Robert Scoble explains why Google dominates how people find things online and why businesses need to understand search basics like links and title tags. He uses examples like finding a pediatrician on Yelp and shows how inbound links affect rankings. Small customer interactions can amplify into global reach.
The reason I hooked onto Google as a brand is it still how normal people find things on the Internet. My brother owns a bar. He doesn't spend much time on the computer. Me and you, we spend nearly every waking hour either looking at a computer or looking at our iPhone and twittering each other and stuff like that. Most normal people aren't like that. So when they do touch a computer, they go to Google to find where they're going. One of the most popular searches on Google is Yahoo, right? So people don't even realize you can type yahoo.com in this address bar. They just know this search box over here, and that's all they know about the computer. Now, my first thing as a business is understand how that works. Understand how somebody puts something in there and gets a list of results, and understand how to potentially get your business found in that list of results. I found my doctor on Yelp, for instance, right? So I went pediatrician, San Mateo county, see who comes up on Google. And guess what? A doctor came up, and she was number one on Yelp. She never had even visited Yelp, and she had gotten five patients from Yelp. Most of it comes out of. Have you gotten people to link to you? I'm the number three, Robert in the world. I'm higher than Robert Dinero, Robert Kennedy, Robert Redford. How did that happen? A lot of people are linking to me from their blogs or their websites, and my name, Robert, is on the title tag. So if you don't understand Google and you're not searching for your name, for your competitor, for your genre, for your region, you know, doctor, San Mateo county doctor, you know, San Francisco doctor, you know, see what comes up. You're going to be at a huge disadvantage to businesses who understand that. Keep in mind that the Internet is amplification. So you might only have 15 people that come by your website every day, but if one of them writes for the New York Times or one of them has a Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of people following them, or, you know, then it gets amplified, right? Your message and your business gets amplified. So that's why when I ran a camera store in the 1980s, I always cared about every customer. Why? Because you never knew when it was the guy from KGO Radio walking in your door or a guy who's going to buy a thousand cameras. And business people understand that. But the Internet is fast. You can see things go around in minutes and go around the world. And now you can use free tools to make a global brand and get people around the world. To see who you are, that you're authoritative, that you're credible, that you're passionate, and that you can buy things right from them.
