Is the golden age of Google over?

Will the marketing might of Google soon be out of reach for your average small business owner? Well, it might be already. Recently I was chatting to a class of university students studying entrepreneurship.

We had an hour to outline the different marketing strategies employed by entrepreneurs and run through the myriad mistakes we all make. I had got through the first five minutes, where many of them pay me no notice while they chat on computers and mobiles, and I resist the overwhelming urge to yell like a school matron and plonk them in the corner. 

Typically what had got their attention was my usual spiel that they were a most fortunate generation. The internet, mainly through Google, had provided them with marketing muscle that meant they could quickly get a targeted message out about their company to anywhere in the world at a very low cost.

Consider the alternatives only five years ago – old media such as TV, radio and print, which were very expensive and offered very little transparency – and think how lucky you are, I told the now attentive students.  

Then a clever student who was already running his own business raised his hand. He said he could not afford to buy keywords on Google, and he found the cost of trying to get on page one were too high for his start-up to bear. Did I have any other suggestions?

On reflection he makes an excellent point. In the last two years an army of SEO and SEM specialists have sprung up to ensure their clients get top billing. It is becoming harder and harder for your average start-up to get on page one.

At the same time, Google seems, at a whim, to continually “refine” the algorithms and search functions, leaving everyone scrambling in its wake to adjust, defend or take advantage of the changes.

Take Google’s latest changes, explained by Patrick Stafford in his excellent story yesterday. Typically, they are announced in an unassuming blog and a video that then causes search geeks to go into a spin as the word spreads.

There is no doubt that to get the same results as several years ago, business owners need to spend a lot more money and time – and probably use specialists – to get the same effect. As this trend continues, I will be telling students about how good it was for a very short time. And I will be telling them how fortunate were the businesses that spotted the opportunity, rode the trend, grew larger and can now afford the specialists and have the expertise to play by Google’s every changing rules.  

Is the golden age of Google over? What do you think?