Your Chocolate Is In My Peanut Butter! Search and Social collide!

As a deeply addicted internet denizen, I’ve always known that search engine visibility was important. It wasn’t until I started working at Sitewire that I realized how radically the landscape is changing, and how many companies are going to get left in the dust. I spoke a few members of Sitewire’s search brain trust (Chris, Andrea, Sean, and Travis) and got their thoughts on where search is going, and how a cutting edge company needs to keep up.

Real Time Search

Companies ignoring Twitter and real time discussions are about to find this pesky information showing up in Google searches.  The impact to your search results?  Google will still display 10 searches per page but the “Latest results for XX” section takes up the space of about two search engine rankings and could push you below the fold.  For now this only appears for highly talked about items and “Hot Topics” for incredibly broad searches, but it is still evolving.

Social Search

The social media and search realms are blending, and soon buying keywords as your entire search strategy will start to fail. As sentiment from review sites, local blogs, and personal social networks begins showing up in Google search results, you won’t be able to hide what people really think about your brand. Google’s Social Search is already out there, and Google’s recent half a billion dollar offer for Yelp should convince anyone they’re serious.  If keeping your search results positive is any sort of priority, you must start engaging with your customers in the social space.

Mobile Search

Users want their information from any device and from any location. MarketingVOX estimates 19% of US mobile users are using smartphones, and 49% plan to buy them within the next two years. Already 40% of users say they download information from the internet to their phones, and soon smartphone usage will dominate the mobile market.  Google is supposedly looking at local intent with search results, and may start returning only mobile-enabled sites to mobile searches.  How does your mobile site look?

Everything Search

There is also a lot more out there than text as search engines continue to develop their capability to index multimedia information. Looking at the content of audio, image, and video files, not just the metadata, is making huge strides. An enormous amount of content exists in Flash applications. Marketers are going to have to give thought not to just their headlines, but the words used in graphics and scripts for video.

Bottom line is that throwing up keyword optimized public relations content is already on the way out. Results are moving away from providing hard data and returning information, context, and suggestions.  To manage it you need to be connecting with what people are saying right now, how they honestly feel about your product, and even where they are when they want to look for you.

Expand your view of search or before too long nobody will be able to find you at all.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Human Algorithm: How Google Ranks Tweets in Real-Time Search (briansolis.com)
• Google searches getting more social (cnn.com)
• Google’s Social Search won’t leverage much of Facebook (computerworld.com)
• Google’s Real-Time Search Raises Importance of Link Sharing Via Social Networks (poynter.org)

Tagged as: Google, keywords, PPC, smartphones, Social Search, twitter, yelp