If you want your online business to be worth a flip these days, you have to market for Google results. They’re pushing 75% of all online searches these days and just to put this into perspective, I’ll plug in a few numbers to illustrate how important Google is to an online business.

An average conversion rate for internet sales probably falls around 2-3% of traffic you receive, we’ll use 3% for this example. Your site receives 10k visitors per month and the average sale price of what you offer is $100. Let’s see what Google means to your business:

  Google Others
Traffic 7500 2500
Conversions 225 75
Sales $22,500 $7,500

Need I say more?

But why do I say “Search Somewhere Else”?

It seems like Google is getting into everything we do now. They keep track of every step you take if you’re using any of their products. If you’re marketing for Google, then you’re more than likely using some of their products. Any of their products will place cookies on your computer and they log everything you’re doing. Since they came out and said they track our IP and cookie search logs, if you do anything remotely questionable (which everything will be questionable at some point with them), then why give them any sort of insight?

Using your customer data to improve things is a common thing these days. The problem I have is how Google uses this information to possibly hurt businesses and people’s livelihoods. So many stories pop up where a website disappears from Google and they have no idea why. Sometimes it’s warranted, sometimes it’s not. Unless you know where to go or who to speak to, being dropped from Google can literally shut a business down. This all sounds very similar to what people had to say about Microsoft back in the day and it doesn’t make sense that someone should have that much power over so many people.

With this in mind, if you do any marketing on Google, it would probably be a wise move to limit your use of Google services and/or products, but when you do, make sure you do what you can to limit their visibility. When you want to search, use one of the other search engines like Yahoo, Live or Ask.