Reputation Management Online

The new service by Google has lit quite the fire under the SEO market as users are using search tool Google Instant under a new ‘Stop, Drop and Scroll’ policy. Highly innovative in design, the ability to constantly refresh the suggested search terms (and then a page of search results for said suggested terms) is said to “revolutionize the industry”.

Yes, well, this is all well and good for Joe Bloggs who wants to find that restaurant he went to last year but can’t quite remember the name of because he was a little drunk and was more concerned with the low cut top his date was wearing, but people in the SEO industry have had to go back to the ol’ drawing board.

It used to be enough to optimize pages to respond to keyword searches. A bit of market research could show you what people were searching for, and what words they were using. You could optimize pages so that they scored highly in keyword density and meta tags. And of course, it helped if your links themselves were optimised. Getting to the top of Google then relied upon the strength of your page and how many strong links were directing to your site. Simpler times!

With Google Instant now predicting search queries as the user types, it’s causing a dramatic shift in what’s being searched for. There have been arguments over how many people actually look at their screens as they type anyway, and whether they would even see the suggestions coming up on their screen until they’re finished typing? But then people are very easily influenced by the power of suggestion, and will likely end up “searching” for for things that Google suggests, rather than following up on their original query.

So the problem SEO faces is a way of overcoming the fact that users aren’t necessarily going to be “searching” for the things you expect them to. The French don’t seem to like Google too much, and have now found Google liable for a search term that came up next to somebody’s name that was considered defamatory in nature. Also, because the person was related to an ongoing (seperate) court case, the French judicial system also claimed Google were potentially guilty of influencing the outcome of that court case too. Google’s response was “the ‘suggestions’ produced by Google Suggest are an aggregate of user-entered search terms”. Well, that’s useful information at any rate.

In terms of how SEO companies can react to this – it seems fairly straightforward. There’s the obvious re-emphasis on getting search results into the top 3 or 4 (due to the ‘drop down’ of suggested searches occupying a greater portion of the displayable page than the standard text box). That’s just down to trying harder to achieve what SEO engineers were already trying to achieve anyway. Now though, because your standard two-keyword searches are likely going to be based on suggested third terms too, there is more to optimize for. Optimizing for search strings like “one two” is straightforward enough, but if you’re trying to optimize for “one two” and Google suggests “one two three”, “one two buckle my shoe” and “one two three four” – you might have a problem. The search results that come up wont be for the original search string “one two” but for the top suggested search term “one two three”, and then give the user the options for the other suggested terms, the user is statistically more likely to click one of the suggested terms than stick by their original search.

Contrary to suggestion that Google Instant has killed SEO and Reputation Management, the reality is far from it. What it has done is made SEO harder and Online Reputation Management more important. As an SEO company, you’re going to have to focus on both ensuring you optimize pages that directly relate to directly relevant search strings, but also find a way of optimizing for suggested search terms too.

With all the work that’s gone into optimizing webpages up to this point, and Google Suggest diluting the concentration of hits a properly optimized website was receiving previously, SEO companies will now have a busier time than ever to achieve the results they were previously enjoying. By that same token, SEO companies are also set to soar in their demand.

Out of great chaos comes great order, and with it – great profit.