Many companies rely on the major search engines to help them overcome the noise of the marketplace and to direct profitable traffic to their websites. Unfortunately, the search business is dominated by large companies behind such search engines as Google Bing, and Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook who pretty much dictate their own terms of service, their sponsors and users be damned.
Now we are finding the search function once again changing in a significant way …
- The first change was moving from pure search to keyword stuffing and those who claimed that they could game the system using SEO, search engine optimization.
- The second change was moving from keyword stuffing to content analysis and affiliated links.
- The third change was moving from content analysis to user analysis and content presentation.
- The fourth change was moving to smaller form factors, tablets, and mobile devices and away from the desktop environment. Casting screens from small devices to larger displays is just becoming a reality.
- And now, we are seeing the implementation of voice search with its own particular semantic demands. Especially with words that sound the same.
ASK YOURSELF
Is your organization capitalizing on the incorporation of question words (who, what, why, when, where, and how) into your searchable content? Or will you be left behind when someone asks a tabletop device to perform a voice search?
Are you using “Microdata” – the facility that allows the placement of descriptive metadata into standard content? Is your organization even aware of Microdata and how search engines are using this information to provide a richer user experience?
Do you have a feature and keyword-rich FAQ that allows a much denser packing of keywords than most regular web pages or blog posts?
Do you understand “long-tail” keywords and how to incorporate them into your presentation materials?
How with this affect your discovery efforts, sales, and marketing? Will the impact be sufficient to cost market share, revenue, and jobs?