Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Google does not care about your mission, and that turned out to be the most useful thing about it.
Losing almost seventy percent of our organic traffic was a wake-up call to take action.
I want to start there, with the admission, because every version of this argument that opens with a villain lets the reader off the hook, and I am not interested in letting anyone off the hook, least of all myself.
The traffic did not vanish because Google singled us out. It vanished because we had built the path to the people we serve on land we did not own, and one morning, the owner moved the walls. The shock was never the change. The shock was discovering the ground had never been ours.
This is not really a story about higher education, though that is the example I know from the inside and the one I will use. It is a story about every business that mistook a rented channel for an owned asset. The corner contractor who lives and dies by local search. The clinic. The software company. The shop. If most of the people you serve find you through Google, what happened to us is coming for you, and the lesson is the same regardless of what you sell.
A landlord can raise your rent. A landlord can also stop returning your calls and decide the room you built your life inside no longer exists. You would never knowingly sign that lease. Most of us signed it years ago with Google and filed it under sales & marketing.
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