Search can't be thought middle-aged until we're all doing it better

17 June 2010

Last month, Will Cooper asked whether search had become middle-aged (nma.co.uk 14 May 2010). For those of us who have worked in the search industry for many years and have witnessed its massive growth and many changing faces, we’re likely to be struggling to come up with the revolutionary next big thing.

We’re also likely to be struggling to get excited about content, URLs, keywords, metadata or basic best-practice principles of paid search. For many seasoned professionals, there’s very little that’s new and exciting coming out of even the best conferences in the industry. We’ve seen ’Google killers’ come and go without even registering a blip. In the latest nma Marketing Services Guide, the talk was all about how search agencies are rushing into social media as the latest frontier.

So does a maturing search sector mean middle age or are we missing something?

Let’s be honest: we all have clients, work at companies or have simply seen websites that make us realise there are still many companies out there that are challenged to even cover the basics of search, never mind getting to the point of actually being able think about what’s around the corner.

I’ve seen companies sitting on goldmines of buzz-worthy content that would light up their natural search presence in a heartbeat; companies that could be investing in improving their conversion rate for the 99% of visitors accessing their website conventionally rather than the 1% on mobile; companies whose tracking is so poor they don’t realise their affiliates are simply claiming sales from their own paid search. And I’ve worked for a company (Amazon) that couldn’t understand the value of having a Facebook page or Twitter account for any reason.

Middle-aged implies that collectively the industry has reached a point where the vast majority have covered the basics, have a good grasp of the intermediate and can begin to start thinking about more of the advanced stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re in danger of becoming blase about search without actually having scratched the surface in terms of its potential. Because the basics are generally well understood, there has been a commoditisation of search marketing, which undervalues its core skills and remains perhaps the biggest threat to the industry. So to anyone who thinks search is getting dull and boring, just think about this gap between the theory and the reality, and think how much further we all have to go.