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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this. Google's changes to search over the years have made it increasingly difficult for an SMB website to show up in organic searches. Google seems to be biased towards big national brands in a way that they weren't in the past. That, of course, led to more bidding for AdWords, which drove the pricing up there.

So, SMB owners then try to find some other way to get a presence, many of which make it difficult to use your own website. Facebook, for example, is setup in a way where your FB biz page is highlighted, but the url to your actual site is obscured and buried.

Aside from your examples of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter...I've also seen SMB's move their ecommerce sales to Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and the like.

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What exactly do you mean by "increasingly difficult for an SMB website to show up in organic searches"? I just googled a dozen local restaurants, stores, rock gyms and for each either the official website was first in google or there did not appear to be an official website (for 3 or 4 of them). Only one of them had the Yelp page before their site, and that's a restaurant that heavily promotes its Yelp page because it has the highest rating among cheap restaurants in town. I was googling them by name plus city (if I thought it would be ambiguous).

So did you mean mean that they don't show up for other important searches like "Indian food in Seattle"?

SMBs used to more easily to show up for queries that did not have a locality modifier like "in Seattle". My experience is more around SMBs that aren't brick-and-mortar, but rather, online SMBs trying to sell nationally or globally.

Edit: A concrete example would be a seller that specialized in some niche. Like say, an online seller of thermal printers. Where they had specialized expertise, inventory, research, support, articles, and so on where there would be a valid reason to rank higher than Amazon for similar products.

Okay, that makes sense, thanks.

I think that "discovery" is the part that is implied to be broken. But in my experience if you search for "indian food" and Google knows your location, it returns solid results.

I read an interesting post just some days ago about Ads in Local Business. The site is horrible, but the content is good:

http://neilpatel.com/2016/12/15/we-analyzed-120000-google-ad...

For what it's worth, Neil Patel writes some of the best pieces on content marketing. If you like those types of posts, I'd also check out his other blog, quicksprout.

https://www.quicksprout.com/blog/

> That site is horrible

That's an understatement. I wonder how can a site, that is so designed not to make you read anything, say anything of value.

I wondered if it could really be as bad as you were saying... And it sure is, but not in the way that I expected!

Neil Patel is one of those "major players" in SEO and content marketing. I signed up once to see what he kept pitching, and it was the most obnoxious chain of emails and hard selling I've ever experienced. I don't know how it's effective and his own site is terrible so I'm not sure how he became the messiah of this type of work.

Rand Fishkin (the founder of Moz) on the other hand understands the material better and I think truly is a good guy that is trying to make the SEO market a better place. He does some really nifty whiteboard fridays.

Neil Patel has always been a self promoter #1. He has some good info, but you have to filter through him talking about how awesome he is and the guru crap he's always hocking.

Rand & Dr. Pete/moz in general is one of the best places, along with http://seobook.com/ for a more cynical perspective.

>more bidding for AdWords, which drove the pricing up there

This situation for the local SMBs that I know is unbearable. They seem to see more viable prices in Facebook, for example, thus reinforcing the trend of moving their presence to social networks. Websites out in the wild seem not to offer any ROI for the dollar spent on adWords.

I would say the absolute opposite.

Google has grown to be incredibly targeted. For instance , when you search "pizzeria" or "gym", it will return the shops which are close to your current location.

This is a big improvement for SMB owners. They're way easier to find for the local population.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but that's for local search. I have no experience in that space. My experience is SMBs that aren't local brick and mortar, but rather, ones that are trying to sell to a national/global audience.

Facebook is a real juggernaut. Google is getting less effective because all of this information is moving to AOL style walled gardens.

It's sad.

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