Google Changes - 2016

By Adam  |  26 Feb 2016 12:00:00

For a lot of small businesses, paid Google search results are essential. Do you ever use their advertising system? It can be a really effective way of bringing traffic to your site - although it is a little expensive. As there is a good chance that many Sellr users will be using this and that it will be a big factor in bringing people to their site, I thought that it would be a good idea to write a blog post on Google's recent changes to this system.

How is it Different?
Well, in the past, if you paid Google, your website would come up in searches for certain keywords and either appear to the right of the main list of search results, or it would appear right at the top of the list of results. But now Google have decided that there will no longer be any adverts listed to the right of the central search column and all paid results will either appear at the top of the main list of search results or at the bottom of the page. If somebody writes in a "highly commercial query" then there will be four paid results at the top of the search, but if they were to write something less "commercial" then there would be fewer paid results.

How Will This Affect Businesses?
With adverts now appearing at the bottom of the page instead of to the right, it seems likely that fewer people will click on them. When results were listed to the right, they were high up on the page and people would see them without having to scroll down too far. When people use Google, they're not very likely to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page; when was the last time you did that when searching for something? But what you need to remember is that the number Google searches done in a single day is very large; apparently the number is about 3.5 billion. With such a huge number of people using Google so regularly, even adverts listed at the bottom of a page stand to be very useful... Just not quite as useful as when they were listed to the right.

Will Prices Change?
As of yet, this remains to be seen as this is still a very recent change. They could go up: there'll now be fewer paid results coming up for each search, meaning that there'll be a higher demand for those few slots. They could go down: results that appear at the bottom of a page will not be as effective as results that appear to the right and so people may not be happy to pay the same sorts of prices for them. It's possible that this could lead to higher prices for big businesses (who want the top results) and lower prices for small businesses (who get the bottom results.) Alternatively, maybe nothing will change! However, I think it likely that we'll some kind of differences in pricing as the new system settles in.

So that's about everything you need to know about the changes to Google's advertising. Hopefully this won't have any kind of negative impact on your business; in fact, hopefully it will have some kind of positive impact on your business! At times of change like this, it's natural to be uneasy and I hope that knowing the facts about the change will help to put your mind at ease somewhat. But if you don't yet have an eCommerce website, this won't really be of that much interest to you! Sign up to Sellr now and make your own eCommerce website for no cost at all.