IESS Group

As Google rolls out it’s social context to capture share from Facebook, Google +1 provides new search dynamics to incorporate user votes, but how useful is this actually going to be to search engines? And will it impact on SEO by becoming an algorithmic metric for SERP’S?

From the context of using the data generated from this activity…

1. Is it really meaningful to search?
2. How could the data be utilised?
3. Is the only credible use for sharing in groups (circles)?

Let’s take a large corporation competing against a sole trader in the same market sector.

The corporation would have multiple locations, hundreds of staff and hundreds of suppliers too. It’s highly likely that staff will have fixed home pages set for their browsers and will make great use of the corporate site everyday. A high proportion of the corporate staff will also sign in with a Google account and +1 the site and any micro-sites and landing pages too. The competitors will also be periodically browsing the site, creating a good footfall but low conversions and unlikely to generate any +1′s. Suppliers would likely use the main company site also as a business portal and also +1 the site. Within the social context, this is shared in circles with peers and colleagues. So very similar to Twitter and Facebook Groups and Fan Pages, people share their knowledge of a website.

In the sole trader model, things are very much different and are scaled to place the business at a distinct advantage when compared to its corporate competitor but on equal footing to other sole traders.

So really, how meaningful is this data to someone at the search engine interface looking for a service or product supplier. If the data is used algorithmically to generate SERPS is that a true representation and fair for the individual performing the search. If that’s going to be the case, the sole trader won’t have the same capacity in the majority of instances to perform better than the corporation in SEO or in the social arena too, so is Google’s move just one that reflects the real world in terms of word of mouth?

The whole notion of SERPs is also on the move. The idea of having 10 SERPS results per page, is being tested by Google and could easily go, offering users a more dynamic and responsive single page that allows the searcher to narrow the results dynamically is likely to be heading our way any time soon.

Imagine if you searched on SEO’s for example and the result set came back with 18 million pages, if then you could narrow results quickly by a range of other criteria you could find what you want, quickly and easily without moving from that page.

Options in dynamic search

• Pages updated within a time span
• Pages with pictures or video or audio
• Pages with flash content or just text
• narrow results by business size – sole trader, SME etc
• By page date – when was it last updated
• By news or blog news
• By business location
• By company size or profit
• By numbers of employees
• By number of products or services

Now as soon as you put in narrow by popular pages (based on +1′s) you’re leading the searcher away from a true set of data. This is very similar to how SEO’s have spammed Technorati, DIGG, Google Maps, Delicious etc. etc. – it’s not a good or quality result set and biased, therefore the search experience suffers.  I think the search experience will always suffer as a result of SEO’s spamming, but it would be a shame to see the SE lower the quality of the search experience in order to chase it’s commercial goals of gaining social share.

It’s interesting to see whats ahead, but more importantly, the chess game we know as SEO is changing.

Your SEO game plan needs to be revised today.  Every business out there has to now incorporate how search will roll out in the months ahead and how that impacts what there are doing today in order to be successful in that new arena.

If you’re not responding today, you’re definitely loosing sales tomorrow!