SEO is Google’s Only Competitor

Today, Google has one main source of revenue to talk about: advertising through Google Ads. Part of this happens via Adsense on other websites, but the majority comes from search results in the form of Adwords. Currently, no other company offers this service in Sweden.

Bing, Eniro, Hitta and the others, you might think. Sure, there are companies that want to compete with Google when it comes to selling advertising in search results, but I choose not to count them. Google’s dominance in Sweden is total – 94% of searches are made using their search engine. If some recipe site or an old phone directory gets a handful of searches, it doesn’t matter; they’re still not competitors.

Google’s only real competitor in this market – the one generating massive (tax-free) profits for Google – lies within its own search results. There is, after all, an alternative to paying Google per click if you want to drive traffic from the search results. We are, of course, talking about SEO. Those of us working with SEO on behalf of clients are in direct competition with Google for that money, because if companies couldn’t buy SEO, their only alternative would be Google Ads.

At this point, Google can hardly increase its revenue by taking market share from Bing or Eniro – there’s nothing left to take. Expanding into new countries isn’t an easy option either, since they already dominate globally. One way to grow is to make people search more often, rather than to get more searchers. That’s something they work hard on. Chrome’s address bar is a good example: since it also functions as a search field, it generates a lot of searches. Another way to boost Google Ads investments is by taking budget away from SEO agencies. And how do you do that? First, you have to make SEO less effective.

How do you most easily sabotage the results of SEO?

It turns out that Google can’t easily make SEO ineffective without also damaging its own search results. Good SEO essentially means doing the same things that create good search results. By reducing the impact of SEO work, they would also damage their own output. So they need a different approach: get SEO specialists to fail on their own, before results even come in.

And here’s where PR machinery comes in. I won’t say outright that this is the reason, but if I wanted to shift people from SEO to Google Ads, I’d do it like this: instead of fighting SEO directly, I’d focus on making SEO professionals worse at their jobs. Clients would then see poorer results, decide that Ads perform better, and gradually move their budgets from SEO to Google Ads. Simple, right?

In recent years, Google has been pumping out guides explaining how you should do SEO. Every Google engineer is more than happy to talk, and they’ve even put together a huge PDF badly translated into every language. All of the advice is good – but it’s far from the most important advice they could be giving. And that’s the genius of it. They give good advice, but they leave out the really great advice.

They’re always happy to advise you to create great content. And of course that’s true – great things are always good to have, including content. But it won’t get you to the top. Your competitors are also producing great content, so in the end you’re all pouring millions into creating “quality” content but only getting mediocre results. You’ve bought into the myth that “content that deserves to be shown will be shown,” and in the long run you’ll pay the price – by shifting your marketing budget to Google’s offices in some tax haven.

SEO is more than just content

Great content is an important part of SEO, but there are so many other areas you need to cover. Both the basics of SEO and the more complex aspects go far beyond copywriting. If you’re unsure, I recommend the following reads:

• Five key points to becoming an SEO specialist (a bit more advanced)