What is in store for SEO or SEM? A number of forums and blogs try their hand at gazing into the SEO crystal ball.
E-gain’s Peter Young takes a pragmatic view and quotes the following from Andy Jeal of Mediavest :
“I think the growth of search engines will slow - particularly when people realize that in many ways these search engines simply act as telephones”. Specifically he believes TV advertising still had a role in encouraging people to search for particular brands in the first instance.”
Search Insider’s Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs? By Gord Hotchkiss was able to talk to some of the industry’s top movers and shakers and he has this to say –
“I realized I haven't seen a lot of innovation lately. Certainly, the engines themselves are innovating. And I'm seeing innovation in adjacent areas (Web analytics, competitive intelligence). But I'm not seeing a lot happen in the search-marketing space. After a raft of proprietary bid management tools hit a few years ago, there's been little happening to move the industry forward. In fact, I've noticed a lot of SEM heads buried in the sand. We are not encouraging change; we are actively fighting it… It's a very risky call to spend time and resources developing new tools or technologies that can be rendered useless by an arbitrary change at Google or Yahoo -- or made obsolete by the rapidly increasing pace of innovation.”
“The change that's happening in the search space is reflective of the change that is happening throughout marketing and advertising. It's the continuing evolution of a much more efficient marketplace, where connections between customers and vendors are made tremendously more effective through access to information on both sides.”
But a lack of change notwithstanding, what is going to be important and what won’t be? Web Analytics World’s Manoj Jasra goes through a list of what they think will and will not matter for future search engine marketing strategy.
Hard to believe that an industry as new as search engine marketing could be
resisting innovation, or innovating on tactics alone.
At the end of the day, as the old Chinese proverb says “The only thing constant is change” – this is especially true for Internet technology. Try to make decisions based on what your business needs the most now, with the knowledge that things is bound to change in the future.
