Google’s Alphabet Restructuring: What Does It Mean for SEO and PPC?

On Monday of this week, Google announced a major corporate restructuring, creating a new holding company called Alphabet Inc. that will manage portfolio businesses. One portfolio subsidiary will be known as Google, and be comprised of the Google search engine, YouTube, Android and Chrome. What does this change mean? In the words of Larry Page, Alphabet CEO:

“We are excited about…

• Getting more ambitious things done.
• Taking the long-term view.
• Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.
• Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
• Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.
• Making Google even better through greater focus.
• And hopefully...as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.”

Alphabet Spells Opportunity for PPC and SEO Marketing

From a PPC and SEO marketing perspective, Alphabet is nothing but good news. Here’s why:

• The healthier Google is as a business, the better. Greater transparency, greater focus and greater accountability throughout the Alphabet organization should lead to better results and faster growth for all portfolio subsidiaries, including Google.
• Innovations from so-called “moonshot” developmental subsidiaries won’t interfere with or distract from Google operations on a day-to-day basis, which is probably good. At the same time, great innovations spawned in moonshot initiatives can be adapted by Google both more rapidly and with fewer live troubleshooting/tweaking issues.
• The Alphabet structure will make the company formerly known as Google a much better innovator. It is very difficult for established companies to excel at innovation without this type of conglomerate structure. In the past, Google has had a lot of costly false steps with innovation, Google Plus being a recent and glaring example. By incubating innovation efforts properly, Google will still have false steps (it’s inherent), but they will be less costly, and the successes will be more numerous.

In the long run, the new structure should give us a Google search engine with greatly improved usability, an algorithm more capable of rewarding good content and ignoring bad, better mobile UX, and more effective mobile paid search products. Google needs to innovate to remain relevant. Competitors such as Facebook and Bing are not standing still. It’s good to see Google isn’t, either.