A few things I feel I should mention aside from what’s covered in the video:

If you’re wondering which route you should take to ranking your website in Google for the first time, I believe for many small business owners the answer maybe Google Adwords. It’s a solution that allows you to be ranking literally within days and provides EXTREMELY measurable results and valuable data to continuously improve your online advertising. Learn more about our Google Adwords management service.

That being said, organic is great. It can take some time to rank but is the cheaper way to acquire clients. Sometimes the cost per client is literally half. This is because organic search results are not technically for sale and achieving an organic rank is not nearly as easy as simply signing up for Google Adwords, therefore less people do it meaning less competition. If you wish to receive an instant quote on our organic SEO service check out our page Google Rankings, Only Pay for Results.

If you’re really serious about online advertising (and I think we all need to be nowadays) there’s a good chance you should consider doing both options.

Hello. Jonathan Adams here with Printing Peach. I’m going to talk a little bit about the two different ways you could rank your website in Google. You’ve probably noticed that when you do a search in Google, there are two different sets of results that come up. One would be their ads, the top three with the yellow background here on the left and continuing on down the right-hand side of the page are more ads. Ad number one, two, three, four, five, six, so on and so forth. That’s way number one to have your website come up in Google. That program is called Google AdWords, by the way.

The other way you can come up in Google is to do the work to come up in the organic section, that’s these results I’m highlighting here. That term, ‘organic’ is an SEO term, a search engine optimization term and I use that term because technically, officially, there’s no way to pay to come up in the organic search results. This is what Google, based on their search algorithm, genuinely thought was the ten best results for page one. I say officially there’s no way to pay; there is that whole industry, search engine optimization, where people are doing the work to get your website to meet the criteria of Google’s search algorithm and rank your website as one of the top ten pages. The ads, obviously, are a little more transparent, it’s just something you sign up for and pay for. It’s a fairly complicated system, it’s not like there’s a price list for keywords and you say ‘I want this keyword and it’s this much money a month to have it rank.’ The whole thing works on an auction system, that’s why it’s complicated enough that there are companies like Printing Peach that manage Google AdWords for clients such as yourself and generally get a better return on investment. For instance, you spend $300 a month on AdWords: doing it yourself you get $400 of income a month back; Having us do it, you pay the management fee on top of the $300 but you get $600 back just because your campaign runs that much more effectively. That’s why you might hire a company like ours to do it. Just to be clear, anybody can sign up for AdWords, and they can go through the process of setting up their campaigns and telling Google what keywords they want to bid on and how much they’re willing to pay every time their ad gets clicked.

And that’s pretty transparent, it’s rankings for sale. It is clear here that they are ads too. It’s nice that they sometimes come up at the top of the page. Many people, this is kind of a negative thing, are aware that they are ads and some people are leery of that. I’m not sure why, these are companies that are so confident in their product that they’re willing to pay to have them come up. Anyway, a lot of people are leery of them and therefore don’t click on them, hence the reason why it’s quite attractive to come up in the organic section or the regular section. A lot of people just tend to trust these more. They know they’re not ads, and they rank in Google, and Google is god according to many people so they figure they must be pretty good websites and these get a lot of traffic. It’s true, it’s not easy to get a website to rank in the organic section in Google because it’s not officially for sale. You have to do the work to meet the search engine algorithm criteria, and Google certainly does not publish that criteria. That’s their secret sauce that all the other search engines would love to about. The really big obvious reason they don’t want it to be easy to rank a website in the organic section is because they make 98% of their revenue every year selling ads. Everything that Google does on top of ads is kind of just for fun and to make people love Google and use Google because they do make 98% of their income from ads. Certainly they don’t want it to be easy to make a website rank in the organic section.

There is a whole industry, search engine optimization, revolving around professionals that do the work to have as clear an understanding as possible as to how that algorithm does work and thereby help people such as yourself get your website to rank in Google. I did a search here for ‘postcard printing Toronto’ and I did that because our website Printing Peach comes up in both the ads here on the right, position number four, and we come up organically number three. Given that it’s our website I have a pretty good understanding of why those are coming up. We’re coming up in the ads because we signed up for Google AdWords as part of our management account where we do our account and a bunch of our clients’ accounts and we set up a campaign specifically for people searching for ‘postcard printing Toronto’. You see that our ad is extremely relevant, therefore quite likely to be clicked on a lot. It talks about how we have great prices and fast shipping and it gives an example. That’s a compelling, highly relevant ad that’s likely to be clicked. Now you understand why we rank there. The next question is ‘why do we rank in the organic section?’ Number three for a very competitive term. Again that search algorithm, nobody knows fully how that works except Google, it’s all a matter of research and debate and trial and error, but there are certain things that we do know pretty clearly and therefore are able to successfully get sites to rank in Google. It comes down to really two things with organic; it comes down to relevance and it comes down to popularity. Google wants to rank relevant websites. The whole reason you go to Google is because you know they’ll give you back ten relevant websites. They’ll give you back what you’re looking for. Google has a ‘spider,’ or a ‘robot,’ I don’t know if you’ve heard these terms before but basically it’s a little program or bot that goes all over the web. It starts with a website it knows about, sees other websites that that site has linked to, and basically just follows the links; goes from one site, to the next site, to the next site. It gets as much of the Internet as humanly possible, or ‘robotically’ possible into its index and that way it knows that if someone’s searching for ‘ABC’ we’ve got 10,000 sites related to ‘ABC’ we can give them in our search engine results.

So for this term, ‘postcard printing Toronto,’ we’ve done the work to A)make sure Google is aware of our website and has it in its index, and we’ve made our site very relevant to the term ‘postcard printing Toronto’. In this case it ranked our homepage. In the title of our homepage it says ‘Cheap Printing Toronto,’ which was part of the search query, mentions postcards here, it also mentions postcards in the description, ‘printing’ in a couple of places. You can see that it knows we have a ‘postcard Printing’ page, so Google figures we’re quite relevant for this term. That’s reason number one why our site is ranking. Reason number one is not enough. You see here at the top that, when we did the search for ‘postcard printing Toronto’ it brought back 143,000 results. That means that, in the Google index they figure they have 143,000 websites relevant to the term ‘postcard printing Toronto’ so being relevant is not enough. Why did Printing Peach come up number three out of 143,000? The answer is that second piece of the puzzle, popularity.

In addition to just being aware of all the websites on the internet and what those sites are relevant to, Google has an algorithm to determine basically how popular any given website is. You might hear other people use other terms like ‘authority’ or what their ‘Google Page Rank’ is. Page Rank is a scale from zero to ten in terms of popularity authority that Google has. The algorithm is obviously complicated, and again nobody knows exactly except Google, but when you boil it right down, that popularity has to do with how many links there are from other websites on the internet to your website, remember Google sees this. How many other websites thought you were good enough to mention on their blog with a link or to tweet your website with a link or to mention you on Facebook with a link or maybe you were part of a charity so they mentioned you with a link. There are a million and one ways that links occur on the internet, it’s what holds the whole internet together so it makes sense that Google would use that as a popularity ranking factor. That is a hugely simplified version, some links matter a lot; if you had a  link from NBC.com to your website, that would be saying a lot about your website, that’s a huge thumbs up for your site. Whereas, if a brand new site that itself had no links pointed to you, that does virtually nothing. It’s much more complicated than that, but when you boil it down, it’s about links. How many links, quality of links, et cetera.

The other part of the SEO equation is doing that work to build up that connectivity to your website through links. The right kind of links, done in the right way. When your site it highly relevant and has lots of popularity you’re quite likely to rank. Again, this is an unbelievably simplified way of looking at this. There are a lot of ins and outs, and Google’s getting smarter all the time and trying to thwart the efforts of the SEO industry, because again they don’t want it to be easy to rank in Google, they want it to be something that can’t be manipulated or encouraged. They would prefer that we all give up on the organic SEO and pay for the ads. You can see why that would get difficult and tricky.

Hopefully that gives you a little clarity at least about what you’re seeing here when you do a search in Google and why people are coming up there. For many of my clients that are starting from absolute zero that kind of clarity can be good. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks.