If You Promote Google, Does Google Promote You?
Some of you marketing hounds might remember back to January 2006 when Pontiac ended one of their tv commercials with a screen shot of Google’s search box with the search term "pontiac" being entered. The commercial voice over stated "Google Pontiac and discover for yourself". Ifyou don’t remember, you can read some past thoughts on this from Media Post and SEO Moz.
At that time, some of my first thoughts were:
- Google must be kicking in some promo dollars on this, and that’s genius.
- Pontiac is VERY in touch with how people use the web and search.
Then last month here in the Twin Cities I heard a radio ad a few times for a local dental office with multiple locations that used this same technique. The closing of the radio ad asked listeners to "Google Metro Dental Care Online". Currently, you can actually listen to their radio ad from their home page. I was shocked to see small business try this approach. That’s a lot of faith in your Google ranking, especially without any locale attached or using AdWords to secure the top spot. But they did it.
So now 30 days later I have repeated the search just to see if another dental office had tried to use AdWords to steal some fire/business from Metro and I’m amazed at what I found. I’ve found that Google is awarding Metro Dental even more SERP real estate. Here is the screen shot below from their search (which it wasn’t this way 30 days ago) and also for "pontiac". It seems to me that Google has rewarded both of these with additional links to sub-pages in their site, clearly making them stand out on top.
As you can see, this is what leads me to my question. Does Google promote those who promote them? It looks that way to me. Your thoughts?
Posted on October 25th, 2007 by Aaron
Filed under: marketing, small business, search, local search
If you like what you're reading, please subscribe to this blog.
Related Posts
- Get A Few SEO Tips & Understand Search Results From Google & Matt Cutts
- Monday Link Menu: Blogs for 7.9.07
- The Meaning of Color
After some further research, I found out that these are called ’sitelinks’ and that Google has an explanation on them here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334
Many people have speculated about how to get ’sitelinks’ for your web site, but it seems as if Google isn’t giving an exact recipe.
This article by Jonathan Hochman has a good explanation and theory about how you can achieve ’sitelink’ status:
http://www.jehochman.com/articles/sitelinks.shtml
After researching sites he worked on that have ’sitelinks,’ Jonathan found these similarities:
* Site ranks first for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing
* Easily spiderable, structured navigation
* Fairly high natural search traffic
* High click through rates from the search results page
* Useful outbound links
* Inbound links from high quality sites
* Site age is several years or older
Dang, thanks Luke. I should have known your researcher skills would bust out on this. Good stuff to look into … but I still think there is some other angles to it with Metro Dental gaining this.
In the beginning, there had to also be some “exact match” going on to get the sitelinks to show up. They used to only appear on exact company names, for example, like your Pontiac example — this was a year or two ago, when they first started showing up.
Now, you see sitelinks show up where there’s less of an exact match. I’m a bit surprised that a seemingly generic phrase like “metro dental” brings up sitelinks for one match, when there are a handful of other competitors with the same name. To me, that screenshot is what the real news is here … why does that one company get the sitelinks when there are several other exact matches for the query you entered?
Matt- Thanks for weighing in. My thoughts exactly… what is so special about this Metro Dental and not the others. As well, they only appear for the top organic result in all of the queries we did … so why can’t the 2nd or 3rd result get the same depth? Isn’t being the top result advantage enough?
Aaron,
I’ve heard that radio ad here in the Twin Cities as well! I forgot to search on it to see what the results would be. Thanks for reminding me. Great post!
Pat