The Importance of Google PageRank: A Word to Business Owners

If you’ve spent time learning about online marketing, then the topic of search engine optimization (SEO) usually comes up. And, no discussion of search engine talk is complete these days without someone mentioning Google. This insert provides a brief overview of how Google ranks search results with a look at their Page Rank™ algorithm. I'm an not a programming expert (that is the bad news) The good news is that I am not going to describe Google Page Rank in complex terms but rather a simple terms (such that you can impress your friends and family with your new-found knowledge).

Quick Intro To S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization)

Put quite simply, SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN). By “optimizing”, I mean attempting to make it such that searches for specific key word phrases rank your website higher in the search results than other websites. There are lots of good reasons to want to rank higher, but for businesses, the primary reason is to generate good leads and traffic for your product or service. Hundreds of Millions of people use Google looking for a product, service, or information. Some of these people might be potential clients looking for your particular type of company. There are two ways for you to show up on the results page when users are doing a search. The first is paid advertising (I’ll talk about this in a future blog) and the second is what is known as “organic” (or “natural”) search. The natural search results are listed free and are dependent on Google’s estimation of how relevant and credible your website is. Natural search results are my favorite kind, because you don’t have to pay money for them, and they often works better than paid advertising. I liken this to the difference between getting mentioned in a magazine article and purchasing an ad in that same magazine.

If you can rank high on the free (organic) search results for Google, it’s like getting potential hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free advertising in the most relevant trade magazines, trade show, radio, tv, or print for your industry. I’m not sure about you, but that’s pretty interesting to me. It’s a great way to grow your business and find new clients. So, how do you get all this free, effective advertising in the search engines? Well, to do that you need to understand the Google algorithm and how it determines who gets listed. And oh yea, hire someone like me to get you there. That, unfortunately, is not free.

Google’s Search Algorithm

First, let’s establish a simple example which we can use to frame our discussion. Let’s assume you are the owner of a large background checks firm. Lets further say that your specialization is providing custom solutions to big business. Now, you could probably identify a number of search phrases that your potential clients might use when interested in this particular topic. Users may search for something like “background checks”. Or, they may just start by looking for content (instead of consulting) and search on “how to get hire a background check company”. In either case, Google has an algorithm that figures out which websites of the hundreds of millions out there should be displayed in rank order on the results page. These are the organic (i.e. non-paid) results. You want to rank high on these results.

Though Google’s algorithm is extremely sophisticated, it boils down to something like this:

Search Ranking = Relevance * PageRank

Relevance is basically the measure of how your website (or more accurately one of your web pages) matches the search phrase the user has entered. Measuring relevance is a relatively sophisticated process, but it boils down to some fundamentals like the title of the page, words on the page and how frequently they occur, etc. So, if your home page has things like “background checks”, it drives up the relevance for this particular search. Basically, Google figures out what your page is “about” by looking at it’s content (and by looking at other sites with similar content that are linking to yours). It then uses this to figure out how relevant you are for a particular search phrase.

Page Rank is an independent measure of Google’s perception of the quality/authority/credibility of an individual web page. It does not depend on any particular search phrase. For the public (you and me), Google conveniently reports this as a number from 0-10 (10 being the best). So, assuming for a second that your web page and your competitors web-page has the same relevance – then whoever has the higher Page Rank gets the better ranking – and shows up at the top of the results page. This is why Page Rank is so important. Your relevance is based on your content (if you’re a consulting company specializes in performing background checks, your relevance for high powered lawn mower searches is going to be understandably low). Your Page Rank is what counts.

How Page Rank Is Calculated

There has been a lot written and a lot debated about Google’s Page Rank, but on one point there is near unanimous agreement. PageR ank is primarily determined by how many other web pages are linking into you. Google considers this kind of inbound a link a vote of confidence. But, here’s the trick: Not all inbound links are created equal. Web pages with more credibility that link to you have more “value” to your Page Rank than those with less credibility. How is this credibility determined? Why, by their PageR ank, of course! So, let’s take an example. Lets say you have your Best Friend linked to you from his blog to your small business website. Let’s also say that Best Friend's blog has a Page Rank of 3 (this is being a little generous because all your Best Friend writes about is his Hot Rod and has limited inbound links). This link from your best friend will certainly help you – a little bit. It will help you more if you can find 100 such websites with a Page Rank of 3 and get them to link to you.

However, if you get a single link from a website with a Page Rank of 8, it’ll help you more than a 100 best friend websites. Why? Because a site with a Page Rank of 8 is 100 times more powerful than a Rank of 3. I divide up Page Rank into these broad categories:

0-3: New sites or sites with very minimal links
4-5: Popular sites with a fair amount of inbound links
6: Very popular sites that have hundreds of links, many of them quality links
7-10: Usually media brands (NYTimes.com), big companies or A-list bloggers.

Now, it’s important to note that Page Rank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. What this roughly means is that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4. So, there are likely over a 100 times as many web pages with a Page Rank of 2 than there are with a Page Rank of 4. This means that if you get to a Page Rank of 6 or so, you’re likely well into the top 0.1% of all websites out there. If most of your peer group is struggling around with a PR2 or PR3, you’re way ahead of the game.

What’s Your Page Rank?

There are two ways to figure out what your approximate Page Rank is. One, you can download the Google Toolbar (the Page Rank feature is not turned on by default, so you’d have to enable it after installation).


Quick recap: Organic search is like free advertising. It’s worth the investment to try and get a high ranking by the major search engines. To rank high you should do two things: First, make sure your site has the right relevant content for the types of searches your potential clients are conducting. Second, try to get the highest Page Rank possible. To do this, you need to get as many inbound links from as many high Page Rank web pages as possible.

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

When I talk with most people in marketing today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say seminars, trade shows, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods "outbound marketing" where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons. First, your average human today is innundated with over 5000 outbound marketing messages per day and is figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including caller id, spam filtering, Tivo, and XM satellite radio. Second, the cost to learn something new or shopping for something new using the internet (search engines, blogs, and social media sites) is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Hilton or flying to a trade show in Vegas.

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing "inbound marketing" where you help yourself "get discovered" by people already learning about you and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a "hub" for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blog-o-sphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 80% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 20% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.