As 2009 drew to a close, Google still enjoyed roughly 70% of search engine market share. Yahoo! dropped from ~17.5% to 15% over the course o the year and Bing slid into nearly 10% after starting the year at just 5.5% and AOL and Ask dropped to roughly 2% each (source: The Nielsen Company). Together, these 5 search monoliths make up nearly 99% of all search online …and Yahoo and Bing are, from the perspective of search market share, the same company.

While Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are complex subjects, it doesn’t take a Mensa member to infer that watching the moves of these companies is imperative if you want your small business website to show up in a search.

Here at beachdog.com, our SEO approach has been “white hat conservative”, which means we use tried-and-true techniques we believe will give our customers a longer-term ‘organic’ placement in the search engines. Our holistic approach to small business marketing means we look at a company’s marketing goals and their resources before making recommendations. After doing so, most of our customers find a stronger return on investment from a diversified marketing mix than they do in being highly competitive in the highly competitive world of search.

In our 13+ years of SEO and SEM, our techniques have certainly changed, but have also had one thing in common: a reasonable amount of space on the search engine’s results page. We could expect our clients to come up with a top-10 rank and that a top-10 rank was enough. This is because, while ‘top-10’ could mean first on the page Monday, eighth on the page Wednesday and fourth on the page Friday, top-10 meant the first page of results. And, while we’ve had a variety of monitor sizes, the web has been oriented to a desktop- or laptop- shaped screen, giving non-paid listings at least ten placements on the first page of results.

Enter 2010.

Since Google is the big boy of the team, let’s just take a minute to talk about what we expect from the king of search this year.

Real-Time Search. Back in December, Google announced that it had started using real-time information found on blogs, news sites, and social networking sites. Users now have access to information more quickly, with dynamic sites quickly jumping to the top of the search heap due to their fresh and relevant content. Small business owners with sites that don’t get updated regularly are going to find themselves no longer in the search game, regardless how well optimized these sites may be.

Mobile Search. Google is has released a mobile phone application called ‘Google Goggles’ which lets you search by taking a photograph. For example, you take a picture of a book cover and are presented with Google results page that includes title and author information, as well as links to Google’s book preview and price comparison searches, as well as organic search results. Modules include search categories for landmarks, artwork, places, logos, wines, books and contact information. Another exciting change for users, small business web site owners are undoubtedly contemplating how to compete in a search method that doesn’t involve keywords or inbound links or any of the SEO elements that are typically important to Google.

Google Caffeine is one of Google’s biggest behind-the-scenes updates in more than three years, and is intended to improve the speed and accuracy of searching on Google while also including content from social media sites like Facebook & Twitter. The big question for small business, whenever Google does a major update, is what havoc it will wreak on their site’s ranking. That is yet to be seen with caffeine although beta testing indicated that caffeine is, indeed, giving the jitters to site rank.

Google Sidewiki shows up in your browser’s sidebar and is a bevy of relevant information on any web page, information contributed by USERS.  Users can read and write entries in this sidebar, and the comments
are saved and displayed beside that web page when subsequent visitors
view the page (if they have Sidewiki installed as well). The entries
are not ranked with the most recent entries first; instead, they are
ranked using a Google algorithm that ranks the most useful,
high-quality entries first, and takes into account other criteria
Google deems important.

The implications of this user-friendly tool are far-reaching for site owners.  This definitely adds another layer of complexity to managing your company’s online reputation, since now you need to monitor your web page comments in Sidewiki as well as all the other tracking & reporting you do for your web site and social media marketing efforts.

Google Place Pages extend your existing Google Local information in Google Maps to an online profile for your business.   You can get to a Place Page by clicking on “more info” in search results, or by clicking “more info” in the mini-bubble.

We’ve been telling clients for more than a year now to ‘trick out’ their business listing here, which costs only the time it takes to fill out the form.  Doing so increases your business’ visibility and improves your content in Google, especially since the search engine started giving these map-based results higher placement on the search results page than organic search results.  Now you also needed to monitor your Place Page for accuracy because these pages also display aggregated information about your business that Google finds throughout the internet.  Reviews of your business, search results relevant to your business name and even paid listings by your competitors can show up here, making managing your online reputation even more important.   However, it is also a great opportunity to provide Google with the most complete, updated, search-engine-optimized information about your business.

Site-Loading Times are going to be more and more important in 2010.  According to Google’s unofficial spokesperson, Matt Cutts, the time that it takes your web page to load into a browser window is now a much more important factor in your Google positions. If your web site is image-heavy or has been built with Flash, a tables-based layout, or contains local formatting code, chances are that your page download times will cost you in the Google search results. If your site hasn’t had a facelift in a year or two, now is the time to invest in a web site upgrade to convert your site from old, tables-based HTML to a new, cleaner, and faster CSS-based site with modular files for formatting.

Personalized Search. Google is experimenting with ‘Personal Search’, which will deliver specific results to users based on their search history and personal preferences. If it does launch in 2010 as rumored, each user will get a different set of results from the same search, tailored to what Google believes is that user’s personal preferences.  This will make it nearly impossible to optimize your business so as to use search to get in front of potential customers since you can’t optimize for personal preference.  The good news is, if you’ve been following our prescription to make search only a part of your online marketing plan, you’ll be even better poised to compete as your search-heavy competitors scramble to do what you’ve already been doing.

2010 promises to be an exciting year in online marketing.  The implications of these changes are far-reaching and yet to be fully realized. Don’t be surprised – or too worried – if your rankings bounce around a bit as the search world stretches and morphs. That is, unless you’ve been following ‘cutting edge’ or ‘black hat’ search rank gurus.  If that’s your SEM game, get ready for the ride of your life and open your wallet a bit wider to stay strapped in.

We’re confident that business owners who:

1. Provide good customer service in their stores and online
2. Stick to a diversified online marketing plan
3. Follow established best practices and ‘white hat’ SEO techniques like providing great content on a regular basis and
4. Continue to build inbound links from quality sites while they
5. Manage their online reputation

…will come through better than just okay.

If you’ve been lax in creating or following your online marketing plan*, and need someone to help you with an analysis of how well-poised your company is to weather the changes, give us a call (360-642-4431) or email (webmaster@beachdog.com).

*We don’t judge; we meet you where you are, inventory your business’ branding and marketing, your reputation on and offline, and the resources you have to allocate to the effort.  Then we work with you to create a customized plan that gives you the strongest return on your investment.