1. Focus on the users

Google states that its products have basically focused on users. It goes further to give some details of how it ensures good user experience for every of its offering. Here they are:

Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

These words exemplify Google’s concept of user experience and should also guide your content development. Clearly, you will find that speed is essential and how your website does what it claims to do is also important. This underscores the role of Google reviews to your website and its assessment by the search engines. When negative reviews suggest that your website is not what it claims to be and you do not genuinely and factually address such reviews, it paints a bad picture of misrepresentation which send a negative signal that could impact your ranking in Google search.

It is important to emphasize that Google is interested in the quality of its search. It follows that when you produce poor quality content and try to use manipulative strategies to rank in the Google search, it backfires and when Google catches you, you get severely punished. Google does not not want to rank poor quality content in its search because it diminishes the quality of its search engine.

Also read: How to Optimize Your Website to Boost User Experience

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well

What Google is saying here is that it is better to build on existing offer rather than being jack of all trade and master of none.

In the exact words of Google, it says:

We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

This makes a plausible business sense and can be very beneficial for profitability. Many businesses fail due to a lack of planning and a long struggle to be noticed for patronage. It is therefore better to achieve excellence and profitability in one area before seeking to invest or expand into other areas, except there be sufficient economic justification  to add a new line or divest into other areas. While it remains a decision of managers to evaluate every business decision and decide whether to invest in them or not to, focusing on one product and achieving success with them before adding new product lines is definitely an advise that should guide and lead businesses to success, as Google has advised, based it own experience and business growth trajectory.

Also read: How Google Assesses Website Quality

3. Fast is better than slow

Google says they want people to quickly find the answers they seek. This, however, does not conflict with the idea that longer dwell time is an indicator of good user experience. This is how Google states it:

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

To improve the speed of your website, you need to pay attention to the quality of images and ensure their optimization. We have covered this in these articles on Best Free Online image compression Tools and Image Optimization for the Web. You also need to implement some file compression, CSS and JS compression. If you run a CMS like WordPress, you will find very effective compression and optimization tools which can do these for you effectively with little efforts.

4. Democracy on the web works

In the words and practice of Google, every content has a chance of being ranked. Google, in its words states:

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

To perform well in Google search, you will need to produce good quality content that addresses the needs of searchers and answer the questions they seek in a better way. Google is interested in rich, high quality content and repeatedly have emphasized the importance of quality over quantity.

You may want to learn more by looking at How Google Assesses Website Quality

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

Google strongly emphasizes the power of mobile friendly websites. It its words, it sats:

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, an open source mobile platform free of charge. Android brings the openness that shaped the internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

Google understands that more users now access the internet with mobile devices than they do with laptops and desktops. Not having a mobile friendly website is a red flag and

6. You can make money without doing evil.

The Google search has become the most powerful and free advertising medium. If you can do the right thing, and get it right, your business will stand out in the Google search and this is some king of free advertising for your business. Being top ranked or featured prominently in the Google search due to the your successful optimization strategy is the greatest reward offered by the Google search.

This is how Google puts it in their own words:

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use Google Ads to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

• We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
• We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

• Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust. There’s always more information out there.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

So, playing by the rules, Google is a great opportunity for publishers, website owners and content developers to build business, increase their sales and profitability.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

Every useful information is important to Google and they have also provided platforms for people and groups to provide as much useful information to readers and searchers. This has been achieved through the creation of niches and services tailored for different regions and languages.

This is how Google puts it:

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

Also read: How Google Reviews Can Benefit Your Local SEO

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Everything, no matter how little, matter to Google – people, ideas, places, personalities products – and Google wants to be the hub where everyone can find these offers and creatively make offerings available to those who need them. You do not have to be a corporate organization, Google is a place for everyone to excel, be useful, offer some benefits, grow and succeed.

In Google’s words, here is how they put it:

Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

Also read: A Guide to Google Website Ranking

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Google expresses love for continuous improvement and wants you to strive to always be better than you are. When Google, itself, expresses love for continuous improvement, it is a signal that there should never be something like “we have done enough”. You just need to keep doing well to stand out above competitors.

In its words, Google states:

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

Also read: Best Link Building Techniques Recommended For Higher Ranking in Google

Final Words

The internet has become a big opportunity and the largest single market in the world. Thanks to great works of search engines like Google, exploring and exploiting the gains of this community has become possible for both micro, small and medium scale businesses. All you need to do is keep building quality content, keep to the rules of Google and avoid desperation and manipulations to gain advantage. Google is available to offer you its great platform and to help your business.