketing, and call centers according to our study.
The next growth area will be hundreds of thousands of verticals, driven by small businesses exploiting areas and needs that the fortune 500 companies can not fill efficiently. The search engine company that gets the most advertisers on its side will win market share, and winning will require the ability to service everybody, not just the super sophisticated internet super geeks.
However, many private companies not sanctioned by Google, have sprung up in order to try to bridge the gap between the Google Adwords program and the ability to advertise efficiently on Google and achieve a high ROI. One such company is http://adwordstraining.org that offers free video training and free frequently updated information at http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org
Simple training videos are available on the site, as well as an advertiser self study course to get non-technical people up to speed with Google Adwords advertising.
Between Googles extensive training program of Google Professionals and private training by private companies, this knowledge gap may be bridged, and in the process a whole new industry of Google Adwords Marketing companies may be created, to facilitate the knowledge gap between Google and the advertisers that want to take advantage of the enormous advertising reach afforded by paid search.
But, this might not be enough for Google to keep its lead, as advertisers often follow the path of least resistance in getting their messages out, and they are the ones funding the growth of the search engine industry.
Where those advertisers ultimately go will determine the ultimate victor in the ever growing search engine wars, and the winner is by no means secure at this point.
Steve Blom
Founding Partner
InTouch Media Group
About the author:
Steve Blom is a founding partner of InTouch Media Group, a publicly traded company specializing in the online marketing field.
Little do you know but you too could be making mistakes with your website that are costing you your search engine rankings.
Goggle and the other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to keep pace of searchengine spammers. Some novice website owners may be like me and be making big mistakes in the eyes of the search engine bots which will lower their search engine ranking or blot their website right out of existence from everyone except those people that have been given their website URL.
Let me tell you my mistakes and what Ive learned from them... In 2000, I started a small research vineyard. Soon I wanted a website to tell people about it, advise others how to grow grapes, and get my research information out to the public.
I was on a shoe-string budge so I learned HTML myself. My website was quickly posted to one of those free website hosts. Two months later, my website was hitting the top 5 in the search engine rankings for all of my keywords. I had lots of relevant content which made this possible. I was in heaven!
I soon realized that the free web host didnt provide all that a webmaster wants (cgi-bin, commerce, etc). I found a better host provider at a reasonable price and I moved my website.
Big Mistake #1: I didnt remove the pages from the free website host. I figured with time, that host would see no activity and just drop me from their server to make more room for other websites. Little did I know how long that free website would persist on the Internet.
Big Mistake #2: This one is much like the first one, just done in a different manner. After three years, I got tired of my websites appearance. I had learned CSS and wanted to make my website more uniform and professional looking. Slowly, I began transitioning my pages to the new look. Since the search engines knew the old pages, I simply left them on the backend of my website, while naming the new pages differently and more google friendly. Little did I know at the time the search engines would spider both the new and the old pages now.
I really didnt know that I was doing anything wrong. When I checked my search engine rankings, I still ranked very high. I should have paid more attention and noticed that sometimes it was the new pages that ranked up there but often it was the old pages. They had been there all along and still commanded those high search engine rankings. Once in a while I even saw some of the old pages from the free web host days.
I guess I was only concerned about my search engine rankings, not which pages, new or old were being indexed. After all, as long as my site was getting noticed, And traffic was coming to my website so why care
Big Mistake #3: I wanted to put up more relative content in the form of articles related to growing grapes and win on my website. I though this would help my search engine rankings for some keywords I was low in and also help my website visitors.
I purchased a program named Article Equalizer to make this task easier on myself. Being a new user of this program, I began to use this software with the templates that came with the program. It seemed to work well and produced the results I wanted.
Little did I know that by using the built-in templates that came with this software, a finger print would be placed in the resulting pages that would identify that I used this program to generate the index to the article and the article pages themselves.
Mistake #4: To aggravate the above mistake, I loaded the index page to the back end of my website. This index page was a collection of hyperlinks, no content, just links.
Goggle drastically changed its algorithm early in the year 2005. The unthinkable happened. Not only did my search engine rankings drop, they disappeared altogether. I wasnt even in Google. Google had treated me as a search engine spammer! I had lost my top rankings and now wasnt even indexed.
I had violated Googles new rules. I learn a lot from my mistakes. What rules did I violate First, I had multiple pages of the same content all over the web and my own website. Google says, Dont create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Boy, had I done that. And without even knowing it. I had links up on the search engines that lead to multiple pages on my own site and to my old free one.
I had created pages that had multiple links that lead back to my main page through my article directory index. I know it looked like I was spamming Google but it was just a naive mistake, compounded through the software that was going to save me time.
Naive mistakes can cost you everything when youre running up against google. My laziness cost me. I didnt erase what I had created before and had used a program to save me some time.
Ive remedied my mistakes but am yet to be found in Google. They are unforgiving in that respect but I believe that I will soon be back in their good graces. Learn from my mistakes and dont make them. If you have disappeared from Google, you might want to check and see if you too have made some naive mistakes like I did. Change your website to conform to Googles guidelines and then re-submit your site. If that doesnt work. Youll have to start all over with a new domain name. And that can be a painful waste of time.
Jim Bruce of Ristvin Marketing helps newbie internet marketers develop their online businesses through advice and business software. You can find out more at