[Hot] On Google's 20th Birthday, Two Key SEO Lessons
Google is celebrating its 20th birthday this week. Introducing its 20th anniversary "doodle," the #SearchIs20 Doodle Team, noted:
"Twenty (ish) years ago, two Stanford Ph.D. students launched a new search engine with a bold mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Though much has changed in the intervening years—including now offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries—Google is still dedicated to building products for everyone."
Google's products, used by over a billion people worldwide, include some of the most famed in the tech world: Google search, of course, as well as YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Android, the Play Store, and Google Drive, the file storage service.
These eight products, all collected under the parent company, Alphabet, produced a staggering $32.66 billion in revenue in the most recent quarterly earnings (Source)--and soon, undoubtedly, the company will reach a $1 trillion market cap.
Yesterday, CNBC shared some other staggering numbers: Android has 76.8% of the mobile market share worldwide; Chrome has 59.7% of the worldwide browser share; and in the United States "Google will account for 37.1 percent of all U.S. digital advertising revenue this year."
Read: "On Google's 20th birthday, Here's a Reminder of How Dominant it's Become"
And don't forget YouTube, the clear dominant player in online videos, and the world second largest search engine. Google, the world's largest search engine, of course, accounts for over 70% of all global search engine traffic (Source: Net Market Share). Baidu, the Chinese search engine, is a very distant second with 14%. Bing is third with 7%, and Yahoo, once a leader in search, enjoys only 4.51% of global search engine traffic.
No wonder Mozilla dropped Yahoo in favor of Google (as its default search provider) last year. In its statement about the change, Mozilla said: "As part of our focus on user experience and performance in Firefox Quantum, Google will...become our new default search provider."
To us, this quote defines the essence of Google's dominance while offering two key SEO lessons for websites: online success is about user experience and website performance.
Google SEO Lesson I: User Experience
Early search engines, like Yahoo, once charged websites for inclusion in search engine directories. Websites that paid more enjoyed higher placement in results.
However, paid advertisements do not always deliver the most relevant results. The essence of organic search, which Google pioneered, is an emphasis on unpaid, natural results. As we've noted before:
"Paid advertising helps a search engine like Google make money. But Google's reputation depends on the quality of its 'organic' results. So unpaid marketing, or organic SEO, satisfies the true goal of search engines: to offer the most relevant, unbiased results for any given search."
Read: What is Natural Website Optimization?
Google changed search, then, by shifting the focus from paid results to organic results.
Writing for Forbes, Adam Heitzman noted how this shift emphasized user experience:
"Google’s entire business model focused on providing a better user experience. Its algorithm accounted for multiple factors, such as page quality, number of links and relevance to a user’s search in addition to how much advertisers pay, thus improving Yahoo’s original model. Because Google provided the best product, everyone wanted to use it."
The SEO takeaway is simple: browsers prefer websites that optimize user experience. Practically speaking, this means a streamlined site with an easy-to-navigate structure (website structure) that satisfies users expectations (website content).
Read: SEO 101: Website Structure & Is Your Content Relevant?
Google SEO Lesson II: Website Performance
Google's search engine is prized for its instantaneous results--often millions in a fraction of a second. This speed was a major factor in its early success and continues to wow browsers. The key to this speed is Google's vast index:
"The first thing we have to understand is that Google does not search the Internet when you submit a query...Google searches its index of the internet. This might seem trivial but it’s an important distinction because it makes the search infinitely faster" (Source).
Though different in kind, Google's index is analogous to a website's "back-of-the-house" design, which governs website speed, and website speed is an important factor for Google:
"Websites with servers and back-end infrastructure that...quickly deliver web content [have] a higher search ranking than those that were slower." (Source).
The SEO takeaway here is simple, too: For Google and websites performance means speed, and speed always wins the day.
Read: SEO 101: Website Design
Online Marketing, Website Design, & SEO: Stepman's SEO
To build an effective, fully-optimized website, you need a web design company that also understands SEO. Stepman's SEO is the rare company that offers a host of design, SEO, and marketing professionals to optimize your website. Contact Stepman's SEO today to learn how you can improve your website's performance: 215-900-9398.
"Twenty (ish) years ago, two Stanford Ph.D. students launched a new search engine with a bold mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Though much has changed in the intervening years—including now offering Search in more than 150 languages and over 190 countries—Google is still dedicated to building products for everyone."
Google's products, used by over a billion people worldwide, include some of the most famed in the tech world: Google search, of course, as well as YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Android, the Play Store, and Google Drive, the file storage service.
These eight products, all collected under the parent company, Alphabet, produced a staggering $32.66 billion in revenue in the most recent quarterly earnings (Source)--and soon, undoubtedly, the company will reach a $1 trillion market cap.
Yesterday, CNBC shared some other staggering numbers: Android has 76.8% of the mobile market share worldwide; Chrome has 59.7% of the worldwide browser share; and in the United States "Google will account for 37.1 percent of all U.S. digital advertising revenue this year."
Read: "On Google's 20th birthday, Here's a Reminder of How Dominant it's Become"
And don't forget YouTube, the clear dominant player in online videos, and the world second largest search engine. Google, the world's largest search engine, of course, accounts for over 70% of all global search engine traffic (Source: Net Market Share). Baidu, the Chinese search engine, is a very distant second with 14%. Bing is third with 7%, and Yahoo, once a leader in search, enjoys only 4.51% of global search engine traffic.
No wonder Mozilla dropped Yahoo in favor of Google (as its default search provider) last year. In its statement about the change, Mozilla said: "As part of our focus on user experience and performance in Firefox Quantum, Google will...become our new default search provider."
To us, this quote defines the essence of Google's dominance while offering two key SEO lessons for websites: online success is about user experience and website performance.
 |
| A Google "doodle" honoring the Mexican wrestling legend, El Santo: How did the search engine pile drive the competition? User experience and performance. (Photo Source). |
Early search engines, like Yahoo, once charged websites for inclusion in search engine directories. Websites that paid more enjoyed higher placement in results.
However, paid advertisements do not always deliver the most relevant results. The essence of organic search, which Google pioneered, is an emphasis on unpaid, natural results. As we've noted before:
"Paid advertising helps a search engine like Google make money. But Google's reputation depends on the quality of its 'organic' results. So unpaid marketing, or organic SEO, satisfies the true goal of search engines: to offer the most relevant, unbiased results for any given search."
Read: What is Natural Website Optimization?
Google changed search, then, by shifting the focus from paid results to organic results.
Writing for Forbes, Adam Heitzman noted how this shift emphasized user experience:
"Google’s entire business model focused on providing a better user experience. Its algorithm accounted for multiple factors, such as page quality, number of links and relevance to a user’s search in addition to how much advertisers pay, thus improving Yahoo’s original model. Because Google provided the best product, everyone wanted to use it."
The SEO takeaway is simple: browsers prefer websites that optimize user experience. Practically speaking, this means a streamlined site with an easy-to-navigate structure (website structure) that satisfies users expectations (website content).
Read: SEO 101: Website Structure & Is Your Content Relevant?
Google SEO Lesson II: Website Performance
Google's search engine is prized for its instantaneous results--often millions in a fraction of a second. This speed was a major factor in its early success and continues to wow browsers. The key to this speed is Google's vast index:
"The first thing we have to understand is that Google does not search the Internet when you submit a query...Google searches its index of the internet. This might seem trivial but it’s an important distinction because it makes the search infinitely faster" (Source).
Though different in kind, Google's index is analogous to a website's "back-of-the-house" design, which governs website speed, and website speed is an important factor for Google:
"Websites with servers and back-end infrastructure that...quickly deliver web content [have] a higher search ranking than those that were slower." (Source).
The SEO takeaway here is simple, too: For Google and websites performance means speed, and speed always wins the day.
Read: SEO 101: Website Design
Online Marketing, Website Design, & SEO: Stepman's SEO
To build an effective, fully-optimized website, you need a web design company that also understands SEO. Stepman's SEO is the rare company that offers a host of design, SEO, and marketing professionals to optimize your website. Contact Stepman's SEO today to learn how you can improve your website's performance: 215-900-9398.