The world of search is ever-changing. With near-Cold War efficiency, search engines constantly bring out new features to either maintain their dominance (hi, Google) or attempt to steal marketshare (hi, Bing). The end result — in theory — is a better search experience for users. Marketers — that’s us — are left figuring out how our marketing efforts will be impacted by these continuous changes.
And it happened again. Today, Google announced their full-adoption of real-time search. The announcement came with a few other changes, like Trends coming out of Labs and some amazing new changes to how mobile users will interact with search. Sorry, marketers, but it’s time to go back to the well. Again.
The announcement of real-time search integration is just one more event leading to this goal: every person’s SERP (search engine results page) will be different.
What does that mean to marketers? For starters, you can’t count on your ad showing up for every query. If SERPs are completely customized to the searcher at hand — and make no mistake about it: that is Google’s goal — your ad will only show if (among other things) it’s relevant to them. Understand what I said there, for it’s subtle. Relevant to them. Not the term they searched on, but to the person making the query.
I understand if your initial reaction is to cry foul. But I honestly think this will be — it’s not yet — a change for the better. When ad blocking tools came out years ago, marketers ranted and raved. And then they quickly realized that the people who would use ad blockers weren’t going to respond to their ads anyhow, so they were saving on — not losing — costly impressions.
That’s where you need to be with this development. It will cause all of us to move away from a reliance on keywords and shift to understanding user behavior, personas, locations, devices and true intent behind the search.
At least that’s what Google — and soon the other engines — will be busy finding out. The only questions is where you want to sit on that wave.
* Quick disclaimer: The image of the Google toolbar was photoshopped to illustrate the point, it hasn’t really added that in…yet….
This article is from Travis Unwin
Travis has been working in the online space since 1999 and specifically online advertising since 2002. He prides himself on solving problems by helping key decision makers shift their perspectives.
Travis has written 9 posts.
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If search results are really becoming customized for each person, it’s going to put a much greater emphasis for people to put honest, valuable content on their site rather than worrying about ways to bump their average content up the results page. Will be very interesting to watch.
Excellent use of the final word: “wave”.
Your headline is provocative, but a tad misleading. 40% of searches use the suggestions that Google presents. That means people fall into buckets and fairly predictable ones. What we are seeing is the internalization and integration of Doubleclick technology into Google.
So it turns out that in most cases for any given “you” guess what? You’re not all that remarkable after all. Google will not be able to personalize much beyond the bucket or buckets they put you in. Whether it’s a geo bucket (your location) or some other bucket, all those in the same bucket will likely see (and likely want) the same results.
If as an SEO you can understand what Google is resolving for mode, media, etc. and you understand the buckets of users, you will have a better chance of ranking higher in the serps for your target buckets. If Google is all about context of the user and the search phrase, then you simply need to create the most likely contexts for your content for your target buckets.
I agree with your assessment, Outta. But be cautious of boiling down Google’s plans to simple bucketing. Their current personalization implementation is an example of baby steps. How much further can they go today? Probably not much. But tomorrow?
Note that I don’t think of this as a Bad Thing. And I certainly don’t pine for the past. Change is a good thing.