As someone who has been running an SEO company for the last 4 years, I have the ultimate love-hate relationship with Google.
Google has given me a career and the ability to get other companies to the top of their rankings is my livelihood.
I love Google when it goes right, a website surges to page one and your client’s income and revenue changes overnight.
But Google also plays hard ball – changing their algorithms without giving notice. Its like your hot date cancelling your dinner plans without telling you. You’ve already had a haircut, got your best clothes on and you’re waiting outside Nandos but she ain’t coming.
The techniques to rank higher on Google are never written in stone, but more hear-say and the result of mass trial and error by other search engine marketers who share their findings.
When we talk about Google Ads, their market dominance of 90% of the UK search market means that they can charge essentially whatever they want for ads, with no regulation in place and with 20% of clicks considered fraudulent (by competitors or robots) – you have nowhere or no-one to complain to amongst the giant Google machine.
“A business so dominant in this day and age cannot go unchallenged”
People ask me ‘Why don’t you get funding and grow grow grow?’ – And whilst this always sounds like an interesting proposition, the reality is that you cannot have your entire life so dependent on just one company (like Google).
Whilst Google might seem like this everlasting and omnipotent force – a business cannot be so dominant in this day and age without facing some form of regulation.
To operate with such ambiguity and vagueness when millions of businesses globally lie in your hands, cannot go unchallenged.
Already there are talks about turning Google Adwords into a separate company which is monitored by the Competitions and Markets Authority.
Transparency is key in business today and no one can control a market so freely.
It won’t happen today, it won’t happen tomorrow, but the market is calling for more transparency and at some point Google will have to face to the music.
