The end is nigh, for me at least!

Pundits have commented for some time now that Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search is an advertising strategy which benefits only Google and marketing experts.  For novices it’s a black hole to pore their future down.

Now it’s becoming a strategy even experts can’t exploit.  The Internet is a modern day wild west with people who understand it’s complexities exploiting those of us who don’t.

How many people have noticed a change in the way Google ranks results when we use it to research products and services?  Google now selects premium rate advertisers first, then content from social media sites (the content network) and eventually marketing sites.

What this means, to me at least, is SEO is a complete waste of time. Regardless of how good it is, we only get to show on the back pages.  With Google’s preference for content, any marketer is forced into the auction for keyword clicks if he wants to get a look in. 

Google no longer puts willing buyers and sellers together for free.  What it does is share its’ ill-gotten gains with the people who feed it stuff to put in its’ results.

The ranking is:

1. Premium rate advertisers
2. Bloggers who provide the content network
3. Other “content”
4. Optimized sites
5. The rest

by which time the searcher is at page 176.

Google Ads is a nightmare for anybody wanting to use Paid Search to generate a profit.  There are three groups of advertisers competing for top rankings, and they don’t care what it costs.

• Major vendors – in our case salesforce – intend to dominate high ranking results as a way of limiting competition.
• Close competitors who need, and can afford, to respond – in our case Oracle, Netsuite etc.
• Government and quasi government organizations with budgets to spend regardless of payback.

Any vendor who doesn’t fit into one of these groups is going to have a hard time finding a low cost route to market through keyword search.

(On top of this Google Ads may not even get to people using Firefox 3.0.  There’s an add on which allows the user to stop the browser displaying ads. Of course it doesn’t come from Google, but it does work.)

Today I came across the most frightening abuse.

Marketing guru Seth Godin is advising people who read blog posts to thank the author by clicking one of his/her ads.

Don’t know about you, but I don’t want my marketing budget being spent by people, with no interest in what I’m promoting, just so they can be nice to bloggers.  Sounds like the content network is useless as well.

What this means is all those people who spend their time writing and reading each others pontifications can make money for each other forming “you click on mine, and I’ll click on yours” groups.  The serious business ends up paying for it, but not for long.  Serious business people aren’t stupid.

And finally I invite any marketing guru to correct my thinking.  None of the ones I’ve asked so far have come back with corrections.