Last week I wrote about Google’s change to its underlying index system. Few companies are as successful as they have been in turning their brand into a verb that now drives billions of dollars of advertising revenue and they constantly continue to advance their business model. Coming up my road this week, I spotted a sign that read, “Google this Address”.
It was strategically placed by a realtor who must be trying to keep up with all the changes to the advertising model in her marketplace. While I’m guessing the realtor was successful in convincing her prospects that she was one of the best marketers around, I wonder if she considered the amount of people who have web browsers on their mobile devices—she might not realize that the changing business model has already begun to make “just Google it” outdated.
Why? Because people are spending less time typing searches into a browser. In this particular case, I simply looked down at my iPhone, clicked on the Redfin application and, using geo-location, it immediately opened a clickable page with all the homes in the area for sale. I didn’t have to type in a single word. To make matters a little worse for the seller, since this house had been optimized for Google but not for other sites, I was quickly led up the street to another home in the same price range. Granted no one purchases a home without doing some research, but, like it or not, my mobile device is getting smarter and smarter about my likes and wishes. This is only the beginning, as the net begins to use my social networking preferences it is only going to further refine my decision making without a lot of needless web searching.
So what? Unless you have begun using a systematic framework (of course I recommend ours) to optimize your net presence, regardless of the way people are likely to find you, you are going to be buried by the results of your competitors that are implementing a systematic framework. Working to create long term, authentic, and sustainable value to the net requires a new form of discipline and thinking—buying keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) alone is simply not as viable of a strategy as one that combines the use of SEO, social media, and collaboration technology . All technology is constantly evolving and the gap between using only SEO and using an integrated framework will only widen in the future.
