2007 Search Engine Marketing Predictions - January 28th, 2007
I’ve promised them and now there here. My predictions for the search engine marketing industry in 2007.
At the moment there are only two that I have on the tip of my tongue one of which I touched upon last year anyway so you could say that I’m not really the best fortune teller around. I have however highlighted the two most significant that I think are going to change natural search in the next 12 months.
The first; Mobile Search.
As more and more users are acquiring mobile phones and devices that are capable of browsing the Internet at decent speeds and delivering the content from sites they are taking more time away from their desktops to perform such an activity. This coupled with the W3C’s guidelines and the release of the .mobi domain for mobile websites leads me to suggest that mobile search is going to get a lot more advanced over 2007. For one thing more and more websites are going to crop up that are mobile enabled therefore the major search engines need to accommodate for this. We know that Google has already with its mobile.google.com, the mobile version of its search engine. The question is when is this site going to emerge from its elder sibling’s shadow and become a search site in its own right?
What does this mean for Just Search? New services to be provided to develop and maintain mobile sites as well a mobile SEO program only concentrating on mobile SERPs.
The second; Geographical search results.
There is talk in the air that this is an area that Google are exploring. At the moment they touch upon the system with their separate domains and search filters for countries such as google.co.uk or google.fr. Users are automatically lead to these sites depending on their location.
Now Google want to refine this system to delve deeper into geographical regions. They won’t do this by providing separate domain names for Lancashire, Greater London and the such. No they’ll do it by directly affecting the users SERPs so that only the significant geographical sites close to where that user is situated come up without them having to directly search for that region i.e. users in Manchester who search for “Search Engine Optimisation” will get similar results to those who search for “Search Engine Optimisation Manchester”
I’m not entirely sure on the logistics on how this is going to happen, whether Google will have it as an option to pick or not, so I cannot really comment on how it will affect our natural SEO service. But as with everything our research and development have already sited this as being a potential problem and IF anything occurs we know we will be on top of our game to provide the best service to our customers.
Not as extensive as last year. I could go on about video search for the new video services Google has acquired, YouTube, and similar. But I feel I may have covered this already a couple of weeks ago.
Martin Vernon
Natural SEO Project Manager
