Google: The Calm Before the Storm

The dynamicism of the internet is invigorating. It’s also frightening. It’s like a living sea of data.

The problem is founding a business model on the internet that doesn’t simply float - but one that remains afloat among the various tides and storm surges of technical progress.

For a company selling SEO services, this means surviving the search engine updates.

SEO is both a competitive and over-crowded industry, covering a vast swathe of different company models and sizes: from big companies employing 100+ staff and serving corporate concerns, to lone Indian students who’ll submit a webmaster’s site to directories for peanuts.

SEO also generates expectations from clients that are not always realistic, and I’ve commonly encountered businesses new to the web who think they can shop on a combination of price and promises, and still get the best.

Promises are nothing on the dynamic seas of search engine optimisaton - I used to offer money-back guarantees when I first started up. It gave new clients confidence.

It almost cost me my company when targeted rankings weren’t met for one particular big client.

Luckily I was more than SEO to him - I provided a lifeline to the web. More than that, even though his major keywords didn’t hit, he got so much targeted traffic from Longtail searches that the SEO had already become profitable for him anyway.

Lesson being, there are no guarantees in SEO to anchor a business model on.

A lot of SEO companies - especially newer ones such as mine - have a core expectation that is being continually challenged.

The expectation is simple: our clients will survive Google updates.

Google updates are even more important here in the UK, because Google owns over 70% of the search market.

But frequently those Google updates have been more severe. Google Sandboxing has become a fact of life, and every update threatens a change in its parameters that can suddenly sink a client.

I’ve come to appreciate that many webmasters are natural problem solvers, and often brilliant people drift into SEO through this process.

But while we can build innovative works and sail rough seas like Thor Heyerdal riding the Kon Tiki, the storms of Google are becoming more and more unsettling.

Simply put, business models founded on SEO services need to be increasingly stabilised to survive these storms.

Running a new business can leave you feeling insecure enough, but at some point when running a SEO company, the time comes to realise that the boat you currently man is too vulnerable to sustain a long term business with.

You need to make it more stable, diversify, and make it stronger so that it’s even more fit for the internet seas and surges. The older SEO companies already learned this.

I’ve long realised these things, and have been trying to build my boat stronger for some time. But I’m still fearful of not being able to make it.

Google is quiet at the moment - they’re making changes to their datacenter infrastructure - so no updates for a while yet. But they are coming. It is the calm before the storm.

Like Noah before the deluge, I’m trying to ensure that - by the time the next big Google update swells and stirs my clients - they will be better positioned to weather it successfully, and help my own business survive in the process.

The ultimate goal is no longer simply SEO and rankings, but a wider raft of useful internet services, developed from key skills and problem solving that many small businesses desperately need to deal with the internet.

In the meantime, I try to get more and more organised. After all, when you’re faced with the calm before a storm, the most useful way to use that time is determine how you will survive it.