Google’s recent proclamations about alterations to its search engine have divided marketing opinion.
The first announcement was that it will integrate real-time data from over a billion web pages – including status updates from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs in search results – meaning a brand’s presence on social networking sites will be magnified like never before.
Status updates – whether positive or negative – mentioning a brand, company and service, will be available to anyone searching for a product or service.
Google explains that real-time search will pull in any subject that is trending’ fast (such as popular topics on Twitter) or being searched for in large volumes. If B2B brands want to ensure a relevant web presence it will now become imperative for them to take part in social media.
As information garnered from search will also be supplied by social media, if you don’t tweet, blog or update your status in any way you risk losing search traffic and the rewards of referral traffic
and leads.
Social services
Henry Elliss, head of social media at Tamar says Google’s latest move cements social media at the centre of search.’
“Before now, people would use Twitter, for example, to do their emotional research’ – engaging with others to find out how they felt about brands, products, services – and trusting Google to deliver the factual side, the best deals, information and so on. Now, Google is more fully addressing those emotional needs – and brands are going to have to get serious about social, very quickly.”
However with less-than-favourable tweets about brands also appearing on Google search results, companies will have to accept the blurring boundaries of search and social media. “Social media is just an electronic word-of-mouth,” says Andrew Girdwood, head of strategy at Big Mouth Media who says he loves’ Google’s changes because they make his experience better.
“The number of potential spectators to your tweets is going to grow rapidly. The cost of getting it wrong is going to grow but so is the benefits of getting right. If you make your brands newsworthy you will get the rewards for it,” he explains.
Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer of Greenlight Search Engine Marketing believes Google’s changes mean that optimising Twitter feeds, in the same way as web pages, will become imperative. “Brands will need to tweet more and become more time-sensitive and relevant to their products and services. They will need to be more focused and become like mini-press releases,” he says.
Luckily for many B2B companies the amount of data and keywords relating to their products is small, meaning that if you are the only company in your industry, in the short-term you are likely to dominate real-time search results, giving you an opportunity to grow awareness and traffic in the long-term.
However Microsoft Advertising marketing manager Cedric Chambaz warns that if brands start to focus on their social media solely from a SEO standpoint, creating tweets or blogs on current topics merely to appear on search results, they risk being taken to task by their audience. “You must never under estimate the power of a community and dialogue needs to be authentic so there will be even more reason to stay on your toes and deliver social media that is appropriate.”
A benefit of real-time search, says Tim Gibbon, director of Elemental, is that it will allow marketers to keep a track of campaigns like never before, “Real-time data enables marketers to consider making alterations to brand activity and witness the results in real-time, creating more intuitive brand marketing activity that is more interactive, flexible and meets the demands of environments that are socially charged.”
Google is not the first search engine to incorporate social networking site updates. Microsoft’s Bing started listing real-time results from Twitter in October 2009, but it does not incorporate them into regular search results.
Microsoft’s Chambaz describes Google’s real-time search as a half-baked product’. “I don’t think freshness is always relevant for people when they are performing a search, which is why we have separated relevancy from real-time search.”
But Chambaz agrees with Girdwood when he says Google’s real-time search will act like a magnifying glass upon a company’s social media activities. “Everything you now do with social media now will have an impact on search,” he explains.
History lesson
Implementing real-time data into search results was not the only trick up Google’s sleeve. The search engine behemoth also announced the implementation of Web History, an opt-out personalised search feature which will remember which websites are visited regularly and place them higher up in search listings.
As soon as the announcement was made, the SEO community was eager to understand its consequences on their marketing techniques.
One of the biggest fears for SEO marketers about Web History is that it will limit users browsing habits, returning search results that are familiar to them, making it increasingly hard for smaller companies or new entrants- with less recognisable names- to make an impact near the top of search results.
There will be no limit to the number of results that are personalised and Google says that personalisation will improve with search frequency. However with search history being kept for 180 days, products or services that are needed infrequently will not be affected so much by Google’s latest move.
One consequence of the move says Pouros, is that offline marketing will become more significant. “It will be necessary for web users to search for you by name, rather then sector alone. Small or niche businesses will also have to become more productive with SEO, whereas historically they did not always spend too much time on it.”
Grant Muckle, head of natural search at digital marketing agency I Spy agrees, “Over the last few years we have got a sense that Google favours big brands, so it could be seen as another step towards making harder for new entrants.”
With the advent of Web History the success of a site will have less to do with its Google ranking, as every user will have different results, and more to do with ROI and traffic figures.
Content still king
Google however is keen to reassure SEO marketers, with a spokesman saying, “The Internet is still growing fast and new websites spring up all the time. The key factors in terms of Google ranking haven’t changed: if sites produce great, original content that is structured well and offers users a good on-site experience, then they’ll rank well.”
However Google’s Web History is also a natural evolution of search. According to Muckle “you have to step back from it and remember that Google doesn’t make changes lightly, and it always makes sure they are good for its users.”
Pouros also acknowledges the user benefits of Web History but adds that it “depends on whether they want more choice with a wide search, or a more restricted, but more relevant page of results.”
After all as Pouros says, “It’s also questionable whether we should see Google as a public service or not.”
For more information on SEO and understanding B2B search methods, attend our SEO seminar on May 26 2010
