"The safest place to hide a corpse is the second page of Google" reads a phrase that has been circulating among insiders for some time now. The meaning is this: if you don't appear in the first page of Google search results it's like you don't exist. And companies that invest more and more time, energy and above all money to grab the first places in the list of what today is the most visited site in the world. But how expensive is the race to the finish line? And what are the means that companies must use to be able to obtain even that minimum of online visibility?
Let's take a cue from a tweet published in recent days by Jason Fried, founder and CEO of Basecamp, an American company that develops web-based applications for project management. In the his tweet Fried states: “When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you're forced to pay up if you want to be found. It's a shakedown. It's ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad” ie: “When Google places 4 paid ads before the first organic result for your brand, you are forced to pay if you want to be found. It's a perverse mechanism. How to ask for a ransom. But at least we can have fun. Search Basecamp and you may see this ad attached." This is the ad in question:
The marketing experts in Basecamp therefore "amused" by publishing (paying for) an ad only to essentially affirm that they did not want to publish it, but that they were forced to do so. The reason? Bigger, more powerful companies have made paid ads that rank before the first organic result that sees them appear for the search query “Basecamp”.
So Google is a perverted machine that rewards only those who have a lot of money to spend? Google is a multi-million dollar company, active over 20 years, which collects mainly thanks to dealer. And it is therefore precisely on advertising that it seeks to focus. Its online platform, Google Ads (which was known as Google AdWords until July 2018), allows anyone who wants to promote a product or service on Google to create paid ads.
The mechanism is quite simple: it is based on an auction, so basically whoever offers the most wins. And the auction is done on keyword, i.e. on the keywords that the user uses to carry out his searches. Every single keyword has its own specific value, so the more it is associated with a product or service that many people want to sell, the higher its cost will be.
Let's go back to the starting point: the more money I have to spend, the more chances I have of being found by users. Exactly so, but not quite. Google's SERP (Search Engine Results Page) is not only made up of paid ads, but also of organic results, results to which companies can aspire with a careful strategy SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is free – in the sense that you owe nothing to Google – and which analyzes the functioning of the search engine algorithm to ensure that a specific web page, through the use of meta tags in the source code, the best possible placement.
So you don't want to be that body on page two? Prepare the right budget, hire an SEO expert and pray that theGoogle algorithm change only once a year.
