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Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

What Sweet Search has to say about the future of SEO

Posted on | January 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

Image via WikipediaYesterday, the folks at findingDulcinea released SweetSearch, which combines Google algorithmic rankings with quality reviews by actual human beings. When playing around with it, I noticed that when you search for a specific business type in a specific location, rather than getting the results of any individual firm or company, your results are almost exclusively a listing of directories for that business type.

What interests me about this is what it says for the future of SEO: Jeff Jarvis and others have argued that when personalized and semantic search become more powerful, the SEO industry may cease to exist. I never really gave all that much credit to that argument, but after using Sweet Search I saw how that could eventually come to pass.

The reason the end of SEO as we know it today is a possibility, however remote, is the differences in priorities between the searcher (Google’s customers) and the people working towards being found on search engines. On the one hand, a listing of a directory of businesses, rather than one or two individual businesses that happened to have gamed Google (or hired someone who has) is more useful to the searcher. While gaming the system is not inherently illegal or unethical, it does probably end up hurting the product for the searcher, even if everything is kept White Hat. On the other hand, the field of SEO is booming—it’s one of the few tech fields that is still seeing growth, and the fact that Sweet Search produces search results that are all but useless for hired SEOs is a potentially devastating and portentous sign for anyone who makes their living in the industry. It’s still unclear what exact mechanisms Sweet Search uses to get its results, but it may be the closest indication we currently have to what Google is striving for in the long run in terms of their search product.

Note that even if SEO were to decline as a result of this discrepancy, it would NOT mean the end of the SEM industry by any means. There’s still a lot that can be accomplished by marketing through search engines without strictly looking to improve organic rankings, even if getting a high ranking is a much sexier and more noteworthy goal. Regardless of what happens to SEO with contextualized and semantic search, here are the two main conclusions I can draw from the future Sweet Search depicts:

1. SEO’ers should focus more extensively on directories—and for reasons other than backlinks alone. While backlinks are nice things to have for traffic and crucial for SEO, directories can also provide companies with clients without those clients even touching Google. If the categories are sufficiently specific, potential customers would be likely to convert at a higher rate through a directory rather than a general organic search. Of course, while most directories SEO marketers use now are independent of Google, and many exist purely for providing links, it’s inevitable that Google will look to get a larger pie of the online directory business. This is why directory search marketing Google Local, which is already a rapidly growing priority for SEOers (especially for businesses that mainly operate locally), may become an expanded and someday even predmoniant form of search marketing.
2. Paid SEM like PPC, while not as immediately cost-effective in the short term, may have more endurance in the long term. I would never tell anyone to stop building skills and experience with SEO simply out of a general fear for where the industry is going. I’d be stupid to do it myself. But no matter what happens to SEO over the next 5 years or so, it’s inevitable that industry standards will go through major changes rather frequently over this time. Volatility in SEO conventions means volatility in its usefulness, and hence, volatility in its potential to earn money. While PPC, AdWords, and other paid methods of search marketing may cost more and produce smaller ROI, paid search marketing has much more stable standards, and probably won’t face all that many significant changes over the next 5 years, especially when compared to SEO. Hence, PPC and paid SEM are probably a more reliable bet in the long term. For yet another disclaimer, remember that the risks of SEO may be overrated. Of course, that’s what they were saying about real estate derivatives 3 years ago, so one should keep in mind all the dangers that come with a higher risk/higher reward form of marketing, even if the risk is only slightly higher.

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