• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2024

Ranking updates for small brands or those that are not established still seems difficult, but Google is working to fix the system. The company understands that the size of the site or company shouldn’t matter. The perfect balance should be the best content overall.

“Systems are not saying ‘you’re a big brand, therefore you rank,’” said Danny Sullivan, Google search liaison, in an interview with Aleyda Solis, commentator at the company’s weekly post on SEO called Crawling Monday. “We don’t only want big brands to rank well.”

Sullivan said Google takes into consideration the need for small and independent sites to rank high in search results. The idea is to have the most useful and satisfying information to those searching.

Sometimes Google’s systems don’t perceive high-quality information from the smaller brands or sites, but  Google is woking on this to make improvements. Those same systems can sometimes over-reward larger brands for content.

Sullivan pointed to local searches as a way to get local companies to reach smaller mom-and-pop stores, but did not explain how many of those local business -- especially those in rural areas across Wyoming and other Midwestern states -- have given up on trying to rank higher in Google searches. 

Many of the smaller business in rural areas have turned to Facebook and TikTok to pull in local consumers, which in turn hurts Google’s advertising business.

Smaller companies need to develop their brand, Sullivan said - and focus on what Google’s ranking systems tend to reward. This means ranking higher in search results when someone enters words in a query, and a focus on expertise, experience, trustworthiness and authority — all keywords recognized by Google as being a well-ranking brand for consumers.

"I don’t want people to think I’m saying, 'yes, everything is perfect'," he said, adding that there is more work to do because the ranking systems are always evolving.

Perspective matters, as it does in social platforms that have emerged in search results to give people searching for information a different view and user-generated content.

Many times the content shared is not of high quality and often, it cannot provide expert advice. The industry has seen younger generations migrate to social platforms for content and news.

Google shows content from hundreds of forms. “Many times, I try to fix something on my house or something weird has happened to my car, and I end up in the form for my H-VAC system at home, that I didn’t know existed,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan has also had an experience finding expert content related to experiences on a social site that he called “amazing” for another niche project he worked on. “There’s huge value for showing this type of content, because it’s really helpful,” he said. He went on to acknowledge “yes, but sometimes we will show you user-generated content from forums, and it will be embarrassing” -- but as with everything in search Google will keep working to improve it and figure out how to get the best signals.

Sullivan said, “what I would love [to see], if you’re a local mechanic and have a passion for fixing things, I would like to hear your voice, your authentic voice about what cars you’ve worked on,” he said. “If you have [a] passion to share, that’s what people want to hear, and that’s what we need more of” rather than generic content marketing.