Gianluca Fiorelli’s Super Search Update – January edition
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Gianluca Fiorelli’s Super Search Update – January edition

31st January 2013

2013 has started with a frenzy spirit, as if it wanted to make clear it is going to be a totally different thing from its elder brother 2012. This sort of frenziness was clearly reflected in the quality and diversity of the content shared in our Search and Web Marketing industry.

New year, new perspectives and some old baggage of 2012 still bothering us, this how I would define the nature of what was shared in this first month of the year.

Obviously, and somehow a sequel of the classic preview/best of posts of every end of year, we have seen many articles of that kind been shared. Many, sincerely, very forgettable, but others surely need a second read because they offer more than what simply written: they offer new ideas and new perspectives.

One of them is the Digital Marketing Report of the Q4 2012 by RKG, because it offers a snapshot of where is our industry going. For instance it presents quite clearly the relevance of Mobile as the most promising field for Internet Marketing.

Mobile, or – better – “everywhere”, is the new dimension of Internet, hence the real new playing field for us web marketer. This concept was clearly exposed by Will Critchlow in a recent Distilled meet-up in London, and his preso has been posted in the Distilled’s blog. Especially fascinating is the demonstration Will does of how mobile devices are getting more like PCs, while PCs tend being more like mobile devices (slide 33 of the deck).

As I wrote, many have tried to prophesy the future of Search (me included), but if I have to choose one prophet, he should be Eric Enge, whose “SEO Relevations for 2013” are all credible, with a special predilection for his Revelation n. 6 about Landing Page Optimization for SEO.

We all know the SEO professional nowadays is both a specialist and a Tech Renaissance kind of worker, using both left and right brain. A professional that must be very attentive to the evolution of disciplines, such as Content Marketing, which once had a minor influence on his work, learning new tools for mastering in his art and trying to be both a tech and content SEO.

We must be Social without being Social Media Specialist, and we must do Social well, while we still have to deal with our own so so SEO problems.

Do you know? I think that SEOs especially love cats, because – like them – we officially die more than once during our professional life, but we stand up every time and start, again, kicking asses.

– We have a client under a penalization? We solve his problems experimenting and using at their best all we know, as Cyrus Shepard did.

– Google doesn’t want us to track our rankings? We find new ways to do it, as AJ Kohn presented here.

– Our clients’ new business objective is Internationalization? We know how to help them, as Saurav Rimal wrote on SEERInteractive.

– Surely, then, the Mobile challenge is not scaring us, because we are ready for it.

– Finally, our data driven soul, will make it everything measurable (thanks Anna Lewis, your Event Tracking Guide is simply amazing).

Yet, the best between us will still find time for investigating deeper into Google and Search Engine, offering us new ideas, theories and experiments to do, as Bill Slawki when writing about Google creation and the use of synthetic queries, or Searchmetrics when rediscovering the neglected importance of sentiment analysis, or Vanessa Fox (interviewed by Todd Bishop) when talking about Google, Facebook and the state of our Industry.

Facebook… yes, I cannot but talk, even though briefly, about Facebook Search Graph. Surely it was one of the biggest news this month, but I did not read very interesting posts about it.

Personally I don’t think that the biggest news is the advent of FB Search Graph Optimization (or FEO, which means also “ugly”, as we say in Spain), but there is one aspect of the new search feature of Facebook that, as a web marketer, I can’t wait to try: the opportunity it offers to really understand the random affinities of a target, and from there, creating an “ad hoc” content marketing campaign.

It also offers great opportunities for outreach, as Ross Hudgens explained here.

Facebook diving into Search. Somehow ironic if we think that, at the same time, Google is trying to dive into Social.

Remember, Google+ is Google and Google is Google+, so it is not just a Social Network but a Social layer covering and possibly going to influence all the “Google experience”: from advertising to news and more.

Google+ is a long game, and it is brilliant, as written by Brad Feld in his blog (check also the comments to the post!) and I agree with Dave Llorens when he writes that if we look deeper into Google+, we all end succumbing to it.

The relation we SEOs have with Google would make happy people like Freud or Jung. We hate it, and at the same time we love it.

We hate it because it is not so transparent as it affirms to be, because it is stripping us tools (not provided anyone?) and bombarding us with updates (declared and not), but then it creates new things, like the Knowledge Graph or makes us wonder about the opportunities of things we were used to see only in SciFi movies.

Yes, Google has an evil plan, and we secretly like it.

January 2013. The future seems much like this photo below of the Seattle skyline my friend Rudy Lopez shot: spirited as a picture of New York in the early 1900’s, but futuristic at the same time.

Seattle Skyline by Rudy Lopez
Seattle Skyline

Credit: photo by Rudy Lopez

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Gianluca Fiorelli is an SEO and Web Marketing Strategist, who operates in the Italian, Spanish and English speaking countries market. He also works regularly as independent consultant with bigger international SEO agencies.
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