We, like many other website search engine optimisation firms, will have been a little concerned to see that, in North America, the Google local listings have been changed to have a more prominent status. It looks like the inevitable will soon happen, and these will be added to the Adwords program and become a paid for service.
This could be the start of Google protecting their income, in the face of increased competition from the Microsoft / Yahoo situation. As with any large corporation, the end result the shareholders look for is the profits. This will surely diminish with the potential rise of Bing and Yahoo, and as we know Microsoft are now committing an awful lot of cash to the cause, including powering the results on Yahoo. The aim of this being to create a genuine rival to Google and work on the 65% market share they still maintain.
So how do Google protect their revenue streams? Well for years the local listings have offered companies the chance to have a free advert pretty much bang in front of your face when searching for a local product or service. We didn’t really think that this would last, did we? SEO Clock believe it was just a matter of many firms getting to the position where they relied on these listings, which would put them over a pretty little barrel if Google decided that these would become pay per click listings.
So why are we concerned? Well having worked in the optimization industry, like many people reading this article, we rely on the best sites getting recognised by way of organic traffic. So much of the traffic is generated by number one and two positions; the thought of these being pushed out of site on anything up to a 19 inch monitor is pretty scary. With a large rise in paid for traffic, and SEO becoming less important in the marketing mix, we can see this industry becoming very difficult to operate in. Also the reduction in quality of site content is inevitable, when the need to pay per click has more importance than good original website content.
WE imagine work in the SEO industry will still exist, namely the optimization of the Google listings, and PPC management services. The need to make a site friendlier for navigation and user experience will be required. But the ‘top spot’ on Google will mean less than before and make it harder to sell SEO to prospective clients. We envisage a scenario where SEO changes to SEM (search engine marketing) which will emcompass all forms of marketing online.
Tags: Adsense, Adwords, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation