Photo courtesy of LSE Library/Flickr Commons
I am torn between seeing Internet search as a blessing or a curse to those of us in the digital marketing industry. But regardless of how I feel at the end of the day, one thing I remain certain of is that our clients can benefit greatly from the pain we WELDers put ourselves through keeping up with search.
On the one hand, you see, it seems at times that Google’s intention is to never let us search optimizers get comfortable enough to feel as though we understand our jobs. One look at This Week In Search, posted every Friday on the Google Blog, and you can see why.
A year ago, you couldn’t get us to stop talking about “universal” search. These days, our concern is “real-time” search. Has the web search function and experience changed that much?
The answer, without a doubt, is a resounding yes. According to the Google Blog itself, the company’s engineers made 540 changes to Google’s algorithm and interface in 2009. That’s an average of 1.5 changes to how search works every day.
That means that, daily, we’ve had to reassess our search marketing and optimization efforts to make sure we’re pushing our clients in the right direction. In general terms, this has resulted in a shift of sorts, from focusing on” the what and where of content” to the “how of content.”
Here’s what I mean: Once we understood the importance of universal search — that Google and other search engines were not just indexing all the different kinds of Internet content (photos, video and audio, for example, in addition to the text on web pages) — we pushed and supported our clients in producing and distributing these myriad forms across the web, making sure it connected with their desired audience.
Now, in addition to that practice, we’re stressing to clients the importance of how content production happens — how will it get produced at a regular frequency, how will we tune the content subject matter to the needs and desires of the audience, how will we connect all these content platforms to create a seamless user experience that also guides those users to our client’s objective, and how will we track and rate the effectiveness of all this content. This approach is necessary because of the increasingly on-demand nature of our information gathering; people want the most recent information, and they want it right now.
So, we have to focus on the fundamentals, such as making sure that a client is represented on all appropriate search verticals. An ecommerce operation, for example, will benefit greatly (despite the somewhat time-consuming effort it requires) from full indexing in Google Base, which feeds shopping searches. And at the same time, we’re using pay-per-click keyword analysis and Search Trends info to help shape strategy of content engines that regularly find the stories that describe the value and benefits served up in our inbound marketing campaigns, because we have to do it every day to keep getting found.
If there’s no rest for the wicked, as the expression goes, it might be because they’re in the digital marketing business, too.
And I guess that’s the curse to which I alluded in the beginning. It’s a never-ending battle. One search epiphany today still isn’t enough to stay ahead the next day, as you’re already 2 innovations behind. It is the definition of sisyphean.
The blessing, on the other hand, is to see it as constant challenge and a bit of security in knowing that there are always learning and search optimization work to do.
Speaking of which, we’ve got work to do.
Tags: Google, Google Base, real-time, search
Recent Comments