“May you live in interesting times.” - an ancient curse attributed to Confucius
Over the years, the role SEOs play in the success of their clients’ websites has changed primarily by growing in scope. Where once SEOs were charged with chasing the strongest search engine placements and rankings possible, today’s SEO is now concerned with conversion rates, click-paths, time on site and bounce rates. Moving forward into 2009, changes in the search engine market-space and business world will have enormous effect on how SEOs work and how they define their client centered goals. Believe it or not, tomorrow’s SEO might not concern his or herself with search ranking at all.
Here’s the background landscape as it appears to be shaping up now. There are currently three major search engines; Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live. Of those three, one is extremely important, one is somewhat irrelevant and the other is struggling to find its direction and make itself relevant. Unless something radical changes, 2009 is going to be the first truly unipolar year in search marketing history. While Google has been the most important engine, next year it might well be the ONLY engine of relevance. Yahoo! is thought to be too weak to survive and Live doesn’t exactly appear to know how it wants to define itself against Google.
That means Google will not only continue to dictate how search looks, feels and operates, Google will also fully dictate how SEOs think about their missions. In order to understand how SEOs will do their jobs or what factors they will be most interested in next year, one only needs to look at what Google is doing to construct search results or perhaps more importantly, how Google will interact with its users and vice versa.
Google has been pursuing a strategy of increasingly personalized and localized results. This is part of their vision for search moving primarily off the monitor and onto mobile devices. Google is making the safe-bet gamble that the wired generations will require stronger access in what would traditionally considered “off-line” areas such as everywhere beyond the home and office. The introduction of G-phone powered by Google’s mobile O/S Android is the clearest signal of where Google sees the future going.
In order to build increasingly personalized search results, Google now allows users to “vote” on their personal preferences when presented with a set of SERPs. In certain search results, tiny arrows appear to the right of each result allowing individual users to suggest one result is more relevant to them than another. This is piled high upon Google’s already obsessive monitoring of user-behaviours such as search history and time spent on particular documents.
By this time next year, the great chase for rankings will probably be a thing of the past. Proving rankings to clients will far less important than proving an increase in actual website visits or traffic. Second to traffic will come conversion. If getting consumers or businesses to a web document is the first priority, getting them to interact with that web document will be the second. The third will be documenting the experience of the website and its documents using analytics and showing how to increase traffic and conversions.
The search marketing space is going to be more interesting but also far more difficult to operate in professionally. Next year, having experienced webmasters working on your side will be more important than ever. As user behaviours change, the Internet itself changes. Experience helps understand and respond to those changes. That experience (or in some cases, lack thereof) will be the factor that most influences the changes to the face of SEO in the coming year.
These are amazingly interesting times. Confuciusing indeed but interesting.
No Comment Received