Ok, for anyone involved in the web, it is hard not to pay attention to Google. But humour me for a moment.
With all the noise generated by the antitrust brouha, Google+ and the like, it would be easy to miss stuff like this. Sitelinks, visual ads, local ads, social ads … very, very important if your business gets value from search.
Google has been rapidly changing the rules in relation to who gets attention in the search engine result pages (SERPs). In some niches, a #1 ranking in the organic search results might *just* mean you are visible below all the other stuff on the SERP. Google AdWords results, Google Places results and so on.
This isn’t exactly new. If you read Aaron Wall’s excellent SEOBook.com blog, you would have seen his chart asking Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go?. That process – called out in 2009 – has been steadily progressing, and the 2011 version is not pretty for organic search … The Sales Engine.
So, if you are paying attention to Google, you might want to spend more time paying attention to all the different ways you can use AdWords to get your share.
Read it and pay attention: Ads Are Just Answers
Attention sure ain’t free.