The Death of Search Engine Marketing?

These last couple of days have been game changing for the world of advertising and marketing. Google first released personalized search results, and then went on to implement killer real time search. And videos are soon transcribed and searchable. HELP!

Personalized Search Results

If we first look at the personalized search results, this is creating quite a mess for the search marketing business, among other things because it creates a lot of confusion about how to measure results. Arguments like the one I used myself in the Lowe Brindfors debacle , about moving pages to so and so position on the Google SERPs can’t be used anymore now, because there is no such absolute position. The position will instead be different when I search or when, say, Lowe Brindfors do the same search, regardless of if you’re logged in to Google or not. If you can read Swedish, you SHOULD read Simon Sundéns excellent wrap up on personalized search.

There are two ways to look at this.

1. If you, like the music industry for example, are in the business of conserving old business models, you’ll think that this is awful. The world of search now becomes tricky to measure and tricky to analyze. It’s also much more difficult to strategize around because the IQ required will shoot up with the increased complexity. You’ll miss the good old days.

2. Or, you can see this as an opportunity and a blue ocean, in which you can pull way ahead of the competition. When you can’t work with static target demographics anymore, you’ll have to work with what we’ll probably come to call “cluster based targeting” or “cloud based targeting”. You’ll have to think about search targeting in several different layers of search, sort of like how the chess player has to think several moves in advance. You’ll target multidimensional clusters of people with overlapping search behavior, and your strategy complexity will shoot up exponentially. Things just got interesting, and here’s a hint: Sell that latte machine and hire some real brains. You’ll need them.

Real Time Search

Also, we now get real time search on Google, which suddenly moves Twitter and Facebook presence from being something that an expensive social media guru put a confused marketing executive up to, to becoming a key aspect of any search marketing strategy. The real time search results will just become way to valuable to neglect. Especially in short term offer industries like travel.

Indexing of Audio and Video Transcripts

On top of this Google’s indexing of video and audio transcripts will change the game completely for copywriters, who now not only have to debate whether web copy is different from other copy, but have to realize that any film or radio script they write has to be part of the overall SEM-strategy. Or is that becoming an obsolete term? Is perhaps everything search engine marketing soon?