The last few weeks have brought significant changes to the search landscape that could have huge implications on ones current search engine marketing strategy .
Microsoft’s Bing.com is out of beta and initial stats show interest was high and in alignment with Microsoft’s goal of becoming the number two search engine within five years.
Launched as a decision engine as opposed to a search engine, Bing’s initial focus is on travel, shopping, health, or local search. If the concept of being a decision engine translates to users, those of us in search marketing might discover a higher proportion of users are further down the purchase funnel, ready to buy. Bing has tremendous implications for pay-per-click advertisers as searches at this end of the funnel could lead to better conversion rates and require reallocating client keyword portfolios. Time and testing will tell. But for our clients in the travel and local search space we are considering diversifying their spend. If the early trends hold Yahoo will need to respond to survive.
Google added another twist to organic search with the launch of Google Squared. Google Squared creates a table of facts about searched topics. The results can be shared, saved, or reorganized. The results are still inconsistent but if integrated into everyday search it’s position at the top of the results page presents challenges as well as opportunity. Combined with Google Suggest and that personalized results are becoming more of a factor as Gmail users grab more email market share, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a diverse and integrated online strategy that is specific to your business. Those relying on five year old generic SEO will be lost and have a difficult and expensive time returning to a useful level of visibility.
A little less publicized development but important to bloggers (what isn’t) is Google’s new policy regarding the “no follow” attribute. No follow was commonly used to prevent comment spam and also to sculpt page rank by keeping search engines from pages that were not relevant in traffic building efforts. We could sculpt the rank of our sites by re-focusing the link strength to other pages. Here are the details from terrific post by Mike Levin and Mari Assefa on the 360i.com blog. This changes has a lot of people upset but it makes sense as the new policy puts the focus back more on quality content. It’s a welcome idea, in my “can it ever be humble enough” opinion.
Finally Google has given yet another terrific set of tools to those focused on local search. The Local Business Center unveiled new data that can help measure the marketing impact of local search. Along with click-throughs and impressions uses can now see the top search terms used to find you, how many times Driving Directions have been requested, and which zip codes the driving directions originated.
Spring cleaning is not just for the garage, especially around my house. This is a great time to pull out your search engine plan (you do have one right?) and throw out your old ideas and misconceptions.
