I have been saying for years that Google is over. Judging by the looks of disbelief I got from clients and colleagues, I realized that for 99% of the population my statement was outrageous! Heresy! How can Google be over? It is making so much money! It is so large! It dominates the Internet landscape!

That is precisely why Google is over. Here is the evidence:

Being the largest game in town, black hats need only focus on on guy to game and that’s Google. And Google is losing the arms race, it is the Elephant killed by a billion ants! The increasingly poor results served up on Search Engine Results Pages is proof. Every search delivers large spammy selections from content farms: broad shallow sites filled with vapid information. About.com is the most legit among the villains! (Shame on you NY Times Corporation!) But thousands of others are even more guilty: black hats hiring low wage/slave wage cut and paste workers copy information onto millions of pages so the site owners can sell Google Ads. (A shout out to a crowd of bloggers who since Jan 1 have been rapidly building momentum on this topic: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail, On the increasing uselessness of Google, Trouble in the House of Google

If you deliver spammy results you train your visitors to seek answers elsewhere. And as I predicted years ago, vertical search engines and upstarts are gaining ground. Bing delivers beautifully. Blekko delivers better. Wikki answers the homework questions. And when shopping, hell, just start at Amazon or Ebay and move on from there. Vertical social media and tightly focused message boards still deliver some of the best answers to questions asked and answered by passionate individuals. Need a special undershirt that won’t chafe for a child wearing a scoliosis brace? The answer can be found on a message board – because the brace company that sells it has been crowded out of the Google SERP by other inane sites all served up by our infamous friend GoogleBot who simply CANNOT differentiate between quality information and web trash.

Google stopped innovating long ago. We empowered Google by going to it and clicking on its ads. After their initial eureka moment, they bought all other innovations by acquiring companies. Their SaaS offerings of little spreadsheet ditties and social marketing confections are so disjointed and insecure they could pass as Open Source! My question is how can a company so big lack so much vision? Google is clearly distressed about this, note the latest change in leadership at the top. But going back to the founders is a mistake. Steve Jobs may have had the hutzpah to pull a Phoenix with Apple – but in my view that is a rarity!

What does this mean for businesses trying to be found?
1. SEO within reason, that means follow Google Web Master Guidelines, but don’t obsess.
2. NEVER, ever undertake an SEO effort beyond Google Web Master Guidelines unless it has an additional benefit such as lead generation, sales or enhancement of your web site experience. That way if your effort may give you a temporal SEO bump but it will also deliver a lasting marketing lift.
3. Create really useful content for humans. Understand WHEN they need your product and look for blogs and other platforms whose content is associated with that moment of need.
4. Solve problems where your clients look for solutions: message boards, blogs, user groups, associations etc.
5. When considering SEO do not ignore Bing or Blekko and others.
6. Beware of the Social Media sink hole! Where do your customers congregate? Go there. Just because “everyone is on Facebook” doesn’t mean your customers are there, or care to hear about you there. TAKE NOTE: If Google was over in my mind five years ago, Facebook was over two years ago! Vertical social media is here. But that is a topic for another day!

Happy Hunting!

Sometimes words escape me. But the folks over at XtraNormal gave me the tools to say what I really mean in animation.  What fun! Here it is folks, a visit to the Temple of Google. Enjoy!

Most of businesses don’t have the privilege of being a luxury brand. (And in this economy that may not be such a bad thing.) However, I cannot tell you the countless client meetings I have attended where owners and managers express their desire to “look” like a Mercedes or a Jag.  And I totally get it. Traditionally purveyors of luxury goods have been geniuses at surrounding their products in romance. Whether it be geek romance (tech gadgets) or bodice ripping romance (fashion).

This romance surround is created by implementing the highest production values. Great  imagery, with great lighting, superb sound and simply fabulous, to die for models. When done right, even an Imac is a super model. Images spill across pages of glossy luxe magazines too fabulous to touch, evoking wordless emotion. So it is no wonder that so many businesses hold up luxury goods as aspirational branding examples.

But the Internet has put a “spanner in the works” for luxury brands. The high production values they demand – rich media, flash and just plain sexy sites that are, really really cool but unusable – present a dilemma for those who aspire to higher production values: they are tough for search engine bots to crawl and tougher still for humans to shop.

Frankly, search engine indexing, is less important for a luxury brand, it is already well established. So luxury brands have the luxury of not really needing search. In actuality what they do require is a deftly produced social marketing program that propels their brand forward. Most businesses whose brands are less well known require both indexing and social media.

This presents a tension: how do you remain indexable while also presenting a rich experience? Sites must be developed with both needs front and center. And the best approach is often a hybrid. Enough rich media for sex appeal, just enough well-tagged text and regular updates to increase your importance to bots.  And here is where many non-luxury sites fall short. It is entirely possible to have rich media with great production values without spending a fortune. Its all in the planning and the choice of talent.

For non-luxury brands, social media must be produced to be repurposed across many vibrant platforms where brand influencers come to connect and play, it must engage, it must be relevant and it must be frequent. It must also be authentic. Here is where many smaller businesses can win big. Nothing beats the authentic voice of ownership, even if it is a bit packaged and polished by an agency, it still rings true.

As for shoppabillity, many luxury brands simply ignore any rational web conventions. I suppose they build in their exclusive attitude by being impossible to navigate. Businesses ought not to use them as aspirational shopping examples. However, they should build the most streamlined, elegant shopping cart possible, minimizing clicks and clutter, getting people to the submit button swiftly – now that’s luxury!

What’s better than being a luxury brand? Looking luxury but being elegantly facile to buy from.