The Future of Search - Handling the Change

As the number of users electing to utilise social search grows and searching across all engines shifts towards a less algorithmic result set, companies will begin to rank for keywords in ways that will be much less affected by linking programmes or page content. Essentially rankings will be available based on how 'cool', funny or controversial your page is perceived to be. In general this will mean that those web pages which play an early part in providing information, knowledge and entertainment to their users will have a huge advantage in the social SERPs.

It should be stressed that inferred popularity and algorithmic indexing are not about to be replaced by an entirely social voted ranking system. Spam recognition aside, algorithms and user behaviour monitoring should eventually win out, as users look for relevance and accuracy of results over perceived popularity. However the major search players are already incorporating democratic social elements into their results.

For companies eager to rank highly, search is becoming an ever more holistic process. Keywords and back-links are becoming the 'noise' in ranking algorithms, so allowing enough tagging users through that noise to your message, in order to gain rankings within social search platforms will require an ever increasing amount of more traditional PR within an online environment.

Offline publicity will continue to play a huge role in generating online interest, but as users spend more of their time online, standard advertising will be more available within, for example, the gaming industry (the 'World of Warcraft' game alone has over 8.5 million subscribers at present (xii) and Google acquired Adscape, who deliver dynamic advertisements for video games, for $23 million (xiii) ), generating another channel for branding and advertising.

Pay per click advertising is not enough on its own, but will become an even more valuable resource in search. Organic results are responsible for over 60% of traffic (xiv) , but around 62% of users only follow links from the first page of results (xv) . If you cannot guarantee a front page position for your page in any individual’s personal or geo-targeted SERPs then two thirds of users will never even see your position. Juxtaposed to this, eye-tracking studies clearly show (xvi) that there is a huge visibility advantage to having a top 5 natural search result over paid listings and search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results as they are to choose any of the paid listings (xvii) .

The case for a combination of both good organic search positions and paid listings is strong. Most of the larger e-commerce companies use PPC effectively (xviii) and brand trust can be increased by seeing the same results in either section of the SERPs to the extent that a blend of paid search and organic search will produce an ROI greater than the combined value of each done independently.

Whether it is measured explicitly or implicitly, people talking about your pages is a requirement for rankings. Creating a company blog is important, but appearing in the blogs and feeds of others is going to increase traffic twofold, both through direct referrals and through associated ranking increase. Link-bait and viral marketing are already big business (xix) and this is a trend which can only increase. As the amount of content on the web is increasing, so the battle to be the most interesting, cool, or quirky - that is, the battle to get the most links and the most traffic, becomes ever more difficult. More and more a traditional, offline marketing approach is being adapted for online use, although this is not at the expense of technological expertise.

Search engines are becoming ever more adept at handling pages, but they are seeking to remain relevant. Returning a whole page of near identical content is not providing a good user experience, so canonicalisation is at the forefront of recent algorithmic changes. Inappropriate redirects, poor use of robot exclusions, pages reached from multiple urls and similar technical issues are rife and ignoring these can cost a page dozens, or even hundreds, of SERP positions.

Recognising which search terms are converting is an area of search which is widely mismanaged. Ranking for trophy phrases may be good to show the board of directors, but the importance of web analytics in recognising the long tail conversions cannot be overstated. An example of this might be a search for [car] against a search for [approved used estate car Croydon]. While there may be hundreds of times as many searches for the generic trophy term, the long tail term is more likely to result in conversions because the searcher is more likely to have found what they are looking for.

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Notes:
xii As of 07/03/2007
xiii February 2007
xiv iProspect
xv Online Media Daily
xvi Did-it, Enquiro and Eyetools
xvii OneUpWeb
xviii Amazon UK received 13% of its search traffic from paid listings in the four weeks to 21st October 2006 and eBay UK received 37% of its search traffic from paid listings.
xix Examples include Sony Bravia and Guiness