Cross Platfrom Internet Marketing - Say Goodbye to Traditional Search

Business owners in the 1990’s were faced with the fact that in order to compete, they needed to establish a web presence. While the necessity of using search engines to achieve website visibility may be obvious to those in the search marketing industry, only now are many site owners realizing that the establishment of a web presence alone is not enough without search engine optimization. However, as this awareness of the need to appear in the search engines is beginning to become self evident to the layperson, traditional search engine optimization is already outmoded due to a variety of factors. Traffic patterns involving search, user search behavior, and the way in which search results are delivered are dramatically different than that for which common perception allows, which is primarily focused on a metric based upon visible search engine rankings and keyphrase targeted search of textual web documents. As such, it is incumbent upon search marketing professionals to provide a holistic solution to clients that is no longer merely about title tags, rankings and keywords, but rather about reaching customers across a broad spectrum of platforms, including multimedia (blended search), verticals, social media, targeted search, mobile and traditional search combined with cognizance of the importance of brand awareness and reputation management.

1. Blended Search

Blended search, which is also known as “universal search”, has changed the way traditional search engines present information relevant to specific queries to the user. Not too long ago, a user would have to click on separate tabs for web results (which are the traditional text documents found in the organic listings), local results, news results, image results, video results, blog results, book results, weather, shopping results and the like. Now, all that has changed. Blended search is upon us, with the most relevant results delivered to the user regardless of the form or nature of those results.

This of course begs the question as to what results are most relevant, and that question will be delved into more deeply later on (in a nutshell, the most relevant results are a function of traditional ranking algorithms combined with user preferences, browsing and search history, demographics, context, location, and the like).

With blended results now accounting for more than 1/3 of all organic results delivered by search engines (some numbers show it to be as high as 57%), it becomes incumbent upon Internet marketing professionals as well as their clients to steer away from traditional web document, keyword based search optimization.

The effect of blended results is that for any given search query the chances are good the engines will return more than a simple text list of web documents. Images, video, breaking news, local results, and more are all appearing together in a single common results page.

Accordingly, blended results yield several items that should be considered by Internet marketers. For one, there is more competition for first page real estate. Focusing solely on web document results can have the effect of missing out on multiple opportunities for influence in the results pages, not to mention the increasing scarcity of web documents appearing on first page results. Marketers should be advising their clients of the importance of image optimization, video production and optimization, press release marketing, blogging and other opportunities to grab some of that valuable search real estate.

As blended search incorporates social media and other verticals as well, it is not enough to merely create multimedia; this multimedia must be promoted in and of itself. Popular sources of blended results include local business listings, YouTube (video), Flickr (images), BusinessWire and other wire services (news and press releases), and Amazon or eBay (shopping) just to name a few.

2. Social Media and Vertical Search

Many people still do not understand the value of social media and remain obstinate in their quest to stick with traditional search. However, the old saying “maybe if I ignore it, it will go away” simply does not ring true. You can gripe about it if it makes you feel better, but it will not change the fact that social media and search verticals are here to stay. The sooner you embrace it, however awkward that first embrace may be, the sooner you will benefit from it.

One effective way to understand the value of social media is to obtain an understanding of the numbers of eyeballs we are talking about. No businessperson can argue with masses of eyeballs staring at social media and verticals, all teeming with anticipation to click on the next targeted result they encounter. As is demonstrated in the following discussion, we are talking about a lot of eyeballs.

Another way in which the value (or harm) of social media can become apparent to those not acclimated with it is when searches are performed for names of principles, employees, or the company itself. These often turn up, on the positive side, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook profiles, on the (usually) neutral side Wikipedia entries, and on the negative side Ripoff Report and similar items. With any disgruntled customer or employee able to quickly, easily, and anonymously post damaging information about an organization online (regardless of the veracity of the statement), online reputation management therefore becomes an issue, and social media is the single most effective means of controlling it. Online reputation management should not wait until such time as there is a problem – if you are regularly and consistently building a name for yourself online through various social media sources then when a problem does arise you have the advantage. I do not consider online reputation management an option; rather, it is a critical component to exercising influence and control over how the world perceives you.

The use of vertical search is also on the rise. Vertical search is focused on search queries in particular field, for particular type of information, or a particular information format. Sites such as Flickr (images), Fandango (movies), Weather.com, WebMd and innumerable others all cater to specific verticals and are heavily trafficked. YouTube is a well-known example of a vertical search engine, in which users can search for information in a particular format, namely video. YouTube is also demonstrative of the fact that vertical search cannot be ignored, as it is currently the second largest search engine behind Google (beating Yahoo and all others). As such, traditional keyphrase based web document SEO completely fails to reach this huge audience. Search marketers should be encouraging their clients to develop video content and post it on YouTube in order to reach the vast audience that YouTube offers. Additionally, the inclusion of video in an Internet marketing strategy gives site owners the opportunity to appear within the blended results mentioned above. As any opportunity to appear on first page search engine results should be seized, this is yet another added benefit of video (and one, perhaps, which clients may more easily understand as having ROI potential).

YouTube is not the only social media or vertical site that competes with traditional search engines. For example, MySpace receives more search traffic than either AOL or Ask. When search queries are combined from the sites eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon they total 980 million per year, which is close behind MSN (now Bing), which received just over 1 billion queries in 2008. Obviously, relying on traditional, web document keyword based SEO results in the loss of massive amounts of potential search traffic that is funneling through vertical and social media portals. Facebook, with over 200 million registered users, had 113 million unique visitors in May of 2009, surpassing MSN (97.5 million) and approaching Yahoo and Google (135.5 million and 145.5 million respectively). Photo sharing sites such as Flickr are extremely powerful ways to promote image content. Finally, heavily trafficked social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and the like cannot be ignored as potential sources of visibility for your content.

Internet marketing professionals can adapt to the changes in search behavior as reflected in the popularity of verticals and social media and provide maximum ROI to their clients by developing client-specific strategies which involve both a social media presence as well as inclusion in verticals relevant to the client’s business.

Real time search is another consideration that cannot be neglected. The popular microblogging site Twitter is growing at an annual rate of 1400% and currently has over 10 million users that add 10 gigabytes of data per day. Last year Twitter bought the Summize search engine so as to add real time search capability to its function. Twitter has also recently announced that not only will it index tweets in real time, but also index links that are contained within tweets in real time. This stands to be the first large scale, real time, web document-indexing engine available. An additional real time feature offered by Twitter is the trending topic functionality. When there is a breaking news event, such as an earthquake in China or the debut of the new iPhone, people are talking about it in real time, and that is reflected in the trending topics. A user searching a traditional search engine for news on the earthquake in China, or a review of the iPhone, would be hard pressed to encounter breaking information in the first hours following the event. However, on Twitter, such information is readily available the moment it is published.

Obviously real time search creates spam problems, by which people can create spammy content and get it indexed instantaneously. These are problems which will have to be overcome for real time search to reach maturity, however could theoretically be solved by allowing only content posted by trusted users or users with a reputation to appear in real time results. This could even take the form of a filtering option, in which real time results could be filtered, according to user preference, to include only those results which are from trusted and reputable sources.

However, the same obstacles that are presented by spam to real time search provide an opportunity for reputation management as well as targeted search traffic. In a crisis, or when bad press happens, it can be addressed in real time and promptly resolved, before it gets out of hand or becomes viral. Vendors of products and services can always a sure a top listing in real time search by regular contributions to the service (for example, regular tweets), as currently these results are “ranked” by freshness only (with the most recent tweets appearing first), and not according to any sort of reputation or authority algorithm. Relevance is rudimentary, and simply determined by the presence of the target word, phrase or hashtag occurring within the Tweet.

Real time search also offers an incredible opportunity for branding as well as link building. Increasing one’s influence on Twitter by increasing followers allows one to address a captive audience in real time with recent blog posts, product announcements, press releases, and the like. This in turn enables followers to create links and discussions related to the freshly released content, many of which could never be reached by any other means.

3. User Targeted Search

Traditional keyword based SEO strategies can also fail due to the advent of customized search. Customized search is a methodology by which various engines deliver search results based upon various parameters that are defined by the user (either actively in search or profile settings or passively as in GPS location).

Geo-targeting and local search is perhaps the quintessential example of custom search. Organic search results are geo-targeted and modified based on user location, which can be ascertained either by IP address, direct user input (such as “coffee shop Austin”), or in the case of mobile devices via GPS networks. The inclusion of local results makes it incumbent upon local businesses to insure that they are included in various local business directories. National businesses should ensure that all local franchises and locations are separately registered in local directories, preferably with individual, local telephone numbers. Geo-targeting additionally (without other user-defined preferences taken into consideration) favors local business over online merchants. For example, a user searching for “organic food” on either Bing or Google will be given myriad local choices, at the expense of national organic food ecommerce sites or suppliers. This is demonstrative of one way in which traditional keyword based SEO would lose efficacy due to geo-targeted results.

Geo-targeting is also extremely compelling when considering various verticals such as Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Fandango and the like (all of which steal traffic from traditional search engines). The increasing popularity of GPS on mobile devices further illuminates the importance of geo-targeted search, and is further examined later in this article.

Browsing history is also used to customize search and is an example of what is known as behavioral targeting. For example, Google acknowledges using recent search history to further refine your results because "it provides a valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches". Google states that it uses search history "to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out [of a Google account]." Recent search history is stored via a cookie that expires within 30 minutes, if logged out of your Google account. If logged in to your Google account, your browsing history is additionally factored into your search history to further customize results.

User defined preferences are another way in which search is customized for specific users. Perhaps the most notable example of this is Google’s “Safe Search”, which has a default setting of “moderate” and is intended to suppress certain search results that may be offensive (and hence not relevant) to some users. Image searches are clearly marked with the safe search settings for the machine on which the search is conducted. These settings can be changed to set filters on search results that should be either included or excluded according to user preference.

A clear example of this is to set your Google preferences to “strict filtering”, and then perform a normal text search (meaning this can be demonstrated outside of image results) for “Toys for Adults”. The results delivered include brain toys, tech toys, Discovery Channel toys, and the like. If you then perform the same search, with the filter set to only “moderate”, the results are quite different, as would be imagined. As a side note, Google (as well as Bing and others) also allows users to set preferences which would favor pages written in specific languages.

Information stored in user profiles is another source of potential search customization. Search results can easily be tailored to take into account the most relevant results for a specific demographic, such as age, sex, marital status, user-defined interests and the like.

4. Mobile Search

It has been said for years “this is the year for mobile search”. While I believe social media outlets are the biggest source of untapped traffic currently, it is self evident that mobile search is on the rise. This is due to several factors, including mobile browsers that look and feel the same as traditional browsers, which eliminates the need for special mobile-version websites. Increasing network speeds (4G and beyond) and device processor speeds, combined with declining costs and ease of use make the mobile web accessible to most anyone. Mobile devices such as the iPhone and the G1 come preinstalled with proprietary, web ready browsers.

The G1, running on Google’s Android operating system, comes with ready to use, one touch Google search functionality, including the ability to search by voice. How can search possibly be made any easier than just saying what you want and having it appear on your mobile device? Short of mind reading, there is no easier way!

However, I believe the future of mobile search for many common queries is in the growing use of mobile applications (“apps”, for short). Examples of extremely popular mobile search apps include UrbanSpoon, Yelp, NearbyNow and other apps which deliver customized search results based on geo-targeting, often using the mobile device’s built in GPS functions to filter the results. I am most amazed by Shazam, which allows the user to “record” a snippet of background music and then performs an automated search that results in the title, song name, and artist information, with the ability to purchase the mp3 with one touch.

Conclusion

In order to best serve clients and realize maximum ROI on an Internet marketing investment, the focus on rankings-based metrics must be diverted to metrics based on traffic and conversions. Obviously, this means getting your message out to where the traffic is – which today means multimedia, mobile, social media, and verticals. Your marketing message must be designed to target specific behaviors as well as be visible in a variety of platforms in addition to the traditional search engines. Traditional SEO, with its focus primarily on search engine rankings, is no longer the most effective means by which to obtain visibility for a website. The vast amounts of traffic utilizing nontraditional methods to search for products and services combined with customized and blended results in the traditional search engines render traditional keyword targeted, web document search engine optimization strategies obsolete.

About the Authors

Matt Foster (Twitter: @ArteWorks_SEO) is the CEO of ArteWorks SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm specializing in social media, new media and organic search engine placement. Lisa Kinnard (Twitter: @LisaKinnard) is the eMarketing Manager for a national ad serving agency and has extensive experience managing behaviorally targeted search marketing campaigns and in developing custom search experiences based on user preferences and demographics.

Notes
Ryan, Kevin (2008). Uncovering the Real Universal Search. Retrieved June 15, 2009 from Search Engine Watch. Web site: http://searchenginewatch.com/3628796
Comscore, http://www.comscore.com
Comscore, http://www.comscore.com
Wauters, Robin (2009). Compete: Facebook U.S. Traffic Nearing Google, Yahoo. Retrieved June 9, 2009 from TechCrunch. Web site: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/compete-facebook-us-traffic-nearing-google-yahoo/
Scoble, Robert (2009). Some Stats from Twitter Conference Compared to Google. Retrieved June 9, 2009 from FriendFeed. Web site: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/50e673d8/some-stats-from-twitter-conference-compared-to
Arrington, Michael (2008). Confirmed: Twitter Acquires Summize Search Engine. Retrieved June 9, 2009 from TechCrunch. Web site: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/confirmed-twitter-acquires-summize-search-engine/