With Competition for Search Small Businesses Sell More

Small Businesses Like Us Will Too

To be clear I’m not talking about when everybody uses Search – that happened a long time ago now.

I am talking about when Search becomes the point of competition between these mega sites – Google, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Bing, and whoever else comes along.

When users select their Search provider on the basis of quality content directly addressing the question, the guys who provide that quality content will get real leverage with that provider.

Search Engines Are Brokers

Google is the best example, but the others will get there soon. It brings together three parties 1) the User, 2) the Content Provider and 3) the Advertiser. Basically it helps people looking for information find it from people offering it – Content – and allows the Advertiser to sit in on the conversation.

Everyone’s a winner, especially Google. But it’s obvious the giant only gets to sell all that advertising because WE feed its need for content.

Brokers Need Deals

If every blog in the world shut out Google (as Murdosoft is suggesting it might) nobody would use it to search for information, and nobody would pay to advertise alongside the results. If every blog was indexed by Facebook (and it’s getting there), searchers would use it for Search and the advertisers would follow.

Content Not Keywords

Searches are becoming more complex. They’re no longer limited to single word queries. Now phrases offer more detail of the searcher’s interest, and Google does a reasonable job of answering them, based on page titles.

In the last month Google has sent visitors to 230 different pages in the Front Office Box blog. As a minimum that’s 230 different Search phrases, and a minimum of 230 users who would get sub optimal Search results if our pages weren’t there.

An old style, five page site wouldn’t have done anybody any good.

Great for Small Businesses

Why is this such good news? It means anybody with good ideas can get them out there. Size and brand mean little when somebody’s looking for a specific answer to a specific question. It’s the answers which count.

Small businesses have lots of great ideas, plenty of opinions and can adapt them as circumstances change. There’s no corporate PR machine to make sure a publication toes the party line, and no CEO’s permission needed.

Big companies can only feed Search engines with sanitised, keyword engineered, limited scope, promotional brochures. And it takes forever to get anything new approved.

On the other hand we small businesses can say what we think, today.

Which do you think the Search engines will prefer?

When Search Becomes the Point of Competition

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Delicious, Diigo, Stumbleupon, Linked In, and names we haven’t yet heard of, will be competing for our content.

We won’t have to worry about SEO and Pagerank. We can just focus on ideas while the Search engines bring us the business.

Sounds Great to Me.