Thread: Google is Killing Small Businesses

Google was built by the small business. To this day, most of their profits come from the aggregate of hundreds of thousands of small businesses that have small marketing budgets. Big businesses make up about 20% of their revenue. So given this, why on earth are they favoring big businesses, and screwing the little guy when it comes to organic search traffic? How are they doing this? By penalizing small businesses when they try to compete organically with the big guys.
Google is in control of over 60% of online e-commerce transactions. If you are not ranked on the first page of Google for your primary keywords, and you are a small business, you have little chance of being successful online. Without organic rankings, it will be near impossible to be profitable. The problem is, according to Google’s webmaster guidelines, you cannot really do anything that will give you a competitive edge over anyone. You are supposed to only do what is natural. “Build your site and your marketing campaign to the user, the rankings will come”. That is completely false, if you are a small business.

Google is Killing Small Businesses | iDeposit.net News

You can agree or disagree, but I am one of them thinking that Google is killing small businesses to favor their crony corporations.

Remember what Eric Schmidt said:

"Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component".

Originally Posted by jw15

It is all about money, if small businesses do right SEO, they may beat the big ones.

It depends on the niche. It's getting tougher with online shopping due to more adwords, youtube and shopping ads on the pages. So, in addition to the 10 organic listings there may be an additional 25 listings on the 1st page.

The question in my mind is what does a small business have to do to have their brand identity stand out against the Big Dogs? Does it mean you're forced to launch a blog on the same site with detailed reviews on your products now that then link back to the product listing with its own unique description? Launch a parallel FaceBook page that syndicates your content as well?

I'm thinking leveraging Facebook search and syndication is where I would go if I had a similar business (I don't).
J

Originally Posted by javanx3d

The question in my mind is what does a small business have to do to have their brand identity stand out against the Big Dogs? Does it mean you're forced to launch a blog on the same site with detailed reviews on your products now that then link back to the product listing with its own unique description? Launch a parallel FaceBook page that syndicates your content as well?

I'm thinking leveraging Facebook search and syndication is where I would go if I had a similar business (I don't).
J

A lot of the recent Google updates like MayDay, shopping results and Panda have impacted the small ecommerce sites in a negative way. I think the big issue is that there really isn't organic traffic apart from Googe/Bing.

Social can be a way to go. Though it's tough when selling $10 consumer products as you don't have the kind of profit margin as selling big ticket items.

Any small business can use adwords as well as optimize their sites for search engines.
I don't feel Google is killing anything

Google is killing off small businesses.

One, someone said small businesses can buy into adwords.
Most small businesses can not afford adwords.
Can you?

Two, in line with the above, google is good to big businesses and not so good to small businesses.
EG: for an example (sure google looked at this and said, let's make it this way) look at ebay and how they really killed off a lot of their small businesses and sellers.

For any small business to survive if they go on the net (and despite what people keep saying, I say 80% of small businesses would get nothing for going on the net), they have to go social media (twitter, facebook, etc)

Now the 80% I mentioned?
Think about it, going on the internet really a big concern or need of your local gas station? Local bar? Local doctor?