Gabriel Goldenberg recently wrote a post about how search is changing forever. First of all, I would like to make it clear that I agree with Gabriel, search is changing. I think Google is in an early stage of testing what works and what doesn’t. Norwegian search (google.no) hasn’t been that much affected by what Rand refers to as blah blah blah as the English search results have yet. However, in Australia (google.com.au) I’ve noticed a lot of testing by Google. One of the keyword terms I was watching did until recently contain a map, but just a couple of days ago the map was removed. I don’t have any explanations to why, but I’m guessing Google learned that the result would do better without the map. We don’t know what Google will end up doing with the search results, but one thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that Google is looking to put most of its money in their own pockets (who wouldn’t?) and want to keep as much traffic as possible within Google owned sites. I don’t think there is any point in sitting here waiting — what we should do is start adjusting to the future.
So what will the future hold for Internet marketing companies? I think that companies that mainly focus on selling SEO services will die a slow death. They will have to expand their product line if they want to survive. It is very likely that SEO will provide less traffic in the future than it is today and PPC will gain more of it. After all, that is what Google wants. So what is my suggestion we start looking more into? How to make better sites. To make it simple – let’s say a site is getting 1000 UV a day from organic search, but in the future it will only get 700 UV a day from the same results. Does that have to mean less business for the site? Not necessarily. At this point the site should start spending more time and money on improving its conversion rates. Web designers are once again highly important. We need to make designs that are user-friendly and that triggers to users to do whatever action you want them to do; at the same time you want the site to look good and represent whatever message you want the site to give.
In the future, we’ll need web analytics to track every single move on our site. We need web analytics to find out where our users drop out. We also need it to find out why they dropped out. Once we know the weak links on our sites, we need to improve them. This is where a/b testing and multivariate testing comes into the picture. Everything needs to be tested. And when we’ve increased the overall conversion rate of the site, we can start looking for new ways to attract traffic to the sites. Maybe we can review some of our old sources of traffic that didn’t give a positive ROI on the old site. I might just do that for the new site, which is more user friendly and has a higher conversion rate.
To summarize, I think that good internet marketing companies will be focusing more on selling strategies in the future, not just services.
