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Search Marketing Industry Shake-up Imminent
By Jim Hedger (c) 2007

As sure as the sun shines behind the clouds on a rainy day, a
major shake-up in the search marketing industry is coming soon.
The signals are being sent and received through-out the various
sectors of search and online marketing. Change in any
marketplace, when it does come, is often swift, brutal and
merciless. For some SEO practitioners, this one will be
especially so. While the search marketing industry has been
bracing for change for at least a year, the movement is now
picking up speed and gathering momentum. As SEOs, our
working-world is going to look very different this time next
year.

The biggest change is the death of "traditional SEO".

Dead is taking it a bit far. SEO is not exactly dead. A better
way to describe it would be to say it dyed (changed).

SEO has evolved so far and so quickly in the past six months
that it as a practice is hardly recognizable from its humble
roots, much like a Neanderthal placed beside any given Homo
Sapien. The thread that ties the past to the present is search.
Everything still comes down to some sort of search.
Nevertheless, the traditional view of SEO services is over.
Having languished in a virtual state of stasis for most of the
past year, the concept of traditional, SERP based SEO went to
rest sometime in the early spring.

With the introduction and rapid advancement of social
networking, the attention of the search marketing world and
Internet users has quickly spread outward, away from the common
search engine results pages. While Top10 (first page) placements
are still extremely important traffic drivers
(http://blog.sitepronews.com/index.php?/archives/
239-62-of-Search-Engine-Users-Click-on-1st-Page-Results.html),
information seekers rely on social media, RSS feed-readers,
specific vertical search tools and multimedia as frequently as
they do on traditional search engines. (That's why the
traditional search engines are branching so far out into social
media)

This has led to a surge in the development of SEO based
techniques to work within social media environments. Clients now
require social profiles for their businesses, themselves and
their key staff, along with the proficiency of a skilled social
networker to keep those profiles popular and polite. Fortunately
adaptable SEOs will find many of these tasks fall within
skill-sets that are very similar to "traditional SEO".

Another critical service popping up in many SEO firms is called
reputation management. With literally thousands of potential
venues open to anonymous or unmoderated postings by the public,
larger companies often require professional assistance
monitoring and maintaining the numerous representations of their
online reputations. All too often though, the majority of us
don't need someone else to make us look bad online. We're
perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

Take a second to think about this question. How many profiles do
you have available to searchers in how many different venues?

Try to consider everything from a database of church members to
the dating site one might have signed up with to the websites of
local business association. Now add MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn,
MyBlogLog, and any other larger social network you or your
business might have joined. Though much of it might be
restricted to members-only searches an enormous amount of
personal and business information is floating around to be
discovered, vetted, and compared with that of other potential
employees or vendors. For some, that constitutes a reputation
management problem. Who better to find and attend to such
problems but companies that already specialize in performing
searches and creating high ranking documents?

The final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the
introduction of Google's personalized results. Though
personalization and localization will be good for adaptable SEO
firms, the direct interests expressed by each unique user will
increasingly determine which documents are consistently placed
in that user's results. That means SEOs will have to do more
work on each file doing little things such as placing calls to
action leading to social or browser based bookmarking (which
requires the establishment of even more business profiles) and
building smarter link/tag networks, along with the traditional
SEO tasks covering titles, tags, text, structure and links.

Covering all those bases is not a simple task but much of the
basics remain the same. The principle application of search is
used in an increasing number of venues. While each search
application differs from venue to venue, they perform the same
ultimate task. Most fall into a limited number of types that
experienced SEOs have likely dealt with before. For instance,
tagging images at Flickr or documents at Digg is much like
adding the keyword meta-tag was for Alta Vista. Similarly,
writing great personal or business profiles is much like writing
a strong description. The same principles apply from keyword to
copy.

Full-scale service is going to cost a lot more for SEO firms to
provide in the near future. A worry in the business end of the
SEO industry is that tomorrow's services (slowly being
introduced today) will cause a shake-out in the industry as less
adaptable firms fall by the wayside and smaller business clients
struggle to afford an increasingly expensive set of services.
The small business situation will cause its own short-term
stirrings in the industry as the standards of SEO services start
to imitate other vertical markets.

For businesses currently relying on SEO services as a primary
traffic driver, the warnings have gone out long before this one
but...  Adapt now. Your advertising dollars are already moving
away from the mainstream media (newspaper, TV, flyers, etc...)
and towards the digital media. That trend will make digital media
the number one advertising venue by 2011 according to the
influential VSS Communications Industry Forecast, issued earlier
this week (http://blog.sitepronews.com/index.php?/archives/
238-Online-Ad-Spend-to-Overtake-Other-Media-by-2011.html). While
hardly advising immediate abandonment of the mainstream media, I
strongly advice a hard look at how next year's marketing budget
is going to be used. You'll likely get a lot more mileage from
the viral power of a 3-minute YouTube video than you would from
a month of localized 30-second spots. At the same time, you might
want to take a very close look at what others are saying about
you or your business online. If you find that nobody is talking
about you or your business, or that they are talking trash, you
might want to do something about it.

The bottom (and hopefully last) line is simple. A new generation
of highly wired consumers is looking at monitors more than they
are print or television. The weight of their bulk is
fundamentally changing how they and other consumers use the
Internet. Though it is, and likely always be, about search, it's
not necessarily about search engines. Like I said to start, a
shake-up is coming in the industry and like most shifts it is
going to produce interesting results.
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Jim Hedger is Executive Editor of SiteProNews.com. He is also a
consulting SEO and writer for Metamend Search Engine Marketing
(http://www.metamend.com/) and Enquisite Search Analytics
(http://www.enquisite.com/).
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