These 3 Letters might be why Bezos became the World’s Richest Man
Take off the “b” and the “z” and what letters do you get?
E.O.S.?
Nope.
O.S.E.?
Think again.
Hint: G.O.O.G.L.E.
Amazon.com may have started before Sergey Brin and Larry Page started the world’s most ubiquitous search engine, but without it, the ecommerce giant may have not survived.
Roll back time — around the late 90’s. The Seattle based internet giant was bleeding money. While Bezos was optimistic, the company wasn’t quite yet on the road to shares worth close to $2000 a piece.
I should know. When I arrived in 2001, the stock was stuck in neutral around $12/share and before that, many people had left the company.
At the time, I remember some fantastic and bright co-workers constantly leveraging another company that had just started a few years earlier. They were optimizing our site to grow Amazon’s business on this search engine. And that search engine started to take over the Internet.
Brin and Page helped deliver “relevant” results. Rather, theydelivered “more relevant results” than did their competitors like Yahoo and Alta Vista. Consumers were migrating away from “paid” search results and gravitating towards “relevant organic results.”
Google grew, grew some more and started to take over the world. Consumers were addicted to “what they wanted.” And Google was constantly optimizing its search engine to truly deliver the “most relevant results.“
The world’s largest search engine wasn’t the only one “optimizing” its results.
Amazon, Expedia and many other websites started to use those three letters.
If you haven’t figured them out yet, let me finally share the 3 most important letters to Bezos’ (and many others’ financial success):
S.E.O. (search engine optimization)
While Amazon is the #1 spender on Google’s paid platform, it also ranks as one of the top organically optimized websites in the world (for the search engine):
Behind the 2 most optimized websites for Google (Wikipedia and Alphabet Inc.’s own site: YouTube), Amazon leverages the world’s largest search engine better than the rest.
Imagine if you were a realtor.
Imagine you ranked #1 for searches related to your local area + the term “realtor” or “real estate agent.” Frankly, you would NOT need to spend a single dollar on marketing.
A lesser known entrepreneur, but possibly an even more successful businessman than Bezos knew this.
Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia.com carried out similar practices. He took SEO seriously along with the paid means to be visbile for everything related to travel.
Today, Expedia still ranks in the top 100 most organically optimized websites on Google — #83 to be exact (according to SEMRush). The only other travel website that ranks ahead of it is TripAdvisor and frankly, TripAdvisor used to be part of the Expedia family. While it was growing organically, Barton and his team knew they needed to bring it into the family at the time.
Barton still knows the importance of those 3 letters. He’s optimized his real estate giant Zillow.com to be the 43rd most optimized site organically for the search engine.
The notion that SEO is important may be very obvious to some of you, but as I’ve learned over the past 10+ years in practicing search engine optimization for many websites, I’ve been constantly reminded that the general population still fails to appreciate these three letters — and many times, the entrepreneurs who try to build their ideas into the next Amazon.com.
Today, I work at a company that has one of the largest teams of SEOs in one vertical. However, the irony is that we don’t take it as seriously as Amazon has (or Expedia or many of the other sites that organically rank very strongly on Google).
One competitor in our vertical has.
And since they have a similar vision as Bezos or Barton, they may increase their lead against the top automotive groups.
As we continue to watch Bezos’ net worth grow, I’ll continue to wonder if withOUT that free monthly marketing, would have Amazon grown as big as it has? Would Bezos be the richest man today?
Jeff’s Medina neighbor might also be asking that question. Bill Gates used to be in Bezos’ shoes, but the company he most famously founded failed to appreciate these 3 letters.
While SEO wasn’t the only tactic that Bezos or Barton leveraged to grow their monopolies, the many other forms of digital marketing (like affiliate marketing for instance) supported the organic efforts which continue to provide each of these behemoths free marketing monthly.
Now, can you say S.E.O.?
Other interesting facts about the power of search marketing:
*”facebook” has been the most searched term on google for the past 8+ years
*Apple.com’s SEO reaps them the following:
*While Microsoft stills struggles, it does still garner the following organically:
*Out of the top 5 most valuable companies in the world, only China’s Tencent doesn’t depend on google as much, but who knows how much being optimized via Baidu they are? They are heavily dependent on WeChat, but again, there are other forms of digital optimization which are extremely vital — which is the main point of the piece.
