Google search changes may yet prove challenging to smaller companies

In February, Google announced that it would be significantly shifting its SERP for desktop. Users would no longer see ads on the right of the desktop search results; in some instances four ads would appear above organic search instead of three; ad positions five through seven would appear at the bottom of the page and; ads eight through 11 would be dropped to page two of the results.

©Utkarsh Vaidya via 123RF

The rationale for this (as described by Google) was to allow for a similar experience on desktop as one would have on a mobile device. This is not an entirely surprising move. Since October 2015, more than half of Google’s searches take place on a mobile device.

At the time of the announcement, the digital marketing space was abuzz with speculation as to what the effect of the move might be.

According to Merkle/RKG, there was an initial uptick in Costs per Click (CPCs), of around 5%, but this has levelled off.

As expected, keywords in positions below 4.5 have seen a fairly large drop in traffic due to impressions dropping off. CPCs in these positions also initially increased 15%, but this may have been skewed by the cheaper CPC positions of 8-11 disappearing from the SERPs.

What is of interest, though, is the click through rate (CTR). Ad positions one and two actually saw a drop in CTR. This has been attributed to the prominence of ads in position three and four, which enjoyed a healthy spike in click throughs. Position three saw a CTR rise of 15% making it the best performing position on the page.

Bottom of page ads (five to seven) are also seeing more traffic than we anticipated which has countered the fear that top page ads would hog all the traffic and would therefore see a spike in CPC. The counterbalance of these two phenomena have ensured a more stable CPC over the past months than the industry feared.

Looking at the Clicks2Customers clients we are seeing some trends, which should be noted, particularly for the smaller companies and SEO professionals.

The fourth ad is now technically in the position of the first organic listing and this obviously pushes organic listings further down the page. Added to this, on smaller desktop displays, the second organic listing has now been pushed below the fold.

The impact in general has not been overtly negative for organic search, as we have noticed that users are now scrolling further down the page and spending more time on the first page before making a decision on where to click. However, the major impact for SEO is that it is now more important to drive a wide array of keyword permutations to the first page and, more importantly, the top five, since users now have more choice on the first page and will have less need to click to the second page.

So what does this mean to the average company making use of paid search?

We believe the smaller advertisers may struggle to compete if CPCs do rise over time, which they may still do. This may bring an end to campaigns that solely rely and focus on simple keywords and text ads.

Smaller brands will have to be more creative. They will have to test and use more Adwords features to stay competitive, which could be a challenge for under-capacitated teams.

We also believe Google might give more preference to local results on the desktop. While this has obviously been a significant factor to mobile, until now localisation on desktop has been fairly broad.

Running a hands-off campaign will not deliver as it did before. Google will always look to pace your spend. Companies need to be monitoring their performance, watching their conversion rates, and not simply how much they are paying, ensuring the money they spend is as effective as possible.

One of Google’s stated strategies is that it will continue to make changes as it tries to provide a better user experience. Nothing this company does is without a well thought-out strategy behind it.

There is no doubt that companies will need to be more focused on monitoring their paid versus organic performance if they want to identify opportunities to capitalise on. Most importantly, companies will need to make sure their focus is on performance, rather than simply working with agencies who are billing on percentage of spend.