Retailers hate Google

A lot of the small retail business owners I've met feel very frustrated by Google. A lot of small to medium sized retailers are starting to have some kind of online presence, if not a fully blown integrated online ecommerce system selling most of the things they have in stock in their shops. Getting people to visit your website is very difficult, especially in popular niches, and mastering Google is probably the most important thing to get right.

The core of the frustration lies in not actually knowing how Google works. Although we all want to be top of the search rankings, it isn't clear how once goes about doing this. With most aspects of retail, business owners understand how to add money or time to solve problems. Not enough stock? Spend some money on stock? Prices are too high? Go and beat up the suppliers. Shelves not tidy - get a saturday worker to spend the day clearing them up. This doesn't work with Google. You can throw a great deal of time and money at the problem, but it is far from clear how to go about measuring the effect of the things you try.

Many business owners feel at the whim of the Google black box. They get a range of potentially conflicting advice from well meaning employees and third party SEO experts and the like, however, it just isn't a case of doing X will result in the outcome they require. The whole thing is much more wooly and dependant on a large range of variables. It is almost a chaos system.

Less understanding owners will be driven to get quite upset by Google. When asking their "web staff" why we are not the top of the Google rankings, they employees often have little answer other than to shrug their shoulders and say "well, that's Google!".

And therein lies the answer. Whilst there isn't a sure fire way of marketing your ecommerce website successfully on Google, starting with the right attitude will save retailers a great deal of stress.

First of all, Google does try to help. Things like Google Shopping feeds in the Merchant Centre, Webmaster tools and Adwords are all their to help. Do not forget that Google's revenue comes directly from online retailers advertising their products online. It is important not to get frustrated by Google. If you are angry that your site has gone down the rankings, then you've got your attitude all wrong. Google is a black box, Google isn't easy to master, but it is just a manifestation of the anthropic principle: Google has to be the way it is, because if it was any other way, then it wouldn't be there in the dominate position it enjoys.

Let me put it another way, at the moment we have one major search engine carrying about 80% of useful global search traffic - it is obvious that we concentrate our effects on Google. What if Google did not exist? What if we had to work with hundreds or thousands of search engines? Not only would this task be impossibly difficult, it would also mean that they'd be an order of magnitude less people using the Internet to buy goods online because they'd have no reliable way of find the correct websites!

Google is there, and it is a pain, but please don't get upset by it because in the end it is to your advantage!