There have been a lot of new innovations on the internet over the past year and many of them are going to change the way you and other businesses conduct your Internet Marketing Plan.
Below, we uncover three (actually 4 – three just sounds better) new search innovations that are changing the way searchers search, what results they will see when they search and how you need to change your Online Marketing Strategy to make sure you (and your business) show up on the first page of.
These Four search avenues are going to majorly impact your business over the next 12-24 months and you need to be prepared to adapt or be trampled on by your competition:
- Video search
- Personalized Search
- Real-time Search
- Mobile Search.
Video Search: We all have seen and understand the popularity that video has on today’s consumers. We’ve seen YouTube grow from something that was a fad to something that is highly regarded….and now, search engines are also taking notice.
Search engines are starting to index the videos, the content around the videos, the video descriptions and more. What this means is that now, videos are starting to show up on the first page of search engine results.
How do you tap into Video Search? Pretty simple, as part of your Internet Marketing Plan you need to make sure you/your business has some quality videos online. These videos need to have quality content surrounding them. And similar to website optimization, the descriptions need to be very keyword related.
Mobile Search: 10 years ago, many people didn’t have a cell phone. Fast Forward to today and almost everyone has them. And to go further…many of them are web enabled (meaning people can surf the web on their mobile device). This is fast becoming the wave of the future for search.
How do you tap into Mobile Search? The best approach is just like the old marketing saying…KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Mobile devices are not able yet to download complex CSS or Flash videos. If your site has a lot of complex CSS coding or if you have a lot of Flash on your site, chances are that the consumer will have a difficult time viewing your site.
So, keep it simple.
- Straight HTML is GREAT.
- Know the mobile device aps and optimize for those.
- Keep keyword phrases short
- have a well displayed location – mobile devices are based off of location and this a great way to get noticed
- And above all….make sure you employ it as part of your online marketing strategy
Real Time Search: This style of search ties in very closely with social media. Algorithms are getting ’smarter’ and ’smarter’. Even to the point where they are displaying new blog posts, Twitter updates, and more on the search results page. Don’t be surprised if you are surfing on a hot topic and you see a twitter feed scrolling buy.
What this mean is that is is becoming more and more important to be involved with Social Media and to effectively USE social media as part of your online marketing plan. The business of today needs to have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, a Twitter Feed and much more.
Personalized Search: Start the earthquake and hold on tight. Personalized Search is causing the most waves of them all.
Personalized Search looks at your computer search history over the past 180 days and displays search results based on that history. This means is will become more and more difficult for new businesses to rank on the first page of search engines.
However, don’t get all glum in the mouth and throw your hands up in the air and say that you are done and that business as we know it will fail…there are ways you can still be on the first page.
The biggest thing you can do is DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE NOW! Here is a list of suggestions for your Internet Marketing Plan:
- Pay-Per-Click…get people to your site NOW so your site is ‘indexed’ in the last 180 days.
- Email marketing…get current clients back to your site as often as you can
- Encourage Bookmarking….this will ‘index’ your site as a favorite
- Use social media as part of your online marketing plan
- New/Fresh/meaningfull content.
- etc.
In the future, rank reports will become less and less effective and meaningful.
When you tap into these different tools of the trade and employ them as part of an effective Internet Marketing Plan, you will find your business growing and succeeding.
Below is an article from Marketing Sherpa that supports this blog post. Marketing Sherpa is an online statistical analysis firm.
The Expected Future Impact of Search Innovations
With a number of search engine innovations being released, it’s only natural for marketers to speculate on what role these new additions will play in the future of SEO. It’s not surprising that personalized search tops the list. Because personalized search causes different search engine users to receive different results, it’s possible that personalized search may have a negative impact on some organizations’ SEO efforts by decreasing exposure. This has caused considerable speculation among the SEO community.
Another recent addition — real time search — is also expected to have a significant impact. As the popularity of using social media for marketing purposes grows, so will expectations of this search innovation’s impact.
Of all the segments surveyed, organizations that integrate social media into search campaigns had the greatest expectations regarding the impact of all the above innovations. This could be due to the fact that this group is generally more well-educated in the most recent developments in both search and social media.
