I’ve written previously about the need to re-evaluate search marketing by attending to how users encounter your BRAND through search as opposed to the dated approach of focusing on where your URL appears.  This week a study emerged from a the search marketing agency Slingshot, showing that the click-through-rates (CTRs) on search result pages (SERPs) are diversifying dramatically such that only 52% of Google users and 26% of Bing users are clicking on anything on page 1.  People use search in multifaceted ways so we have to stop believing in the old alchemy of the magical number 1 slot and the obsession over where our URL ranks.  It’s the total experience of the brand that matters and those who make this transition quickest stand to gain the most from their search marketing efforts.

For years, the thinking has been that the top slots produce the lion’s share of the user activity on SERPs.  Various studies in the mid 2000s indicated that the top three slots got as much as 50-60% percent of the activity.  I’m not sure that the story was ever as dramatic as those stats indicated but the present reality is certainly different.  As Google and Bing have moved to build Universal Search Result pages that include blended results from a  variety of content sources, users have begun exploring the SERPs more readily.

Depending upon their mindset, the SERP gives the user many directions to pursue.  Are you just learning about a certain product or service?  Visit manufacturer sites and read articles on the topic.  Are you narrowing down or comparing options?  Visit review sites, blogs and forums.  Sick of reading and want a simpler overview….look for videos. Need something near you……check out the local listings.  The list of options grows annually and we all benefit from the multiplicity of content that is available.

All this reinforces the idea that brands need a content marketing strategy that contributes to the proliferation of content and conversation about them.  A content marketing strategy focuses on the needs of your audience and the best ways to provide them with useful information.  Useful content leads to greater distribution of content and therefore a wider variety of ways that users can encounter your brand off any specific SERP.  This trend along with the trend towards mobile access of digital content are the two most game defining changes that marketers must embrace in the coming year.  Embrace the change!  It’s a good thing.

In the beginning there was SEO.  Then on the seventh day, Google created PPC.  Then, the creators of our acronyms realized that there was an opportunity for a new one called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  It would combine paid and organic search techniques and the Gods would be pleased with us for being so clever.  So why the snark?  I am tired of the obsession that we seem to have for “driving”  (sounds like something we do with cattle), “traffic” (aren’t these actually people), to our site (a magic land where we ensnare traffic into the inevitable conversion act with our elegant design, crafty copy and inescapable marketing acumen).  This is not how people behave online an we all know because we are (most of us) people and we do not behave that way.  The time has long since come for us to consider more than the one url that our magic land resides at but rather all the ways that users can encounter our brands through distributed content and conversions in what I daresay I have a new acronym for.  How about Search Experience Marketing (that way you don’t have to learn a new three letter abbreviation, SEM)?  Here’s my argument for why this makes more sense and is ultimately better search engine marketing than traditional approaches.

When a user searches they are presented with a SERP that has lots of options on it.  Maybe your website is one of them, but it’s only one of them.  What other things could they encounter:

• review sites
• blogs
• forums
• videos
• maps
• images
• news sites
• vertical industry search directories
• white papers
• press releases
• everything else that the internet is made of

If you are fortunate, this user may visit your website but why should they stop there with so much more information close at hand.  Would you? The reality is that every day people either encounter (or fail to encounter) your brand through all of these areas listed above.  A content marketing strategy that creates valuable, useful stimulating and helpful content in a variety of forms that flows socially into the fabric of the layered search experience that I describe above is the best way to attract and influence your target audience.  Obsessing only about where your site sits on a specific set of SERPs seems so narrow a consideration.

How does this work in action?  I recently shopped for a refrigerator.  This falls into the category of a considered purchase.  I searched for fridges and found that a website with helpful decision-making tools on it.  I narrowed it down to a type that I preferred.  On an ecommerce site I found some options.  On their corporate site I saw some specification and sometimes a helpful product tour.  On blogs I saw discussions and reviews.  My mind changed.  I settled on a brand.  I saw other helpful videos about the product by organizations other than the brand.  I was now romanced into the state of high gadget lust that I needed to be in.  Pennies are now being saved and product will soon be purchased.  What role did traditional SEO play in that?  A very small one.

Search engines are intentionally trying to make the SERPs more about answering questions than just scanning the web for keywords.  Your audience is going create an experience for themselves when they search in your space.  The more deeply woven you become in that experience, the better your brand will perform.  It’s not just about keywords and rank.  It’s about the totality of the search experience.  Is that what you are seeking to influence today?  If not, could it be?  Please?

As social media content continues to find its way into search engine result pages (SERPs), interesting new data reveals just how much traffic is referred to our s facebook pages from search.  The folks at the very useful Facebook analytics engine PageLever published their analysis of over 1000 fan pages with 10,000 fans or more and found that 33.98% of the referring traffic to these pages came from one of the three major search engines.There are two things about this that I find very interesting:

Firstl, this stat means that about 9.5% of all traffic to  facebook pages comes from search on average.  That is definitely higher than what I would have anticipated.  Also it should be noted that Google is by far the largest contributor to this percentage. Almost 82% of the traffic from search to facebook pages is coming from Google.

The second thing about this that interests me is the degree to which this may impact our content strategies on Facebook.  Good SEO strategies usually begins with good content strategies.  Social media is important outlet for a content strategy.  Therefore, we can now realize how important it is to apply solid content marketing principles, with SEO underpinnings, to our Facebook fan page output whenever it is possible to do so.

I’m not recommending keyword stuffing your posts but just being mindful of the fact that the search engines, Google in particular, are crawling what you create, and they seem to be making more off an effort to make it visible through SERPs.  Well-thought out, useful, entertaining or engaging content is best path towards greater search visibility in all channels.  That’s good news for the marketer and even greater news for the consumer.

Google recently introduced their new tool, Google SideWiki to create an annotated web browsing experience for any user willing to install the Google toolbar in their browser.  Operators of brand websites are no doubt going to be frustrated by the idea of user-generated content outside their control surrounding the user experience of their website.  However, there could be interesting opportunities here for marketers and tremendous advances for the consumer if the SideWiki adoption rate takes off.

For marketers, there may be interesting ways to engage your website audience in the effort to make your website more useful to other users:

• What if you post a new product and ask your users to sidewiki about it?
• What if you represent a cause and your users can sidewiki additional information that adds color to your campaign?
• What if you have an ecommerce site and users can sidewiki product recommendations or related products?
• What if you are a content hub and users can sidewiki links to your content on sites that relate to you thus creating new viral sources of traffic?

For consumers the immediate benefits are informational but the ultimate benefits could come if/when sidewiki goes social.  What if there comes a day when sidewiki uses Facebook Connect so that you can see sidewiki comments by your friends.  Everywhere you go on the web you will be surrounded by information generated by your own trusted network.  This is another step in the direction of what Charlene Li, the author of “Groundswell”, hints at when she says, “In the future, the social web will be in the air all around us.”

Right now the only way you can get the sidewiki app is by installing the toolbar. I think that one of the keys to rapid user adoption of sidewiki will be to un-marry the application from the Google toolbar.  There are already too many browser add-ons and many people choose not to add yet another row of buttons to their browser in favor of keeping their viewing area uncluttered.  If Google allows sidewiki to become a stand-alone free download that users can turn on and off as they choose I think the adoption rate will be dramatic.  What ideas do you have as to how you will use the sidewiki?

Every year SEOMoz puts out a great study of what factors top SEO experts believe to be most important in impacting your rankings.  Here is a link to this year’s study which puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality and variety of inbound links to your site.  As much as I value the information in a study like this, I’m struck by the fact that SEO experts still remain obsessed with the concept of how to drive people to a single site.  With all of the developments in social media content and services permeating the web we need to move away from our obsessions with our own site rankings and develop SEO models that are based on optimizing how we are found within the total search experience of the user.

What does this mean? It means you should put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. What is their experience like? What sorts of content, sites, services, dead-ends, confusions, or revelations do they encounter when they are searching for topics that relate to you? It may not matter much that your site ranks well for a given term if the search result pages are chock full of so many review sites, lead generations services, and aggregators that the searcher is more likely to be confused than engaged. Think about how searchers are likely to behave when faced with the options that search result pages present them with. How can you be present in those other options?

Here are some things to consider:

• Are there useful sites that aggregate data about businesses like yours that searchers are likely to encounter?  This is almost certain for most industries.  You need to focus attention on how you optimize your representation on these services.  Being listed is usually not enough to stand out when the searcher hits that service.
• What kinds of social content do searchers encounter (blogs, videos, forums, images, reviews etc.)?  How effectively are you represented in this content?
• What kind of content do they see if they search through maps or local search?  Businesses often pay less attention to these listings but the stats I have been seeing indicate that searchers are increasingly passing through these interfaces to get to you.
• What happens when people perform searches related to your services on non-search sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter?  How can you create content that will be meaningful within the context of those sites (be interesting as opposed to promotional)?
• What other sites are embedding or making use of the portable, social content you are offering?  Can you work with them to help them make full use of all the content you have to offer?

Basically the issue here is that SEO practices have typically been focussed on your site instead of the searcher.  By including an appreciation of all the experiences that searchers are likely to encounter in your search optimization strategy, you can create a wider variety of key ways back to you than just your website’s listing on a search results page.  Search optimization programs that do not include this thinking are missing a big piece.

The term “inbound marketing” tends to bring together the tactics of search and social media under one umbrella.  To me the theme that binds them all together is that they reach people during the natural course of whatever they may be doing online rather than interrupting that process with “Hey pay attention to me now” messages.  So here is my argument for a way to look at search as a social media activity.

1.  “Isn’t search a personal act, not a social one?” First of all, not all social media activities have to include interaction with others.  Search is a fundamental way that users interact with the web.  That is the social activity of search.

2. “Doesn’t search marketing place paid ads in front of users?”   Yes but for the most part these messages are helpful tools that reach people while they are in the process of looking for them.  If I’m searching for tennis shoes and I see a search ad for a great pair then the ad is helping me and adding value to my interaction with the web.

3.  “Isn’t social media about two-way communications?”  Yes but search has always been and continues to be a very subtle form of two-way communication.  Attentive search marketers have always looked closely at what forms of content win the elusive clicks of their audience.  The user’s decision to click or not to click is, in itself, a social act that “votes” for that content.  since the search marketer studies this data and makes content decisions based on it, the user’s decisions result in action by the marketer.  This is the two-way communication.  Ok this argument may be weak because we do the same things with paid ads online.  However, increasingly, search results pages give us the tools to actually vote for the content that appears on them.   On Google users can comment on, promote, or delete each organic listing on every page.  This definitely qualifies as a social activity.

The reason I focus on creating these linkages between search and social media is because we are in the midst of a marketing and communications transformation that will de-emphasize (though not eliminate) interruption messaging while placing greater emphasis on how we weave or communications into the fabric of people’s daily lives in helpful, entertaining, and interesting ways.  Maybe it it is wrong to argue that search is social media marketing.  Maybe we need a bigger concept to refer to non-interrupive communication.  The conept of “inbound marketing” comes the closest of any that I have seen but perhaps you have an even better way of referring to this game-changing trend.

Google is now spidering Tweets and pulling them into search engine result pages (SERPs).  This means that if you Tweet for a specifc business reason and are concerned about your online visibility you will want to take some steps to make sure that your Tweets are optimized for organic search.  Here some tips to help you get Twoogled  (I’m going to keep making up new Twitter words):

• Your account name should be in-line with how you intend to be found.  “BestWidgets” would be better than “okeydokey134″ if you are seeking the elusive widget shopper online.
• Consider the title of each tweet.  Use keywords that align with your objectives.
• Be consistent in your use keywords in tweets.  Multiple instances of the same terms will improve your visibility.
• Choose the first 40 or so characters wisely.  When you Tweet appears in Google, the title will include about the first 42 characters of your Tweet.  This is similar to the care with which you would write page titles for website SEO.
• Be interesting.  Providing links to useful content that gets you retweeted will give your tweets a boost in search visibility.
• Write your bio with care.  Your Twitter bio should also contain the terms that matter to your search visibility.

In the future Google may split the real-time content like Tweets from the rest of the SERP.  For now, your Tweets are out there being spidered so it pays to be conscious of how they can help you be found.

Here is an interesting tool that analyzes the content of your website and reports back to you about what percentage of the content is self-focused or customer focused. It is not entirely accurate but is an intersting way of looking at your site that goes beyond typical SEO tools. I typed in two sites I know well and they both came back as 100% me-focused and 0% customer focussed.  Yikes!  That got my attention. How does yours turn out?

http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm

Inspired by the notion that many advertisers and marketers feel that they are held hostage by the constantly evolving paid and organic search landscape, an unnamed author has put forth the controversial idea the searh engines require government regulation. Before you whack me on the snout for suggesting such a thing, just give this a read. 
It makes interesting points, particularly about he lack of transparency in search engine algorithms.  Should the playing field be level and understood by all?  Not entirely a bad idea.
Click here to read the whole article

Because of the many ways that social media content impacts the experiences of online searchers, we tend to put more emphasis on that area in today’s search optimization strategies.  However, in this article by Michael Estrin, he documents several  traditional SEO strategies that make solid sense.  By paying attention to these principles in concert with an effective social media strategy you will see gains in your visibility via organic search.
Read the full article for the details but here is a summary of the ideas he discusses:

• Use Google’s webmaster tools to gain insight into how the engine views your site.
• Make sure that the text of links in your site use keywords that relate to the content of the page that they link to.
• Pay attention to wording of inbound links to your site wherever possible.
• Convert 404 errors to 301 redirects
• Create a 301 redirect for the non-www version of your url.
• Use the search engines to check that new pages of your site have been indexed.
• Pay attention to multiple search engines.
• Use the option of viewing the cached version of your site to see it in text format in order to get a better indication of what the search spiders see.
• Pay attention to the keyword focus of each page and keep it specific.
• Align title and description tags with the keyword focus of each page.
• Continue to find ways to develop relevant content.

There are more principles than this to bear in mind but Michael gives us a good start in the right direction and some solid reminders of some tactics that get overlooked or forgotten.