Has your business been disrupted by your competitors or perhaps Google?
Disruption is the word of the day. Apple essentially turned the music industry upside down and shook it to make sure it didn’t leave anything of great value behind. Amazon and other online companies have disrupted most retail bricks and mortar ventures. Uber disrupted taxi services. Craigslist your newspaper want ads and the list goes on and on.
If your business has yet to feel a shake-up by an industry disruptor or Google algorithm update consider yourself fortunate. If your SMB has a productive website, your traffic has a value and your competition and Google want their pieces of your pie. Google has grown from a company with no source of revenue in the late 90s to grossing over 100 billion dollars in 2017. They’ve done this by selling advertising. Their AdWords platform is hugely profitable. Anyone who has followed Google closely since their inception 20 years ago has seen Google closing the circle and according to this recent article on MOZ – Google’s Walled Garden: Are We Being Pushed Out of Our Own Digital Backyards? slowly shutting down the flow of outbound visitor traffic. In addition to the fight to outdo your competitors for top spots in Googles organic search results, today your main competitor may well be Google itself. Continuing in their efforts to effortlessly answer their searchers’ questions, many of their improvements in recent years have been crafted to keep searchers on Google properties where they have a greater potential of clicking on a Google revenue-generating ad. You may have already felt these changes in the way of reduced website traffic. Fewer visitors to your online presence that may have impacted website generated sales.
Don’t take this to mean that organic search is dead, far from it. Just a wakeup call to the reality that surrounds us as we traverse the modern digital landscape. As the fight for visitors attention heightens we all need to maximize our efforts to stand head and shoulders above our competitors and grab the largest piece of the online market possible. If there ever was a free ride in the internet marketing world, it left the station years ago!
