Fortune Small Business has a good read about the power Google now wields: "How Google can make - or break - your company". They mean it as a cautionary tale, making it sound like Google might just arbitrarily wipe your business out.

A lot of small online businesses have appeared with a simple model: rank well for natural searches (meaning ones that aren't paid for) on Google, and then make referrals to people who actually sell something. Their business was made possible by Google, and sometimes is right in the path of Google's number one goal: to provide the most relevant search results possible.

As the backlash against Google grows, I suspect this kind of press will become more common. Although it's interesting, for your spa, it doesn't matter. Google isn't out to get you.

But there are some things you need to do:

• Because Google is always looking to improve their search results (and usually leads the other search engines by months or years), you need a website that evolves as search engine optimization (SEO) evolves.
• Don't use an overly aggressive SEO consultant that employs "black hat" techniques. In this case, I lied, and Google is out to get you.
• Create great content on your website that's useful for your clients. That's what Google is looking for. In an upcoming series, we're going to talk about how you optimize this for search engines, but it all comes back to having a useful website.

Posted in Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO) • Share • Trackback

Leave a Reply