Global Auction Blog

It wasn’t many years ago most of us had never heard of Google.com and when we first stumbled upon it we certainly had no idea what an impact it would have on our business and on our lives.

People no longer search for something online, they now “Google it “  What started out as a project at Stanford university has become the most well known brand on the Internet with revenues in 2007 of over 16 Billion dollars and a profit of over 5 Billion dollars. All from a simple search engine. How can that be possible?

In can be summed up in one word.  Adwords.

If you are not familiar with Adwords, they are the small text ads shown on so many pages around the Internet. What makes them so valuable is that they contextually targeted, meaning the ad matches the content of the page. A page featuring information on Red Wing crocks will only show ads that are relevant to that particular topic. Because it is targeted the website user is much more likely to click on that ad than any other type of ad.

When the ad is clicked, it costs the advertiser a preset amount and Google makes a commission off what is paid to the publisher.

Why didn’t any of us think of that?

If you are having a specialty auction with online bidding it is definitely worthwhile looking into the program as you can set a budget and use it to attract highly targeted traffic to your upcoming sales.

But Google is also extremely important to your business without you ever giving them a cent.

With over 65% of the search engine marketshare, how you show in the search engine results is very important. If you are not on the first page of results, you might as well not bother at times because there is so much competition for the simple generic terms.

To use our Global Auction Guide network as an example, we receive approx 100,000 referrals from Google every month. Much of this traffic is for generic terms such as “Farm Auctions” , “Local Auctions” or “Real Estate Auctions” which are the top 3 referring phrases to our server from search engines. If these are terms that are important to your Internet success then you either have to beat out the websites above you in the search engines to move up the rankings, or join them. You just need to decide what is cost effective for you.

But there is the other end of the search spectrum that cannot be overlooked. The Long Tail of Search refers to the search terms that perhaps only get searched for a few times a week. This is where auction sale bills become very important as you want to have as much text and content as possible to attract the Google Bots that spider the web. In 2008 our server received search referrals to 587,013 different keywords. It is much easier to rank highly for obscure terms than it is for generic terms, but you need alot of unique terms to attract the same amount of traffic that ranking well for a few generic terms will do.

This is what attracts attention to your individual sale bills for upcoming sales and archiving your old sales keeps the search engines coming back forever. This is free traffic to you so you don’t want to delete all the good work you have done by throwing out your old sale bills.