Google owes you nothing

Having worked in SEO for over a decade, I’m still surprised that some website owners expect Google to give them thousands of visitors that convert into customers just by the very nature of having a website.

Website owners and marketers need to realise that Google primarily serves the needs of two parties – the people who use Google and its advertisers. As a website owner, you can become an advertiser and appear in its search results, paying per click (known as PPC). If you want to appear in the free results that appear alongside and under the paid ones, that is something that needs to be earned.

Just having a website isn’t enough. You have to prove to Google that your site, and by extension, your business, offers its users a good enough of an experience to warrant being on page 1 of its search results.

The practice of earning this right is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. As website owners and traditional marketing managers tend to not understand how Google works, they often approach agencies or freelancers to help them with this task, some of which are good, some not so good.

This site is created in part as a how-to resource for SEO and in part as a soap box about the industry and its many charlatans and snakeoil salesmen, who either overcomplicate things, end up doing more harm than good or generally don’t know what they are talking about.