SES San Francisco 2010: Search – where to next?
Search Engine Optimisation

SES San Francisco 2010: Search – where to next?

17th August 2010

Here we are with the next session: “Search – where to next?” First on stage is Marc Poirer and he is going to talk about search marketing as a discipline and how it changed in the last years and of course where it will be moving to next.

Let’s start with some statistics:
– Adults spent 34% of media time online
– Online represents 12% of media spent
– But this is massively increasing: It will be doubled in 2014! (in the US)

Even more interesting are the changes from a technology perspective, they might include:

  • Improved tracking attribution (not only looking at the last click but more looking to various events and how the correlate)
  • Access to display inventory (not so much negotiation based deals but more changing to demand based bidding. So you’ll probably have to ask yourself: “how much is one single view worth to your company based on the social factors you know about the user?“)
  • Real time bidding on display

In general this would mean that we are moving from being a search marketer and becoming more a performance marketer because it’ll be so much more than search, like facebook ads, linkedin ads, etc. – but to do that properly, we need better abilities to really manage huge amounts of data. That basically means we need a broader set of different skills which will change the way on how we are going to hire people, especially “number-focused” people will become even more important. So in general one could say that we are probably changing the way how we manage companies internally.

Next up is Brian Kaminski, who is CMO of iProspect. He shares his five clues about the future of search:

  1. Data will be a basic requirement (vs. today: data is just an “advantage” – honestly I don’t agree, cause I think it already is a requirement, but…) to run successful companies: Understand collective impact, attribute correctly and of course testing and improvement.
  2. Search results will be real time & connected: More twitter and blogging into SERPs; also results will be influenced by social networks (even though Brian didn’t have a concrete idea how that is going to happen).
  3. New technology & devices: Search will be dominated by non-pc searches but move over to mobile devices, also the results will be even more locally targeted.
  4. Media will be planned to drive people to search: Search will be more at the center of marketing budgets, but media will serve as a test scenario.
  5. Search will be less about keywords: Today, search is very keyword dominated – this will move over to be camera searches, voice searches and socialized searches.

And last on stage is Shashi Seth, he is SVP of Yahoo! Search. Seth states that the search industry has not so much invested into frontends of search; last years have been more about backed technologies like crawling, indexing, etc. – so Yahoo! is massively investing in a better search experience using various modules like “what’s trending”, “rich experience in SERPs” (move away from classic SERPs to really finding details like for example for a movie the play time in theaters, etc). The idea is to serve the obvious information pieces at one glance – so that users don’t have to re-fine searches all the time.

And that’s it for now – we’ll be back with the next session in a bit 🙂

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Written By
Bastian Grimm is founder and CEO of Grimm Digital. He mainly works as online marketing consultant with a strong focus on organic search engine optimization (SEO). Grimm specializes in SEO strategy consulting, website assessments as well as large scale link building campaigns.
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