It used to be you’d ask people, “what’s your internet strategy”? Today, it sounds more like, “what’s your Google strategy”? Companies of all sizes are figuring out the old world of marketing and advertising has changed dramatically. Think about it, a few years ago the notion of having customers find you was daunting. How could someone across the continent learn about your product without being touched by a global advertising campaign or luckily stumbling upon your website?

Fast Forward to Google Strategy 2006.

Take Shark Diver, a San Francisco adventure-travel company that Patric Douglas founded in 2000. Shark Diver (sharkdiver.com) arranges tours to tropical locales worldwide where shark fans can frolic underwater with their favorite predators. Douglas, 38, estimates that at most, 100,000 people in the U.S. possess the requisites for this pursuit: diving experience and a crazy streak. By bidding on search terms such as “cage diving” in Google auctions, he has been able to zero in on his target market. Shark Diver is now a profitable business with 20 employees and about $1 million in annual revenues, according to Douglas.

Google has put the pressure on businesses to get their ship in order. If you don’t have a website, guess what, you can’t run Google AdWords. And if your website isn’t constructed to be Google-friendly, your competitors will leapfrog you in the all important organic search results. It’s not all doom and gloom though. When you expand online, you learn a heck of a lot about your business. The act of writing an advertisement for your product or service is a great exercise. It’s amazing what comes to light when you write a headline about your own product or service. You quickly see how exciting unexciting your product may be on the wild web.

Another exercise that’s just as important is figuring out the search terms customers would use to find you. By testing different search terms, you’ll have the ammunition you need to think up new advertising campaigns or better yet, you’ll see the competitors in your market appear right on your screen.

Pay attention to Google. Your next competitor is lurking in all those results.

tags: Google, organic+search, paid+search, seo, sem, search+engine, Google+AdWords, Google+adsense, AdWords, adsense, search+engine+marketing, marketing, advertising,google+strategy