By Laura Hampton
With 6,586,013,574 searches made a day across the globe, it is no surprise that search marketing is at the forefront for many marketing strategies. With search engines not keen to reveal their algorithms, it often makes it hard to guess what’s going to be happening in the future of search marketing.
Bing’s James Murray recently revealed various aspects of search marketing that would be happening in the future in terms of their platform and the industry too. With this insight in mind, it is possible to take some advice that will help make your search marketing campaigns future-ready.
Write for Voice
Voice assistants are the norm now. Alexa, Google Home, Cortana and Siri become our constant companion as we use them in our homes, pockets and cars. Murray discussed how PPC will develop into a focus on question keywords, rather than smaller more abstract keywords. This will mean an adaptation to broad match will need to be worked on now, so you can be an expert at it once the time comes. Experiment now, so the plan can be strategized in advance.
In addition, in terms of SEO, a focus upon featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes should be adopted. People want to ask search engines questions and receive the answer instantly without digging through search results.
Focus on Audiences not Keywords
Murray was quoted saying “rather than advertisers bidding together in an auction, they have the opportunity to talk to audiences and to make decisions based on those audiences.” He discussed how more data will be collected on individuals, therefore search will focus on the customisation of an individual, not the keywords.
Whilst this is something that cannot be acted upon now, it is worth noting that as people are getting more proficient at searching, search marketing needs to respond to this. For example, if someone searches for ‘carpenter’ searches need to bring up local contractors, or tradespeople previously connected with.
Search will become more intuitive towards the audience, with less reliance upon the keyword.
Prioritize Shopping Feeds
Bing has only recently implemented shopping feeds, but Google has been doing this for a long time. The changes will see a lot more information being inserted into these shopping feeds, making for a quicker, higher quality shopping feed experience. Information like stock levels and alternative designs will be included in these small advertisement boxes for easy consumption.
If your business is not already implementing shopping feeds into your search marketing strategy, this needs to be prioritized, quickly. Investment into feed-based advertising is going to increase on both sides of marketing, and it is only going to become more prominent in many business’s strategy.
Focus on Context Not Links
Controversially, Murray stated links will decline in importance, and as every SEO knows, they make up a strong portion of what is considered to factor in ranking.
He discussed the increase in data across search engine algorithms will mean links will be less of a factor as context is used more. Data like their live information or search history will come into play more to create a user profile. This profiling is then used to offer search results relevant to the individual, meaning ranking is going to become a lot more complicated.
For the moment, links still play an important part in SEO, however, marketers should be prepared for their declining relevance in the coming years, according to Bing. If Google followed a similar route, their market share of data is so large they could implement contextual search to a much higher degree.
