After SEO: What's Next?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own crystal ball that you could peer into and see the future? Sure it would. Almost everyone wants that extra assurance that could come from knowing what’s going to happen next.

We’d like one of those, too. But we don’t have one. So we can’t really tell you what the future of the Internet—and online marketing—will be, with any greater certainty that we could offer next week’s winning lottery numbers. What we can do is give you insights into trends that are, or will, affect the future of how business is conducted on the Internet. We’ve got some ideas of our own, and we’ll also share with you some ideas from other highly influential “futurists” in the online marketing industry.

Internet news wires (also known as RSS Feeds) will be soon able to push online marketers’ messages to targeted prospects.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t going anywhere. It is, and will continue to be a powerful tool for increasing the visibility of online marketers. But where and how SEO web design will be implemented in the future may surprise some people.

Regional searching will become more widespread. These search engines target a specific geographical area, allowing the user to locate products and services available locally. This creates a complicating factor for SEO, since everyone will see different results based on where they’re located. There is also a small but growing “personalized search” category, which may cause more changes in the way SEO is conducted.

Jennifer Laycock, an editor at SearchEngineGuide.com, writes about new technology that’s allowing search engines to offer “Pay Per Action” services, where advertisers are only billed when a prospect takes a desired action on the advertiser’s website. What’s in place now, and will become more commonplace is “Pay Per Call,” where a phone number is included in search results, and the advertiser pays for each call initiated through the search engine.

Second Tier search engines (like AOL and Ask Jeeves) are showing double-digit growth in the number of user searches. While the powerhouses of the industry, Google and Yahoo, are experiencing much slower growth overall, they won’t need to get worried any time soon: Google is firmly in the #1 position, accounting for almost half of all search queries. Yahoo remains in second place, with around 20-25% of search activity. The balance remains to be battled over by all those Tier 2 players.

“’Social Media Marketing’ is in its nascent stages,” says Jody Nimitz, a search engine marketing columnist, “and it will become more important to online marketers as related technology improves.” So what is Social Media Marketing? This refers to marketing in and to online social communities, such as MySpace, YouTube and CraigsList. This concept has enormous potential to deliver targeted marketing messages to groups with similar interests, and we’re currently studying how we can help our clients take advantage of opportunities that will be emerging.

Nick Cox, of the London-based search engine company, Mirago, says that we’ll also growth in shopping comparison sites. Google’s “Froogle” site is one of the most popular, offering online marketers a forum to “duke it out” based on price comparisons.

There will be new online marketing campaigns that integrate what industry insiders refer to as “all three screens”: television, computer and cellular phone. We’ll see more and more advertisers using print, radio and TV to drive consumers to online content, according to Nihal Mehta, CEO of Ipsh!, a company that specializes in mobile marketing. And it won’t be just different iterations of the same marketing messages. The online component will include forums and other interactive technologies that create longer and deeper exposures to the advertiser’s message.

Clients of eMarketed can be assured that everything we do is created with scalability in mind. We are constantly focused on learning about new technologies appearing on the horizon, as well as planning how we can make use of these technologies to help our clients become more successful in their online marketing efforts. Now, and in the future, eMarketed strives to deliver the best Internet marketing tools, with excellent customer service and competitive pricing.

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