As one blogger put it: “Who cares where they rank (sic), if the #1 rank is below the fold?”
With the advent of Universal Search and now Real-Time Search, we can look fondly back to the time when competing for a page one ranking seemed comparatively easy.
Every business is now competing with
- Paid listings
- New product listing ads
- News
- Organic results (1-4)
- Shopping sites via Google Merchant
- Video via YouTube
- Organic results (5-10)
The above list reinforces why it’s so important to know how to promote your site, products and services in all the areas included on a page one result. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) has morphed into “search optimization.”
Although on-page optimization is still important for effective crawling and indexing of your most important Web pages, it’s no longer enough if you want to be competitive in today’s market.
As Google continues to acquire even more data from mining Social Data Sources, they will be increasing their knowledge about a business ten-fold over the next few years.
This data will eventually be significant in how they rank Web pages not only in Local Search but in Organic Search as well. And we haven’t even factored in Mobile Search.
As detailed in a recent Webinar, the time to develop an holistic engagement strategy is now. Reputation management will be critical to the ongoing survival for any business.
What are the positive online signals your company is sending?
