Search Advisory

The Online Marketing Summit’s Atlanta conference provided, as always, a comprehensive overview on the latest online marketing topics.  One of my favorite sessions, “SEO for the New Google,” was presented by Fionn Downhill of Arizona-based Elixir Interactive.

Fionn managed to share a great deal of information about  how to attain high organic Google rankings in a 50 minute session.  Many of the things she so eloquently covered (particularly regarding Universal and Personalized search), you may have already read in our March newsletter, “Making the Most of the New Search Engine Results Pages.”  Fionn also presented a number of other important points, including:

• The accessibility of your website, including the download speed, is increasingly impacting Google rankings.
• User actions – specifically, your click-through rate from the Google results pages – can affect your organic rankings.
• Google’s recent “Mayday” algorithm update mostly affected “long tail” (multiple word) searches.  Previously, a poor quality web page could rank high for a long tail keyword fairly easily, simply by working that keyword into its content.  Now, the entire site must be of good quality in order for that page to rank high.  Fionn believes this is an improvement.
• Social media has surpassed corporate websites as places people go for information about a company…so you must ensure your social media content ranks high as well as your website!
• Google’s new left sidebar, which allows searchers to choose to search social results, images, shopping sites, etc., reinforces the notion that you really need to have all your digital assets optimized for a wide variety of types of searches.

Fionn had a good point about personalized searches (where Google learns your preferences from your searches and tailors results to you over time).  It’s increasingly important to get high organic rankings right out of the gate.  Because whichever listing a searcher clicks on the first time she runs a particular search…Google very well may display that site first (rank it #1) the next time she runs the same search.  Meaning she’ll be even more likely to click on it from then on.

In essence, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer (my analogy) in terms of high ranking sites being rewarded over lower-ranking sites due to personalization.