Priceline.com CEO on the Death of Search Engine Optimization
Skift Take
Search engine optimization had a great run but we are way past it now. Instead the top dogs in digital marketing are Google itself and the largest and most skilled players that can pay for those clicks and convert the hell out of them.
"And so I believe it is a paid world."
With those simple words, Priceline.com CEO Paul Hennessy summarized a development that has become painfully obvious to travel brands trying to get their piece of free real estate in Google search results: Search engine optimization, the science of getting a company to surface high in Google's organic search results, is basically near death or already a fatality as Google AdWords and Google's own hotel, flight, local, shopping, and Google+ products shove organic results down the page or screen into Web and mobile oblivion.
One of the only ways to get any visibility in this paid Google environment is to spend big bucks for a text advertisement.
Consider below what's visible on a desktop screen when a user queries Google for "hotels in nyc." Google advertisements above and to the right of the only organic results, which happen to be Google's Hotel Ads product.
Attendees at the Skift Global Forum in Brooklyn, who were present for Hennessy's October 14 talk about digital conversion, might not even have noticed what he said about paid search as his words were tucked into his final statement, in response to an audience question, as the 25-minute talk wound down.
Hennessy comes to the issue of free search engine optimization versus paid search engine marketing with a lot of authority: For three and a half years through March 2015, before becoming Priceline.com CEO, he was chief marketing officer at sister company Booking.com, one of Google's largest advertisers.
When it came time for audience questions, Travis Katz, founder and CEO of social trip-planning site Gogobot, asked Hennessy the following: "Google's obviously been a tremendous funnel for the Priceline Group and you guys have shown a lot of skill in acquiring traffic. In the last couple of years Google has become much more aggressive at taking up a lot of the organic inventory [space in search results] for its own hotel metasearch product. How big a threat is that to the Priceline Group? Do you think Google is a monopoly in search and are they abusing their monopoly in what they are doing in the travel space?"
Hennessy answered: "No, I wouldn’t say they [Google] are a monopoly. They have great competitors around the world. We have been able to take the traffic off of Google and do a great job turning t
