The search marketing space continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and if this year’s record crowds at Search Engine Strategies in New York are any indication, the search space will not be cooling down anytime soon. For those who could not attend here are some of the highlights from the conference from an organic search viewpoint.
Keynote Address - Barry Diller
SES New York set new records for number of attendees (over 6,000) and vendors. This year’s keynote address was given by Barry Diller, who owns, amongst other online properties, Ask.com. Mr. Diller announced the relaunch and rebranding of Ask.com. Ask is a distant fourth amongst the major search engines and unless something dramatic happens I cannot see Ask gaining more than a single digit market share in the foreseeable future.
Healthcare - Health Related Searches Increasing
While SES does not focus on any particular market segment or sector, throughout the sessions, market segmentation information will be discussed. One such session included panelists from Hitwise, comScore and Nielson. In looking at search query data, Nielson showed that health related searches increased by 40% in 2005 over 2004. The number of health related searches is growing at a faster rate than general web queries as American’s are increasing turning towards the Internet for their main source of health related information.
Search Engines - MSN and Vista
There was a lot of conversation at the conference about the growth of Google (market share continues to rise) and the launch later this year of Microsoft’s new operating system Vista. Vista will have MSN search fully integrated into the OS (operating system) and it will be interesting to see if MSN can take market share away from Google and Yahoo over the next 12 months. I believe that with the combination of the new OS and Microsoft’s huge marketing budget we will see MSN’s market share grow into the mid to upper teens over the next eighteen months.
Search Engines - Flash and Linking
Several of the sessions involved panel members from the four major search engines. Some of the highlights from these sessions included a universal agreement that flash files continue to baffle the search engines and that they cannot successfully read them.
With the focus that search engines continue to put on online communities, linking and the quality of incoming links continue to play an increasingly important role in how the search engine rank web sites. Linking is especially important in the healthcare market, not only because of the high number of government and education sites that brand sites need to compete with, but also because community specific links can drive highly targeted traffic to a brand site.
Search Engines - New Tools from Google and Yahoo
Both Yahoo and Google have made great strides over the last six months in communicating directly with site owners about their web sites. This has long been a complaint from web site owners and Google and Yahoo both have both rolled out new features (Google Site Map and Yahoo Site Explorer) to address this during the conference. Both products contain some useful information about how the search engines are viewing your web site. If you are not utilizing these free tools from the search engines contact Catalyst on-line about how you can integrate them into your web site plans.
Pundit’s View - Personalized Search
An industry pundit’s panel provided gave some interesting insight into the direction of search. The consensus amongst the panel was that we are two to three years away from truly seeing search convergence on different screens and platforms (phones, iPods, etc). Also, community / personalized search will totally change what sites you see in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as the result will become “personalized” based upon users search history and online communities. Both personalized search and “mobile” search will present some new challenges to agencies and site owners which we will explore in more detail in a future PulsePoint.
Summary
Overall SES New York was very insightful. It is always great to be able to connect directly with the search engine representatives and also engage in conversations with other industry experts. The next SES conference in the US is in San Jose in August. Catalyst on-line will be in attendance at that conference also.
For more information email us at info@CatalystSearchMarketing.com
