Organic Results Space On Google Is Shrinking

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing emphasis by Google to become a destination for information itself, rather than simply a way for people to find information on other sites.

From baseball scores, to hotel rooms to airline tickets, to auto mechanics it seems like the world’s largest search engine simply isn’t interested in giving away as many free organic clicks as it once did.

An article over at Search Engine Land talked about this at length and had a few conclusions which simply startled me. To start, think about the search term “Italian Restaurant”. In one such search based in New York City, only 7% of the total screen space was given to organic results. That’s certainly a shocking number, but when we look at actual results given, the issue isn’t as great.

There is a pretty even split between paid advertisements and those organic listings that we all want so badly.  Here in my east bay region of California, there really isn’t an advertisement to be found on the front page, evidently there isn’t a lot of competition for Italian Restaurants here in Berkeley.

I do think the long term idea and impact of what Google is trying to do makes some sense to talk about here though-how much lower can Google push organic searches on the page? How much content can the world’s largest search engine basically take from other sites and post directly on their own? The mere fact that Google is willing to do that, is a problem isn’t it?

Image Licensed Under Attribution

For those of us, like myself running an online wine club based in California what are the long term implications? Simply put, it is going to become important to do two things well if the Carousel at the top of the page continues to show searches for the company in question, instead of linking directly to the company’s site.

First, you are going to have to continue to work toward better rankings on all engine’s, yes including Bing because search engine’s have no incentive to continually pass along free customers forever. Secondly, you should try and control what results show on page 1 for your own business.

For my wine business, I will have to try and work even harder now to get affiliate sites off of page 1 for my brand name, because that is the exact search which is going to show up if someone clicks on my business image as part of the carousel. One other note here, the image that shows for my business in some markets is a picture of myself and my business partner.

We know that people tend to click more easily on image’s of people than they do buildings, or bottles of wine so we should be prepared to see a number of people using the carousel to perform unintended searches for our business name. That means, it is more important than ever to not only control what searches your site happens to rank for in Google, but also to control what other sites rank for your company name as well!

Mark Aselstine

About the Author:

Mark Aselstine is the owner of Uncorked Ventures, a wine club based in the San Francisco Bay Area.