Is there life without Google?
Published on April 22, 2012
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Over the last few days I have started to become very uncomfortable about the future of my on-line business. I have had an online shop for over 10 years, originally it was local business but evolved over the years and now delivers nationwide. We do very little local work and due to the current climate doing just local work is no longer an option as I just couldn't earn enough to pay the bills.
About 7 years ago I started doing PPC and my business really took off but after a couple of years a lot of my competitors also jumped on the PPC band wagon,. I then found that I was having to pay Google more and more to maintain the same level of income and made the decision that I needed to stop relying on PPC. I paid my hosting company to do some SEO on my site to increase my organic rankings and after about 6 months I was able to do away with PPC altogether and for the last 4 years my site has been of page 1 of Google for a very competitive keyword.
About a year ago I realised that I needed to move further up the rankings, I tried out a couple of SEO tools and made a few adjustments and then the tool told me that the only way I could increase my rankings further was to get more backlinks. I had no clue how to do that! I started doing some research on line and eventually came across WA where I have been learning all about SEO and backlinks since November!
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Since being here as well as creating backlinks for my existing site I have also as created some new sites, written content for my web pages and articles for quality backlinking, social bookmarking and the like all to, unless I have got this wrong, help move my sites up the Google rankings to enable me to get traffic to my sites from people searching.
My main business has a small amount of repeat customers but the majority of my business is from new customers and so I rely heavily on my page 1 listing for traffic to the site. I'm pretty sure that for most affiliate marketers promoting amazon and clickbank products this would be the same for them.
The other day a well respected internet marketer blogged that they were no longer going to rely on Google for traffic because Google are no longer sticking to their own rules. They are listing websites with no content in the top 10 rankings and well established websites with good quality content and white hat SEO are just disappearing to the backwaters. I don't want to name names but this person is lucky because they state that they are only reliant on Google for 30% of the traffic to their site as they also get 30% from referrals and another 30% direct - the customer is putting in the URL. They said they were going to stop worrying about pleasing Google and just create the site for themselves and their customers.
Now my main site has been built for my customers - it has to work so that they can find what they are looking for but it still has all the normal SEO work of keyword density etc and I have been busy creating backlinks to ensure that the site remains on page one but I don't have a plan B and I don't really know how to make one! What if Google stopped loving my site for no reason? If the online shop that pays my bills and feeds my family stopped converting I would go broke pretty quickly!
So what is life without Google? How do we all become self sufficient?
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