The first ever mobile developer conference, organized by Yahoo, recently took place in New York City. There, Simon Khalaf, senior vice president of publishing products, stated that there will soon no longer be any SEM, SEO or blue links. In fact, in his words, they ‘are gone’. He claims this is the case because people no longer use browsers, and are turning instead to mobiles. The mobile world is dominated by apps and this could indeed mean that internet marketing, using SEM and SEO is disappearing.
However, industry experts believe that Khalaf is wrong in his predictions. While it is certainly true that mobile apps are very popular, they do lack a few things. Yes, they offer a variety of different services with ease, but there is simply too much information that people require that can only be found on browsers. This is according to iQuanti’s chief executive officer, Sastry Rachakonda. iQuanti is a company involved in digital marketing with a search specialization.
Will people stop searching because of mobile apps? I don’t think so because they need information. SEO and SEM will still be there, but what will change is how SEO and SEM are done. Mobile data gives you the opportunity to largely improve the quality of search. The more data, the better search outcome you can deliver.
Other experts seem to agree with Rachakonda. One of them is Factual’s marketing director, Vikas Gupta. Factual is a data company that is quickly building itself a reputation as a global leader. They feel that there are a number of search behaviors that will not change, no matter how popular mobile apps become. According to him, SEO is now more of an abstract concept that discusses the way in which marketers get themselves digitally found by actually optimizing themselves.
I think the way people traditionally look at SEO, which is effectively optimizing for blue links, will continue to change dramatically. It will become less important for a specific set of search behaviors, such as local search, that is very fragmented across different mobile apps including Apple Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare and so forth. But SEO will remain important for some search behaviors, like business-to-business sales type of search.
Clearly, experts like Gupta and Rachakonda do not feel that SEM and SEO are dead. However, they do agree that Google is facing significant threat from mobile apps. Google dominates the world in terms of search, so if they are worried, then there really is cause for concern. More and more people use the online world in their daily lives, but they do so through apps rather than search. Shopping is done on Amazon, restaurant reservations are made through Yelp, cabs are booked through Uber. This means that Google, which is effectively an intermediate, will soon no longer be needed. Gupta also added that we must remember that Facebook is now even developing a virtual assistant, and that this assistant will be able to do much of the work Google does now.
Naturally, Google knows it has some significant competition and they are not sitting idly by. They are focusing very strongly now on making sure all their search results are optimized for mobile devices. In fact, when they started to do this, it was dubbed ‘Mobilegeddon’ by many experts who were worried that thousands of websites would suddenly lose their rankings.
Google is changing its algorithm so that on searches made on mobile devices, “mobile friendly” sites will be elevated over sites that are not mobile friendly. So, a user who is performing a Google search from her phone or tablet will be shown search results for websites that are designed to fit her smaller device.
Google is making other changes as well. One of the biggest ones is that their search function is now integrated with other mobile app experiences, particularly through Android devices. This is achieved through the ‘Now on Tap’ functionality. Additionally, they have pushed other Mobilegeddon changes more aggressively than usual, meaning mobile app content is now also indexed. These changes mean that Google continues to be one of the most popular providers, even on mobile, but they are losing ground.
Facebook ranked as the top smartphone app, reaching 71.8 percent of the app audience, followed by YouTube (56.3 percent), Facebook Messenger (54.5 percent) and Google Search (50 percent).
Indeed, experts like Gupta and Rachakonda feel that Google needs to work much harder if they want to keep their dominance. This is because the original Google was constructed to be used by desktop computers. Now, however, the way people search for information has changed dramatically. Once upon a time, people would simply type something into their desktop search bar, but they don’t really do this anymore. Naturally, Google is at the forefront of all things internet, so they know that people’s behavior has changed significantly. This is demonstrated in the fact that they are making a lot of efforts to bring mobile to the forefront. This includes indexing apps and encouraging HTML5. Their business plans are clearly very forward thinking, which is what the company is known for. However, it does have a set business model, and changing this would mean changing the core of the business. But it may just be necessary.
What is difficult is to identify a search model that is perfect for mobile apps. All that experts have to go on right now is the way searchers behaved on desktop and they must build from there. No expert in the field can currently answer that question. However, what most people do agree on is that whatever the solution becomes, it must be a very intelligent one. The current digital assistants like Cortana (Microsoft), Siri (Apple) and Now (Google) show that what people want is an almost robotic personal assistant that knows everything and has a sense of humor to top it off.
The common goal now is to turn your personal assistant from a ‘passive’ to an ‘active’ one, which means doing useful things before you’ve prompted it to. How? By carefully studying your behavior and pre-empting your next move before that tiny spark in your brain turns into an actionable thought.