Searching for answers on Google has become so commonplace that the term “googling” was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. And buying things off Amazon has become so easy that we can give a command to our Echo Dot and, like magic, products arrive at our doorstep two days later.
Each of these search engines is powerful in its own way, but they work very differently. Read on to learn more about the differences between the Google and Amazon search engines and how you can improve your page rankings in each.
One of the first places to look when you’re comparing the differences between Google and Amazon’s search engines is where each company started. This informs a lot about how they operate, their purposes, and their priorities. And at its core, Google is an academic search engine.
Google began as a tool to crawl and index the brand-new internet in 1998. Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin designed the search engine as part of a Ph.D. project. It was built on a foundation of academia and research with a mission to, “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Amazon, however, got its start on the stock exchange in 1994. That was the year that founder Jeff Bezos read that the internet was growing by 2,300 percent each year. He wanted to take advantage of this and decided to launch the online marketplace we all know and use today.
But for people to buy products online, they first have to be able to find them. Amazon was launched with the mission to, “Be Earth’s most consumer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” The Amazon search algorithm was built with this goal in mind.
Because of those two different mission statements, the Amazon and Google search engines operate very differently. Google is the search engine designed to answer all your questions. Whether you need to know whether your favorite Mexican restaurant is open or you’re wondering how bats pee, anyhow, Google is designed to find the answer to your question.
Amazon’s search engine is designed to find the products you need. If you’re hunting for a purple lamp with a yellow polka-dot shade or a filter for your saltwater fish tank, they can turn it up for you. They can turn up a variety of different brands of saltwater fish tank filters and make recommendations about which one is the best value.
Amazon’s search engine uses the A9 algorithm, a program not many people have heard of. This algorithm isn’t as closely guarded as the famously proprietary Google search algorithm. Instead, its lack of recognition comes mainly from the fact that Amazon isn’t in the business of being a search engine.
The A9 algorithm works off of sales velocity, the speed, and volume at which products sell on the Amazon marketplace. Using our fish tank filter example, if Joe’s is selling 5,000 filters a week and Steve’s is selling 40, Joe’s filter is going to show up at the top of the search results. There are also some direct and indirect filters that all tie back into that basic sales velocity.
Google’s search algorithm is notoriously proprietary, so no one knows exactly what ranking system they use. At its base, this system is tied to how many other websites link to a single link/ So if you’re looking for information about how to install your fish tank filter and FishRUs has a tutorial that 1,000 other websites have linked to, while Fish World’s tutorial has only been linked 30 times, you’re going to see the FishRUs tutorial first.
Some of these rankings are also based on relevance to your keyword search and the clickthrough rate of links. The more people who click on a link, the higher it goes on the search engine rankings. And Google also has filters in place to stop websites from creating spam pages with high link and keyword rates or from Google bombing.
There are a few ways to improve your search engine rankings on Google. One of these is to pick keywords that more people are going to search for. You can find tools to test keyword usage and discover that ten times as many people search for “how to install a fish tank filter” versus “saltwater fish tank filter installation”.
You can also improve your page’s rankings by linking to a certain number of reputable websites in your page or post. This connection with authoritative sites will show Google that you’re a legitimate site and you know what you’re talking about. But be sure not to jam-pack your page with links or it might start to look like spam.
Like Google SEO, you want to begin your Amazon SEO with some keyword research. Aim for keywords with three or more words in them, and use analysis tools to guide you.
You also need to make sure your product is getting good reviews. Amazon uses these to factor in where your product gets ranked, so try to encourage your customers to leave positive reviews. If you do get negative reviews, try to respond to them quickly and resolve the issue fully.
Both Google and Amazon run very powerful search engines, but each has a different function. While Google is designed to give you general answers to any query you may have, Amazon is designed to find you the products you need. Which SEO practices you use will depend on where you want your page or product to rank well.
If you’d like to get help improving your SEO, check out the rest of our site at SEO Clerks. We can connect you with top freelancers who have expert-level training in search engine optimization. Shop our traffic marketplace and start growing the number of viewers on your site today.
