What a year of change it has been for Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
One of the biggest events in 2009 was the rebranding (again) of Microsoft online search engine. LiveSearch was re-programmed by Microsoft last spring and then re-launched as Bing in June 2009. Bing has maintained small, but consistent, growth since its original launch back in June. While it may only have 10 percent of the market share, it’s important to note that those numbers are actually up 31 percent from Microsoft’s previous search engine market share last year. It’s also important to note that Google’s market share has remained around 65 percent the entire time so Bing wasn’t exactly taking away from Google’s existing market share, but it did prevent the online giant from stealing any new users from existing search engines to grow.
To stiffen the competition, both Google and Bing reached agreements with Facebook and Twitter to integrate live feeds from both popular social networking sites. This in turn has caused Facebook to significantly change its privacy policy. Moving forward, whenever someone mentions your company on Twitter or Facebook, that remark will show up right alongside your company Web site, coverage and information in search results, which can be wonderful or detrimental depending on the comment.
This was just one example of the overall transition to real-time, personalized, universal search abilities from search engines. Basically, search engines are taking a much deeper look into the person doing the searching as well as what they are searching for and delivering incredibly personalized results based off those assumptions. For instance, when someone looks for a specific service in Google, Google is going to deliver results based not only on its assessment of the services offered on the site, but also based on the user’s location and the company’s location based on the address listed in Google Maps or the company’s Web site. There are also several other contributing factors to the way search results are listed such as previous searches, personal page rankings and even what sites you’ve visited from the Google search engine regardless of whether you’re signed in or not to Google (if you choose not to sign in, your Web history will only be kept for 180 days).
This instant feedback may raise concern about the increase of negative search results about your company or that you’re company won’t get listed in certain results due to missing criteria or location. The good news is you have experts like those at M/C/C controlling your ORM (online reputation management) and SEO; making sure that the positive mentions about your company stay on top, and the negative mentions are responded to and dealt with quickly. We also take all the necessary steps to ensure your company is seen in the right results and the right location.
In addition to the real-time, personalized search results, universal search is providing a broader range of search result types. For instance, search results may include videos that were posted on YouTube, previews of a song, price comparisons for shopping queries and news results all in the same results listing.
In an effort to further compete with Bing and win a little more market share, Google took its search tools a step further by adding visual search from mobile phones. Google Goggles allows you to take a picture of something with your phone, and returns search results that are relevant to that image. You also can enter bar codes and Google gives you the best prices for the item, the closest location where you can buy the item based on the GPS location of your phone or the best price online.
While Google Goggles has incredible potential in the business-to-consumer space, there is quite a bit of potential in the business-to-business space as well. This could serve as a great way to make parts ordering far more efficient. No longer do IT guys have to go through the 1,000+ page product catalog to find the proper connector. They can simply snap a shot of the piece they need and Google Goggles will bring up the piece on your Web site. Of course, this requires that you have had images of your products and machinery indexed by Google with the proper keywords.
Each of the changes and upgrades in search engine technology in the past year have created a more challenging environment for ORM, but has also presented a number of opportunities for businesses to increase online impact. As long as you make the effort utilize these new search tools, you can greatly increase your Internet market presence.