As we approach Google’s 20th birthday, we wanted to take a moment to look at how people search online to find goods and services, and how it has changed since the dawn of Google itself.

Did you know? Google now block over 90% of organic search key phrases.

Since Vector7’s establishment, just two years following Google’s creation, we’ve had the amazing opportunity to watch Search Engine’s battle it out and grow to the industry giants they are now. We’ve ridden the wave from day one, witnessing the change of algorithms and the rise of search privacy that have transformed how Google is used to this very day.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to watch Google grow into the giant they are today, over this time we’ve built, tested and researched the best route to business on the web and have proven ourselves in industry across the UK.”

Simpler times — Life before ‘Not Provided’ searches

I think I speak for the whole industry when I say we used to take for granted the insight into web searches we had available to us back in the earlier 2000’s. Understanding your audience and how they conducted searches used to be simple — allowing you to gain insight into the exact searches that were used to find your website online. These searches were available in their hundreds, or even thousands if your traffic levels were high enough.

Using this information we had a great insight into your audience and the type of key phrases they used to find goods and services in your industry. With this information at our side, we could align your campaign with relevant searches and watch as your Google presence grew.

Thankfully during this time, we were able to gain a true vision into how people search, creating a methodology that enabled us to get a head-start on the competition for years to come. To this day, we use a combination of new and old data to see the difference between what is real, and what Google and the industry is serving us as truth. We know what works because we’ve been involved since the very start of the story.

The birth of ‘Not Provided’ key phrases

In 2011 everything changed. With security concerns on the horizon, Google made the move to encrypt the data we received from their search engine. Over the coming years, the percentage of ‘Not Provided’ search terms became more frequent than ever and Google slowly closed the door on the data we could receive.

Landing page URLs

Following this transition, many looked towards Google for answers — after all, Google themselves took this data away from them. Whilst many jumped ship from natural SEO and began offering Google AdWords placement as their primary offering, we continued to read between the lines to gather real data, unaltered by Google.

The best insight we could achieve was to reference the entrance landing page URLs on our statistics software. By looking at the terms used in our URLs, we could pinpoint which pages landed the most traffic and therefore, highlighted the most used terms for finding our websites on Google Search.

Proven results from Vector7

Vector7 has been around since the start of Google itself. We know what works because we’ve built our methodology from scratch, testing and researching the best techniques in real-life situations over the course of more than 15 years.

“Google’s algorithms may have changed, but the fact still remains — Google still chooses to recommend hand-crafted, genuine websites at the very top of their search results”

In 2017, there are many quick techniques, ideas and speculation about how best to utilise Google to grow your business — however, one thing remains the same. Google continues to put hand-crafted, thought-through and genuine websites at the top of their search results.

Our team take into account learning new and old to determine the best route to market for your business, but the best indicator we can use is our history of proven results in industries across the UK.