Online market is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow in much more better way. According to Forrester’s report on interactive marketing tactics, the top three areas where marketers feel most potential over the next three years are social media, online video and SEO. Companies will focus more of their marketing budget on SEO. However, trends and techniques in search marketing tend to fluctuate over the years regarding to the fact that search engine market is developing in a very fast pace. It’s been time to watch out these changes and trends in online search for appropriate corporate marketing strategies
Currently, Google still rule the world’s search engine market, following by Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. After the Microsoft- Yahoo partnership at the beginning of this year, it's now going to be a Two-Engine, 80/20 world. The end users will be the beneficiaries of this highly competitive landscape. What the numbers need to show in the future is not so much the percentage of total searches each engine has but more so the influence of each engine as they compare to all the other ways that people are getting their information these days. So the question is: What is happening out there?
1. Search engines keep its traffic
Traditionally search engines wanted to send traffic to the most relevant web pages based on search terms. But today players like Google and Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine to keep more traffic. Anytime when you “google” the weather forecasts, the currency exchanges, the soccer scores or the travel information, the results are right there on the search page, no need to go anywhere. More of this type of information is expected to be available.
2. Mobile search by location, voices and sights
• Searching by location on mobile shows that the geo craze now has come to search engine on mobile devices. Google optimizes mobile search suggestions based on location to make its its search suggestions on mobile devices even easier.. Now you have the option “Near me now” on Google page in iPhone or Android cell phone to bring up search results close to your immediate location. Let's take a look, comparing the desktop search suggestions to the mobile suggestions.
• Searching by voices, which was launched a year ago, enables millions of users to speak to Google. The combination between voice searching and language translation is expected to spread the search power to a larger base of users and new markets.
• Searching by sights is rather new but expected to gain more notice and increasing usage. Now with only a mobile phone’s camera, you can send your picture to search engines like Google to know what you are seeing. It’s extremely helpful when going travel, exploring new places and studying. It is just so convenient and practical!
3. Search teams up with social media
Social media has proven itself to be a productive and effective way to get the word out there and it seems like search engines are picking up on it. Social sites within the search engine results pages are here to stay. If brands do not control their Twitter page, they risk losing control of their brand’s message on Twitter and in search. So, search matters in social media marketing. So it’s time to include social media optimization as one of the SEO strategies for SEO companies.
4. Real-time search
Microsoft and Google are racing on the real-time search integration in a response to the increasing power of social media and networks. Being partnership with leading social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular social sites, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. So basically, the real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. And, as part of the launch of real-time, Google also added "hot topics" to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time.
5. Personalized search
Personalized search is here to stay. Both Google and Bing have released their "permanent" personalization of results. Search engines are now storing information about what you’re searching for even if you’re not signed in. So basically, personalized search helps you to get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations, and other personalized features
Personalized search does present some new challenges for SEO. It is difficult to explain to clients how personalized search results appear at various positions depending upon who is carrying out the search. So changes in SEO tactics such as providing fresh, relevant, engaging and updated content, making it easy to bookmark but still not overlooking the universal search are necessary.
