We’ve always been searching.
Search isn’t a new phenomenon. People have been searching for solutions since Adam was a boy. The difference in recent decades has been the speed, scale and effortlessness of Search. The telephone was only invented just over 150 years ago in 1877. This allowed us to expand our reach of who we could talk to dramatically. Before this people had to find solutions from the local villages in one-to-one conversations.
Over time things accelerated, the shift from telex and fax machines to computers and smartphones enabled the development of the internet and search engines. This created the idea of search engine marketing. The practice used to maximise exposure to people searching for relevant answers, problems and solutions to whatever you’re selling.
First Search
The first developments in Search were around optimising websites. It’s crazy to think that the first websites were only created in the early 1990s and the first attempts at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) happened when the manager of the rock band Jefferson Starship wanted to move the band from page four to the first page.
Initially SEO was dominated by directories and on-page optimisation. It was all about stuffing pages with keywords to improve results.
Thankfully things have moved on and today search revolves more around content. Thought leadership, articles, reviews – content that is unique and helpful, generally gets rewarded. As people engage and link to useful content, search engine rankings tend to follow. This move to rewarding user experience signals has definitely helped make search engine results more ‘human’ rather than the old days of copycat content that was ‘algorithm-friendly’.
However, there are two big shifts that are happening today that are threatening Google’s domination of search.
Social Search
Google has never cracked social - but they have created (or acquired) several platforms that have set the standard as far as tools go – think Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail. All of these have ads and content within them. However, big platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter (opps ‘X’) have dominated Social.
Today a lot of content is consumed on the ‘doom scroll’ with people keeping up to date with what is happening with their friends, the news, and the influencers that they follow. For example, Instagram is my new source of recipe inspiration! Today, people are saving and searching for inspiration around everything – new kitchen, next Netflic show, holiday in Portugal, golf driving tips... These searches are increasingly happening in social platforms (TikTok, Pinterest and Tumblr) which then generate more algorithmic visibility designed to keep users on the platform as long as possible.
What is Social search? Social search is where people are using a social platform as a way to find things on the platform (e.g. ideas, products or recommendations). Think ‘best foundation’, ‘best place to eat’, ‘best travel luggage’. These searches return posts and reels that answer these questions.
Just to underline the importance of Social Search Neil Patel, states “One in three people use social media platforms to find answers to their questions.” And if you take the time to optimise your posts like you optimise website pages you will start to see the boost in performance metrics. Key things that will help you are: recency – quality content, speed of engagement, fresh new posts, keywords in the post (and in the audio in the post too) and location tagging.
AI Search
The other massive trend is the uptake of AI. Recently ChatGPT became the fastest app to 100m users (if you ignore Threads because Meta kinda cheated there ;-). AI is clearly becoming part of how we work, what we do, how we search for solutions and suggestions.
The value that AI delivers is that not only is it searching for and finding information, it is also helping us to plan and do tasks on our behalf. So instead of searching through pages and pages of search results, you get presented back, “the answer” in either a text or conversational format. Recent updates to Gemini and ChatGPT 4 have also addressed another problem with AI search when it first came out. Now you can ask the platform for its sources, assisting with accuracy and transparency and avoiding any awkward mistakes.
For some searches this is absolutely fine if you are looking for definitive or factual information, but where you are exploring an area where there is more grey, AI results really should also be treated with a grain of salt and part of the overall search journey. AI searches will not replace the billions of traditional web searches anytime soon.
So how can you get your website content to rank better on AI platforms? There are three things you can try according to an article in Search Engine Journal that covers research done by Princeton University, Georgia Tech, Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi who tested nine different possible ways to influence AI search. Of those nine different methods three had a significant impact on AI search results, achieving relative improvements of 30-40% compared to the baselines. Those were;
- Source citations: quoting reliable sources
- Authoritative quotes: adding quotes from high quality sources such as experts in your niche
- Unique statistics: adding numbers worked well for opinion searches
Google’s response: Search Generative Experience
Typically shortened to “SGE”, Google recently presented new search functionalities capable of understanding complex multi-step questions and search using audio, video and imagery. This is still in the early stages of its development. Currently, it has been rolled out to US residents only, with plans to expand to the rest of the world later in the year. We’ll wait and see the impact on SGE on wider search trends and behaviour.
Paid Search
While we’ve been focusing on natural search you shouldn’t ignore paid search. The obvious benefit of this channel compared to SEO is the immediacy of results. While organic performance can often take two months’ plus to show momentum, you can create a campaign tomorrow and get instant results from paid search.
Paid search should be integrated into your plan right from the get go. From your initial keyword research and content discovery you should be developing a keyword plan that identifies those that are valuable enough to achieve a return on your investment. As demonstrated in the Craigs’ case study below, having a strategy that aligns both paid and organic search creates a further advantage that is often overlooked. Over time as your organic search performance improves you can swap out paid keywords to maximise efficiency without compromising on results.
Case Study - taking a truly strategic search approach
As a case study in terms of what is possible with a strategic approach to search it’s worth having a look at the Craigs Investment Partners case study. By tightly integrating their brand strategy with their website and search marketing strategy we were able to drive significant results. The executed strategy increased the amount of local advisor leads by 45%, while reducing the paid cost per click by 15%. You can read the full Search Marketing case study here.
“The integrated end-to-end approach and embodiment of our brand positioning at every level of our web/SEM and SEO strategy delivered a measurable and ongoing step change in all our digital channels and footprint across our entire network. Results have been so visible that it has also generated huge pride and belief within Craigs.”
Tania Bui – GM Marketing, Craigs Investment Partners
Summary
Too many marketers still think search is limited to Google. But to do so means missing out on a wealth of opportunities to educate, engage and convert into customers. Thinking about Search in isolation no longer makes sense. To be successful you need to take a holistic approach. Make sure you think strategically and have a tight integrated team with your creative, content, search, and developers all working tightly together. Because a holistic approach that focuses on the future will be less vulnerable to future platform and algorithmic changes. Holistic search done well will outperform ‘siloed search’ (e.g. just Google) because it takes into account changing behaviours, real business impact and ROI, rather than just keywords and vanity metrics.