“I just don’t really care anymore about Google algorithms,” my friend said as he took in another bite of his lunch. I was shocked. This guy, the owner of a chain of three car repair shops, had always been pretty good at figuring out how to land his website onto the first page of search results—and not just on Google, but on Yahoo and Bing, too. I grabbed his hand before he could take another bite, and asked, “You’ve always taken pride in your website. Don’t you care about it anymore?” He forced down a laugh as he swallowed his rigatoni and said, “Of course I do. Probably more than ever.”
“So, what exactly are you talking about?”
“I make sure my website is styled to look smokin’ good, and on mobile phones, for sure.”
“Ok.”
“However, I decided my obsession over how well my website places is actually wasting my time. Sometimes my site places near the top of page one and sometimes near the bottom. Sometimes it slips back onto page two. So what?”
“So what? You’re the one that convinced me that it’s important to place high up on page one.”
“It is, but it’s getting harder to control where my site is going to land. These search engine guys are switching their standards so frequently now that I can’t keep up. Besides, there is a better way.”
“What’s that?”
He stopped eating, leaned in closer to me and lowered his voice, “Everybody in this market, my competitors, and I are trying to do the same thing—get onto page one. But there’s only so much room there, and the number of guys trying to get there exceeds the available space.”
“So, tell me, what’s your new strategy?” I asked.
“My website is one of my most important assets, but only if it’s clean, engaging, informative, and has great content. But I have switched the way I get new people to come to my site. I attract them in places like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. You should see how many new followers I pick up each week posting interesting articles I find on Twitter, and many of ‘em stick.”
“What you are saying is that posting on social media is the best way for you to find people to engage in your business?”
“Right now it is. It’s also changing the way my employees and I interact with our current customers. We get them signed up for our newsletters and we ask them if they enjoy our content.”
“Interesting,” I told him, as I began to understand. He leaned back to take up some more of his rigatoni to finish his lunch. He told me, “I hope my competitors don’t figure this out for a good, long time.”
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