So I was doing some research the other day and looked up Google’s current market share for search engines. Ninety percent. Like, nine out of every ten searches on the entire internet go through one company. That’s kind of insane when you think about it, so I figured it was worth breaking down what that actually means for your business and why this thing called SEO even matters in the first place.
First things first, Google is a search engine. Basically think of it like Ask Jeeves if you’re old enough to remember that. You type something in, it finds stuff. Simple enough. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and when you put those two ideas together, the whole game becomes pretty obvious: you’re optimizing your business to get found by search engines. Specifically, to get found by Google. Because Google is where everybody is.
But here’s the thing a lot of people don’t realize, this game has been going on way longer than the internet has. Back in like 1993 if you needed to find a window repair shop, you weren’t googling anything. You were cracking open the Yellow Pages. The phone book was basically the Google of it’s time and everybody had one sitting in their house. Businesses would pay for bigger ads, throw coupons in there, do whatever they could to stand out from the competition. And here’s a fun one, you’d see businesses with names like “AAA Plumbing” or “AAA Auto Glass” because that triple-A would put them at the very top alphabetically. People were literally gaming the phone book ranking system before the internet even existed. Sound familiar?
When search engines started showing up in the late 90s, there was actually alot of competition. AltaVista, Lycos, AOL keywords, Yahoo, these were all real players at one point. Yahoo honestly had the majority of market share for a while there. But the thing is, nobody was really making serious money off of it yet because the people with the money, the older generations, the homeowners and business owners who actually needed to find a window repair guy or a plumber, they were still using the phone book. The internet at that point was mostly for chat rooms and college kids trying to find sources for their papers. It wasn’t really a place where businesses felt like they needed to be.
It wasn’t until that older demographic started actually getting online that everything shifted. Same thing happened with Facebook honestly. Facebook got big with millennials first but it didn’t become the money printing machine that it is until everybody’s parents started getting on it. The money follows the older generation because they’re the ones with the spending power. Once that crowd moved to Google, advertisers followed and the whole industry took off.
Once people started using Google to find businesses, it didn’t take long for someone to figure out you could play the algorithm. You could do things to your website that made Google more likely to show it at the top. And if you’re the first result when somebody searches “window repair near me,” you’re getting that call instead of your competitor two spots down. Most people don’t even scroll past the first few results, so that top spot is worth a lot.
It really is that simple at its core. SEO is just trying to be the number one result so more people find you instead of the other guy. The businesses that understand that and actually put in the work are the ones that keep their phones ringing without having to spend a fortune on ads every single month.
The phone book is dead. Google is the phone book now. And just like back then, there are ways to show up higher, pay for placement, or get left at the bottom of the pile where nobody ever looks. The only difference is the stakes are higher now because the internet doesn’t close at 5pm and people are searching for things at all hours. Your online presence is working for you or against you around the clock whether you’re paying attention to it or not.
