Get Real About Real-Time SEO

On July 9, one of the hottest stories on the Web was the riots in Oakland after a Los Angeles jury returned a verdict of involuntary manslaughter in the case of a Caucasian police officer who shot an unarmed African American man in January 2009. Searching Google for "Oakland riots" led to a page of blended search results—one could find news stories, videos, blog posts and tweets. That's right, Twitter posts showed up in an automated scroll box about halfway down the Google search engine results page. Google's not the only engine that's now mixing social media content into the search results page. At press time, Yahoo! and Bing were integrating Facebook and Twitter posts; Google was doing the same, as well as pulling content from MySpace. This integration, called real-time search, is query-based, meaning social media content only displays when what's being searched for hooks into a topic that's trending in the social sphere, says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a Minnesota-based digital marketing agency. The news story example from above could be replaced with the BP oil spill, the Toyota recalls or any other topic that captures the nation's attention. So while real-time search can affect brands, says Michael Kahn, senior vice president, client services at Chicago digital marketing agency Performics, it's mainly important to bigger organizations and topics at the present. That said, no company can afford to turns its back on real-time search, given how quickly the search landscape changes. And in this better-faster world, opportunities do exist for the savvy Davids to steal sales from the slow-moving Goliaths. What's Driving Real-Time SearchThe social media environment is what Kahn calls a "parallel world" to the search environment, and information often travels faster within it. If you're Google, he explains, you don't want that content in a parallel world; you want to bring it into your search results to make your offerings more timely. Odden expands on this line of thinking: "People go to social media for recommendations and to search engines for research. Google senses the distinction … and is trying to capitalize on it via search." Rob Garner, senior strategy director at iCrossing, a global digital marketing agency with headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., agrees, adding that because real-time search is "a crawler-based algorithm paired with a human-driven social layer," what resonates in search also applies to social media: useful content, reputation and timeliness. But "this is a major shift in the overall way engines are looking at content," Garner notes, emphasizing the balance of relevance over all time with relevance and recency in the search algorithms. When as many as 40 percent of all search queries in a given day have a time element to them, Garner states, the search engines have to recognize the importance of recency within the context of relevance. "If I search on 'hotel deals,' I want current deals, not those that expired a year ago," he says. Regardless of how you feel personally about social media, the search engines have spoken, through words and actions: Social media content now plays an important role in universal search results and its subsets. And behind the curtain, the strength of a company's social presence is likely to influence its rankings outside of real-time search results, too. "You have to wonder, if you're making it into the real-time results," Odden ponders, "does that add another layer of signal to the overall signal to tell Google, Bing and Yahoo! that your content is of high value to the marketplace?" What About Your Overall SEO Efforts?When a 2" x 6" box of real-time results gets added to a search results page, it's not hard to see that other listings are getting pushed off the coveted first page, with a domino effect on subsequent pages. And, Odden adds, this is in addition to the space videos, images and books sections claimed starting in 2007. What this means for marketers is that "they need to get even better at the basics of search engine optimization," by leveraging good technology, using appropriate labels on content, creating good content and building trust for their domains, Garner says. He explains that trust is an important element to search engines, because they're trying to weed out spam content as fast as possible—and that puts the onus on marketers to step up their SEO. "The moving target that search already is," Odden notes, "real-time just escalates that. So it's important for marketers to pay attention to the overall search landscape." He advises marketers to branch out beyond their Web analytics reports and search data to see how the search engine results pages are composed, noting what content topics and types are ranking well. Look for distinct patterns, either for immediate opportunities or to help shape your long-term search strategy. Winning in Real-TimeWhile the siren song of tremendous search volume for a trending topic sounds good, Garner cautions marketers against breaking their necks to get into the box of real-time results for all of, say, two seconds. "That's Whack-a-Mole for search," he laughs. As with any marketing effort, companies first need to investigate the environment to see if the potential justifies the effort. Kahn recommends marketers audit the various social networks to see how much conversation is going on around their brands, product categories and competitors, as well as the tenor of the conversation. Then, they can devise strategies to be part of the dialogue in the most active networks and see how to best represent their brands and products in the ongoing conversations. Garner adds that marketers should look at their base of queries and see how many of them involve a recency parameter. Check the freshness of your content around those topics that are time-dependent to identify opportunities for improvement. And keep an eye out for seasonal terms or other keywords that tend to have a "spikiness" to them, he urges. If you stay prepared on the SEO and social media fronts for these terms, you could capture a good deal of traffic during those spikes. Being prepared to seize on opportunities might seem like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but Odden has some guidance for marketers who are worried about scaling for such search marketing activity. He advises companies to spread the workload across a handful of people in their organizations, assigning each one to monitor a specific keyword. They can bookmark the search engine results pages for their words, looking for opportunities at least once daily. Of course, the second part of this plan requires either their having the ability to take action themselves when they spot a hot topic related to their companies' products or business categories or knowing who to contact so someone can get content into the social media sphere and onto their site. Kahn encourages marketers to leverage the plethora of technologies, tools and services available to help them automate both the listening and content posting processes. Real-Time Requires a Long-Term FocusThe irony, as already alluded to, is that while the window of real-time search is a short one, the overall effect of real-time search on search marketing is a long-term game. So, Kahn explains, you can time your social media and search efforts around a trigger moment, but the best results require a marketer to be continuously involved in the social environment, interacting and responding to its communities on a regular basis. "Marketers also need to think about real-time search like this," adds Garner. "Search used to be about links. Now, the link graph has been cannibalized by the social graph." And what this means to the search space is that Google is keeping track of your value as a content source (tweets, retweets, followers, engaged followers, etc.) in the social realm, too. For now, Google and its search engine brethren have reckoned with the concept that when it comes to judging the value of a piece of information, people still want to decide for themselves.

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Get Real About Real-Time SEO

Hallie Mummert

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Hallie Mummert