In 2008 SEO Trends (I) we looked at the market for SEO services from the firm’s perspective. Let us now turn the camera and focus on the Internet users because they are in fact the final “consumers” of the search engines optimization efforts. Understanding consumers’ behavior is critical to any marketing campaigns and don’t be surprised to find out that there is a new breed of Internauts roaming the Internet.

There are many aspects to be looked at when analyzing the behavior of people surfing the Internet; we will focus on two that are relevant to our case: searching patterns and ad fatigue. When looking at the search engines market leader, we see that Google’s current rate of growth is on a downward trend. I’m not saying that they are not growing; I’m only saying that the rate at which they grow has slowed down. Google is experiencing lower click rates on search results ads and especially on their AdSense partner sites. Not only the click-through-rates (CTR) are lower than the previous years but advertisers are also complaining of having lower conversion rates too. And the lowest conversion rates come from advertisements on social media sites. Why is this happening? There are a few reasons why:

• Not everybody surfing the web wants to buy products, and especially not the kids watching movies on YouTube.
• Ad fatigue. People now know that the top SERP placed results are ads and don’t want to click on them because they’ve seen enough commercials already. Have you wondered why so many customizations are available for AdSense? Google is trying hard to blend their ads in partner sites so that people don’t think they are clicking ads, but there are really no more possible tricks to combat ad fatigue.
• Ad clickers are now Ad publishers. People click on AdSense. Publishers talk too much about AdSense. People now apply for AdSense. People once in the market for clicks are now sellers and hoping for clicks.

The searching patterns have changed also. People usually search for the first three-four months. People learn about new web sites and bookmark the ones with great content. People stay on those sites. People now type directly the website name in the address bar (or select it form the bookmarks list) or search for the name of the website.

SEO Changes

The major trend with Internet marketing today is the rush to get some visibility. The problem is that sometimes the desire to be ranked on top overshadows relevancy. And Internet users don’t like that, because they go to the search engines to find something relevant. So I reckon for 2008, the search engines’ “fight” with spammers and black-hat SEO will continue and the ranking algorithms will be further tweaked to get the most relevant pages on top. However there will be some tweaking that is not spam-related but user behavior driven. With the new breed of Internauts surfing the web and the ad fatigue, the need for more relevant pages will grow. But ranking algorithms already use web page content relevancy, incoming links from relevant web sites, etc. so is there anything else that can be used?

There is still some data that can further improve results relevancy, data like: time spent on a page, user’s bookmarks, direct visits, CTR levels through SERPs, bounce rates, etc. The problem is that this kind of data is hard to collect. There are though ways to collect it and we speculate that one of the reasons behind Yahoo pushing their tool bar and Google offering free analytics might be just that. They are trying to collect, understand and map the data to users’ behavior. As more data is gathered and processed, link popularity will become less important in ranking results.

But, until that happens, the power and number of incoming links will still play a major role in the search engine optimization techniques. One of the factors that are expected to gain more weight in determining the strength of a link will be the text surrounding the link. Links inside the text with relevant keywords around them will have more “juice”.

Summary

Despite the fact that economy will slowdown the need for visibility and better ROI will possible make SEO to go mainstream in 2008. Regardless of when, integration of online and traditional marketing will be inevitable; SEO will merge with the “marketing department” or at least the two services will be offered as a bundle.

Initially it was supposed to be just one article about the 2008 SEO trends, but as I kept organizing the ideas and finding new information it turned out to be quite a large entry so I decided to split the article in two parts:

• part (I) – A Bird’s Eye View
• part (II) – Visitors and Search Engines.

In the first part we’ll talk about SEO as part of the bigger picture and in the second one we’ll look at visitors and search engine trends for 2008.

A Bird’s Eye View

The search engine optimization is a paid service offered by SEO professionals and just like any other product or service; it is influenced by the “health” of an economy. With U.S being the largest producer and consumer of online advertising and online transactions, the growth rate of the U.S. economy plays an important role in the overall demand for search engine optimization services.

In January 2008, U.S. unexpectedly lost jobs for the first time in more than four years, raising concerns that the US economy could tip into recession. Higher gasoline prices combined with the slumping housing market increase the odds that the economy will at least slow down. But, if the economy slows down, marketers are going to look even harder for better ROI. And when it’s done right, it’s hard to beat the ROI of SEO.

Also in the news: … e-commerce sales of goods and services will continue to grow, despite forecasted economic slowdowns. In United States for example, the rate of growth is between 15-20% per year which clearly suggest that the market is still far from maturity. Online advertising spending will increase as well. In a recent study, Barry Parr, lead analyst at JupiterResearch, reported that the local sector will experience the biggest growth, slightly outpacing total online ad spending. Local online advertising spending is expected to increase 82 percent in the next five years, Parr reported.

S.E.O. and Traditional Marketing

The goal of your search engine optimization efforts is to get you visibility and quality traffic but the overall objective is to increase sales, and I’m using sales here as a broad term for a product/service sale, a subscription, a quote or whatever your website has to offer. So, you need to convert part of that traffic into sales, and the conversion rates depend mainly on how clear your marketing message is. Of course it’s better to have 1,000 visitors and a 1% conversion rate than 10 visitors and a 20% conversion rate, but, if possible, why not have the 20% conversion rate for those one thousand visitors too?

To improve conversion rates, you will need first to define your market by selecting the proper keywords for searches, to get traffic, to analyze the behavior of your visitors by analyzing the traffic to see what type of visitors came to your website, from where and which pages were the most and the least successful. Based on this information you will know what needs (or needs not) to be changed or tweaked.

Does this sound like traditional marketing? You better believe it! Starting with 2008, SEO agencies will not be just search results promoters, they will have to be marketing experts, public relations experts, image managers, etc. SEO has started to fall in line with traditional marketing and public relations tactics. However, the main function of search engine optimization will remain the same: increase the client’s websites visibility in SERPs. Traditional marketing is changing, and the change will “affect” SEO as well. Organizations are becoming more customer-centric and marketing is no longer seen as the sole responsibility of the marketing department but rather as a way of thinking, as a way of doing business.

The integration of online and traditional marketing seems inevitable so the “bundle” SEO-marketing will be the wining card for 2008. Either the companies will look for SEO-marketing services from the current search engine optimization agencies or they will staff their own full-time SEOs to work with the existing marketing department. We expect the demand for SEO specialists to rise. The need for accurate ROI reports will also drive the need for accurate traffic analysis tools. Things like traffic funneling and visitors’ behavior will become important in the effort of increasing the conversion rates. But, more about visitors and how to increase traffic in the 2008 SEO Trends (II) – Visitors and Search Engines article.