Google And The Niche Marketer’s Paradigm

Is Google your friend or your enemy?

Many niche marketers out there whine when their Google Ads or search engine rankings for their niche sites drop off the face of the first page of the SERP. I don’t blame them because if the same thing happened to my niche sites, I would be tempted to stand on the other side of the fence and protest against the Google God.

It’s not surprising to hear niche marketers blaspheme against the ‘Google God’ all the time. Think about it… what giant has never been criticized? Take a look at, Microsoft! They deal with federal lawsuits because the ‘big bully’ is taking away the lunch money of the little guy.

But on the other hand, you don’t see the same people switching to Yahoo! by taking away their Google AdSense ads or switching to a Mac…

I’ve read this newsletter by Perry Marshall which has totally changed my attitude towards Google and I believe that it is worth publishing on my blog because of the value of the content and the effect it has on my paradigm… because I used to criticize about Google’s monopoly…

Sometimes people get mad at Google ‘cuz they won’t just take their money and run the ads they write. Worse yet, they won’t even tell you WHY.

Maddening, isn’t it?

Dave Bullock explains why, like this:

“People should think of Google as being their first customer.

“People search Google because they trust it. Your ad on their search engine is an endorsement, and you’re borrowing their identity.”

The fact that the whole world trusts Google - and the true meaning and cause of that trust - is somewhat overlooked in all the hoopla about their juggernaut success.

People talk about Google’s skyrocketing stock values and Page Rank Formulas and the birth from fledgling lab project at Stanford, and the geek culture and the free 5-star lunches in the employee cafeteria.

But not too many people really ask, why does the world trust Google?

When someone wants to know something, why is the first place they think of looking, Google? Why is Google a verb?

Because Google is the most accurate available representation of what human beings consider important and valuable on the Internet.

Stop and think for a minute… what if there was no such thing as a search engine. How would you ever find anything? We’d all be sitting in our cubicles asking our friends what their favorite bookmarks are.

It’s not even possible to deal with the whole Internet as it is. It’s such a vast thing, you can only deal with some simplified map of it. Google has to present the Internet in a way to you that makes it tidy and comprehensible.

So simple, even a six year old can use it.

It’s difficult to appreciate how hard a job this is.

Earlier this year I had a conversation with a brilliant guy who had, for his own reasons, developed his own search engine. You know, one that crawls the web and follows links and rummages through IP addresses and catalogues the pages.

He says to me, “Perry, it was a nightmare. Did you know that literally 90% of the content on the Internet is pure SPAM? You can’t believe the amount of computer resources it took just to explore it, much less sift and sort through it all.”

He wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. It’s impossible to comprehend how much of the actual Internet is pure garbage. You would never want to deal with the Internet in its raw, unfiltered form.

The “real” World Wide Web, if you could actually look at it, is not much different from the swirling sea of chaos outside the Nebuchadnezzar spaceship in The Matrix.

It teems with viruses, rogue programs, hackers’ contrivances, incoherent pages of robotically generated “content” and excrement from the bowels of the information superhighway.

The most minimal job of a search engine is to make all that rubble invisible to you.

At the root of the world’s trust of Google is Google’s inability to be bought. I say this even though Google sells a billion plus dollars of clicks every month.

Because first of all, what makes Google valuable in the first place is the extreme difficulty in manipulating the organic (free) side of the engine. The editorial side has high standards and hundreds of millions of web surfers experience that every day.

Google is pretty good at recognizing what visitors do when they come to a site that they like, and rewarding likable sites with free listings.

And when you go over to the paid side of Google, they still have standards which continue to climb. A lot of people think, just because they’re showing up with money in hand, means Google ought to shut up and take it.
NOT!

This entitlement belief of “The customer is always right and the customer is me, because I’m putting up the money here” is actually backwards. It creates an instant adversarial relationship with THE gatekeeper you have to pass muster with before you get to be on the mainstream of the Internet.

The fallacy of that is, you are not the customer. Google is.

On the Internet, the customer is not the person who provides the advertising dollars. It’s the person who consumes the content and buys things from the advertisers. Google is the customer’s advocate.

The day they cease to be that is the day their flanks are wide open for a competitor to eat their lunch.

Though Google is mighty and has built up a huge lead over all their rivals, their place in the world is not eternally secure. They have to keep inflating their expectations of advertisers and content providers in order for the Internet to evolve.

Ask yourself the question:

“Google, what do you want? How can I serve your best customers?”

That’s how you get Google love, people love, link love, and traffic love.

By Perry Marshall

After reading this, I’m sure you will agree with me on a couple of things…

1. Niche marketers leverage on Google’s credibility. So it should be fair that people cut Google some slack because after all, I really don’t feel like using Yahoo… people say, “Just Google it! Not ‘Yahoo!’ it…”
2. While Google may not have the most ‘human’ algorithm in the universe, the fact that traffic is driven to your websites THROUGH Google gives us a reason to play by Google’s rules rather than complain against their rules. Put yourselves in the shoes of an average Internet user… would you like to search for something only to be directed to a spam site?
3. Yes it is true that although Google has a twin stranglehold on AdSense and AdWords, most people still use them in spite of their complaints against Google’s tyranny because after all, what other stronger alternatives are there? (there are but most still use AdSense and AdWords in the end…)

Regardless on how you feel about Google, I believe that there is one thing we can agree on… the Internet wouldn’t be complete without Google. I really can’t imagine surfing for good content without it.

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