Rand Fishkin
As the biggest search engine in the world (by a mile at 83% according to Statista), Google has a lot of sway when it comes to online searches. And that’s part of the problem believes Rand as the search engine giant can manipulate searches to favour its own content even if you’re the one that’s created it. In some cases, Google can even drive your brand and content down the SERP so you’re hard to find at all (Celebrity Net Worth can tell you more about that!) But there are strategies you can use to get around this. In this talk, Fishkin shares his knowledge of Google as the Trojan horse and reveals 10 great ways to thrive in Google’s world.
So, Google. I'm going to call it a Trojan horse. Let's walk through what's happening in Google's world. So we get some awesome data, and I'm going to share some of that with you. But first of all, let's chat about where they are across the industry. So they've been breaking into a lot of fields, you probably saw job listings and reservations. You may not have seen that Google is breaking into cultural content, which I thought was pretty fascinating and they’re putting up some quite impressive content through their arts and culture project. They've been disintermediating (cutting out the middle man) folks, specifically in different types of content (see Expedia’s callout on it). So take the best accounting software. That comes from the first organic listing: QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Microsoft Dynamics GP, but Google is basically scraping it and then showing it to you without you having to click. They've also been changing up how they treat web spam, link spam in particular. So they've shifted a little bit in rather than penalising a lot of spam, Google has been ignoring a lot which does mean that a lot of spammers have taken advantage, and are pushing a tonne of spam again, which we hadn't seen as much of after ‘Penguin’.
Threats to Google
I think Google is also facing its first big threat in a few years with Alexa. When Google looks across the landscape and says, who could potentially take share away from us, Amazon's Alexa is the biggest threat on their radar. And as such, you're seeing a tonne of investment. The EU actually did penalise Google and their share price went up because investors were expecting that the fine would be even bigger than $2.7 billion. They're also facing regulation in Canada and in the United States and paying university professors to produce research saying that Google is not violating antitrust law. And having those professors lobby on their behalf. My God, America's the land of money!
Google Search spikes
But Google is still the behemoth. So we looked at some data that we pulled together with Jumpshot (who get data from the United States and the UK and Canada via devices). So we wanted to ask what's going on. Where is search happening? So comparing October of last year (2016) and May of this year (2017), Google is dominating, just completely crushing it. Anyone want to shout out a guess of what you think was happening in October that made the image search even bigger than it normally is? What do Americans do in October? Halloween? That's right. We think that's Halloween. We looked at the prior year, and we saw a spike in October. Lots of people are searching for costumes. But that's crazy, right? Can you believe that 20% of search is happening on Google images? It's insane. We double, triple-checked this. I was like, Randy, Shawn, I don't know about this. This looks sketchy to me. They're like, nope, here’s the data. Here's what people are doing. And sure enough, people perform hundreds of searches. Most of it is when you go to the bar with your friends. And you're like, Oh, I think he looks a little like Ewan McGregor. No, maybe this one, this one. And every time you click, it's a new image search. I'm keeping an eye on these because Amazon and Facebook growing search share is an interesting one. They're still tiny, but pretty interesting to see Google's growth. So far, at least in the US. 2017 is trending about 10 to 15% higher than 2016. One thing to note is that Jumpshot’s data does not include Apple devices. So this is Android on mobile, and then mostly Windows PCs. Regardless, you can see that the UK actually has slightly more active searchers than the US and Canada do. So about 41% of all searchers here in the UK perform 10 or more searches per month.
I'm trying to imagine who in the world can do less than 10 searches in a month. I don't think I can go two hours without 10 searches. Even when I'm sleeping! That's just weird to me, who are these people?
In terms of click-through rate, you might be thinking, what's going on in terms of paid search versus organic search? In that case, the changes we've seen are not that significant. Organic is still 20 to 30 times the size of paid and there’s not much variation. It was 57% a year and a half ago and it’s 54.5% now, so not huge changes.
Who are the web’s top traffic referrers?
Jumpshot looked at all the traffic that gets sent around and Google is completely dominant. Facebook is an interesting one, Facebook is sending a lot of traffic out, but not everything is even. Google’s growing really fast but look at the distribution of who gets the traffic. Google sends a lot of traffic to the top 10 but not nearly what Facebook does or Yahoo or Reddit or YouTube do. If you are not in the top 100 sites that are getting traffic from Facebook, you're out of it. But the long tail of the people that Google sends traffic to still gets a lot of traffic. Google distributes really evenly. Whereas these other guys are biased to the top few. So, we are still living in a Google-centric world. And I think that's kind of dangerous. So I want to tell you the story of Celebrity Net Worth.
Celebrity Net Worth & Google
So Dan and his crew from Celebrity Net Worth were fascinated by a boxer named Floyd Mayweather. Now Floyd spends crazy money. So Dan and his crew were like what can we do? What can we investigate about what's going on with Floyd's net worth? They ended up building a business, a website around what celebrities are worth. They had a threat of a lawsuit against Larry David because he said “I'm not worth as much as you say I am”. It ended up that Larry David’s accountants agreed with Celebrity Net Worth, so the lawsuit was dropped. So they're good, right? Dan gets an email from a Google representative saying I am tasked with finding an authoritative source. And I'm exploring sources for the net worth of celebrity datasets. Dan thought this was interesting that Google wants to work with them. But you know what, I don't see any benefit to it so I'm not going to do it. But Google took it anyway.
Dan said, “No, we do not want to work with you. But thanks for your interest”. And Google started displaying a featured snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in their database.
How did they know? Because he put some of his friends' names in there who are not celebrities with fake net worth numbers. And then he Googled them and saw that Google had directly stolen their markup and put it in their featured snippet. He was like, Oh, you're not going to work with me? Well, I'm the 10,000-pound gorilla, so what are you gonna do about it? Nothing. That's right, nothing. It dropped their traffic and tanked them. Once Celebrity Net Worth spoke to courts about this, Google dropped the featured snippets and started referring to people who refer to them.
Google’s Trojan Horsing Model
Let’s look at Google Trojan horsing in the same way they did with Celebrity Net Worth. Local events. Let me take data from Eventbrite and Meet Up. Sure, we'll work with you and then Google won't send you any traffic and job listings. So Google paired up with LinkedIn and Facebook and Career Builder and Monster and Glassdoor, except now we own it. We'll work with weather providers, except now we're just going to take it direct. We're going to work with Major League Baseball, except, wait, we're just going to take your videos and make them our YouTube videos and not refer the traffic to you anymore. That's what major league baseball came up with when they made this deal.
This is cold and a consistent model. Google's basically like, “Hey, you do a great job answering the searchers query and we will rank you well. Unless we have our own data. And then we get to be first because we're Google.”
This is what the EU sued them for. The EU was like, you can't just put yourself first all the time. But lobbying in the United States, (AKA legalised bribery), which our political system runs on, has avoided that fate in America. So they said why don't you structure your data like this? We'll make your listings more visible until we take them from you. And these results are actually best for our users so that's what we want to show people. But then actually, what we are going to show people is our stuff instead.
Inaccurate and misleading search results
I think it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. Either you give Google your content and they rank you for it and you risk Google using your data to build something that takes you out of the results entirely. Or you hold back your unique value like StockTwits did when they said they didn’t want to work with Google and preferred to keep it on their own. So Google worked with Yahoo and MSN Money instead. I guess that's better than nothing. I don't actually know if that's better than nothing. And this isn't the only thing. I don't think it's just fear keeping publishers away from wanting to work with Google in this way. I think a lot of times queries deserve a more substantive answer than what's being provided.
If you're wondering why 95% of the world's citizens believe that climate change is real but 40% of the American population doesn't. This might be part of the problem. In a search, Google is telling them it's fake, it's a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. It's insane.
There’s also politically charged content. I only have one great-grandparent who made it out of Europe. So I know for a fact that the Holocaust happened. And Google is like, Oh, no Stormfront here. Dangerous and complete answers like how to check for rabies. Once you detect rabies (in a person), they’re dead and there's no way to save them. So you have to go to the hospital or your doctor and get painful shots to prevent rabies from spreading even if you think you or your child has been exposed to it. Google is giving you a result that's like, “it'd be fine”. That's really irresponsible. Another irresponsible one, slightly lighter on the scale, but still very frustrating is Google's disintermediation of mortgage calculators. This is a crap result. I know it's a crap result because I know what a real mortgage calculator looks like. There's a lot more information you have to put in there to know what your home payment will really look like. And Google is just providing this overly simplistic one that is highly inaccurate, that is misleading.
The 5-Part Path solution to Google Trojan Horsing
So, what's the solution? How do we fight back against Google's Trojan horsing of the web? When I've seen people have success against Google's infiltration of their results, I tend to see them do this.
Have an SEO strategy that segments searcher intent
A content strategy that prioritises complex tasks over simple ones
A traffic strategy that's going to diversify where your visits come from
Business goals that sync with your SEO and content
Incorporate Google’s future into your plans
Let's look at some examples. Here's Redfin, who I mentioned earlier with their mortgage calculator. They do a great job of prioritising complex tasks. I need to learn everything possible about a home before I go into it, which is why a lot of real estate agents in the United States will tell you to sign up for Redfin and use the app to research houses rather than their app or the website listing. Because Redfin does such a good job of providing all this detailed information, including classes on buying homes, and when you can go tour them; that stuff that takes you through steps that Google will never solve for you. There's Eater who's done a great job of diversifying their traffic sources. They were doing such a good job, they actually got too much SEO success, because they kept growing. But search has grown even faster because they've had just so much link building success, and so much keyword targeting success. This is branded search, because they've built such a brand that people want to visit, rather than just Googling for “I want to know what restaurants to go to in Boston”. People will Google ‘Eater Boston’ or ‘Eater 38’. Shutterstock (stock image provider) has done a really good job with this business in a hyper-competitive space. They have been syncing up their business goals with their content marketing. So they've got places from Game of Thrones you can visit. They're doing sort of the clickbait thing, but they're also playing on the fact that they know that this is going to serve my interest. Because when someone needs stock photos of these places, they're going to remember I'm the place that they can go for it. And lots of people, presenters included, like to use visuals from these things. Here's The Muse which does a great job of providing a breakdown of companies that you can apply to. What I love about The Muse is there's a job search system that is customised. We know that Google is going to provide job listings, but what Google will never do is send an interviewer and a photographer to your company to talk to your staff, and produce a big piece of content about what it's like to work there. So companies start referring to their Muse profiles, rather than just their job pages. So they're staying one step ahead.
10 Tactical Tips to Thrive in Google’s World
Some tactical tips. These are both to help you stay ahead in this Google Trojan horsing world, and also generally good for web marketing. #1 - Prioritise buckets of keywords with complex tasks completion requirements Let's say there's a zombie invasion. This is like a big concern in America because something like 40% of all American television programming is zombie centric. In this case I'm segmenting my queries by what is Google going to answer very quickly versus more complex queries like underwater zombies and swim in zombies? I think that you really need to dig into that problem. #2 - Serve ‘instant answer’ content while enticing the click In this case I'm trying to serve instant answer content with stuff that is going to make people click. So I'm fine providing a list, but I want the list to be incomplete when it shows up in Google's featured snippet so that you have to click to get more. #3 - Invest in content Google either can’t show or in SERPs or builds your brand when they do If you are going to partner with Google in some way, make sure you're getting return value out of that. For example, Lyft and Uber both work with Google by connecting their apps with Google's App. But they're doing it in such a way that they get value, even if Google disintermediated them, Lyft has gotten value from being in those results for the foreseeable future. For the time that they had it, they extracted value from that integration. Tip:Interactive content is deviously hard to steal in SERPs and immensely valuable to those who are seeking to solve this problem. #4 - Make your internal search and navigation as good as or better than Google’s path If I'm Eater, what I want to see is not so many people searching for ‘Eater 38 Boston’. I want to see them come to Eater and know it's super easy to get where they need to go on my website. If I see the navigation path is broken or difficult, I need to make that as simple as possible, so that people don't use Google as my site's navigation but use our internal search. If I'm Eater, I am nervous. Because Google is taking my list and showing it in the search results. That's training people to use Google instead of me, and I don't get the visits, the traffic, the ability to retarget and the ad views. #5 - Drive visitors to owned, subscription channels Own your traffic. If you're going to invest in any other way, whether it's SEO, or paid search, or Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Instagram, or Snapchat. Whatever it is, drive people to your site. Tease whatever you've got on your domain so that you can own that content. If you're doing podcasting, drive them back, if you're contributing to other websites, you get value from it because people are being driven back to my site. I own the traffic and use everyone else's channel as a thoroughfare. #6 - Leverage RLSA to outrank Google for the searchers who matter most If you want to outrank Google, in cases where they put their own results first, paid is a great way to do that. An even and cheaper way to do that is if you can if you are already capturing the IPS right and the and the cookied users and the email addresses of some of your audience you can use RLSA (remarketing lists for search advertising) to be in front of those people who have a more likely odds of converting because they already know who you are. You can outrank Google with the paid search results just for the audiences you care about most. #7 - Bias search suggests in your favour through linguistic branding There are ways to influence search suggest, and branding campaigns are one of the best ways to do that. So take Trivago who ran a bunch of advertising suggesting that you perform queries in Google for them. This saw a big spike in searches, instant instant results in the search suggest and related searches. And that is a beautiful thing because now I get to be in front of searchers with my brand, even when they're only searching for the unbranded term. #8 - Use influencer marketing to become the brand searchers recognize One of the things I recommend is trying to get in front of the people who influence your audience. I don't just mean influencers, like YouTube celebrities or highly followed Instagram folks. I mean, all sorts of influencers. For Crowd Cow who sells beef online, they did this in a really smart way. They went out and realised one of the audiences were trying to reach mainstream foodies, people who care a lot about good food. So we're gonna go to Food and Wine Magazine. And we also care about folks obsessed with their sous vide devices, because suvi with fancy beef is one of the best ways to do that. And we also want to reach those paleo folks so we'll go to the East and taste. As a result, over time, they built up such a brand, that now they actually get more search volume than the generic term of buy beef online, buy steak online. Pretty awesome, very impressive. #9 - Innovate at the problem level vs. the solution level I'm going to urge you to invest in web marketing at the problem level instead of the solution level because Google does the opposite of that. Here's what I mean, you want a high percentage of visitors coming away from your experience and thinking, why would I ever Google this term when I could just visit your site to solve that problem? If you can get people saying this, you have fought off Google. Look at Dribble, they show you at that problem level, not just a solution. They are going to help you with the full range of problems. Here's all the designers, here's all the people before your audience needs a solution. They have a problem and that's why they beat Google to the punch. Be there for problem discovery. Look at payment processing for small businesses. Here is NerdWallet, talking about the problems that a small business will face including payment processing. As NerdWallet builds their audience, they get people before they ever realise they have this problem, and thus the answer. #10 - If Google is already in your space, find where they fail to deliver and double down In this case, you know, Google provides basic weather information, but it's not very good, is not hyper localised, and doesn't include a lot of the things that many of us would want to know about weather. Wunderground does an awesome job of taking all the problems around weather that Google is not answering and providing both in their app and on their website. And I love that this is the app that I've installed on my phone, and now I don't google weather anymore. I just use the Wunderground app so they get to serve their ads. They get to win. With these 10 tips, we don't just have to fight off the dragon. We can make it fly us around the skies. Thank you very much.