True to their mission of organizing the world’s information, Google recently announced a significant change in its search results. Google will now include multiple content types, such as video, news, images and local information, along with traditional web pages. As they demonstrated, you’ll now be able to see results from a wider variety of sources in an aggregated search results page. We’re in the camp that thinks Google, overall, is a positive influence on web activity, so we see this as a step forward in providing better search results for web users. We also think that this change will have several consequences for web marketing programs, including the following:

1. SEO just got a lot harder. Page Rank still matters, but now SEO practitioners have no choice but to contemplate a much broader range of search possibilities. We already know that a higher Page Rank doesn’t always guarantee a higher ranking. Now we’re going to discover how Page Rank will work with timely news results. Even if the changes aren’t dramatic, at the very least it means that fewer traditional pages will be ranked on the first page. So SEO competition will have to heat up
2. You must diversify your marketing portfolio. Just when you thought you’d figured the organic thing out, Google comes along and rocks your world. Things change. Sometimes, quite unexpectedly, Google changes will impact your traffic and, correspondingly, your business. Now you have to calculate how the new algorithms will impact your best laid SEO plans. If you didn’t already know it, this change should convince you that you can’t rely on a single marketing program. So how to you guard against algorithm risk? Pretty much the same way you handle sector risk in your financial portfolio. You diversify. Make sure that, in addition to your SEO initiatives, you’re also engaged in paid search, comparison shopping, affiliate marketing, banner advertising, blogs, news, etc.
3. Spend time and money on Word of Mouth marketing. Twenty-six percent of all Page-One results already consist of user generated content (UGC) such as blogs and Wikipedia. Universal search will likely result in the display of more UGC, which means that you have to have a strategy in place to influence the people writing and talking about you. Word of Mouth marketing will, therefore, become increasingly important. Spend the time and money on ethical Word of Mouth marketing programs to guide users towards creating positive content.

Only two things are guaranteed in the search world: 1) this won’t be the last significant search engine change, and 2) black hats will always find ways to exploit temporary flaws in the system. Unless you want to go to the dark side and suffer the karmic consequences, use the Universal Search change as an opportunity to expand your marketing horizons and build sustainable programs that work over the long-term.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under All Blogs, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.