March 10th, 2010 by Nick

There is no doubt that Google is the biggest player in the search field. It has by far the largest market share of searches. ‘To google’ is now synonymous with ‘to search’ which has to be the greatest marker of search engine success. The other thing most people notice about Google is that is has all the best toys. Street View, Google Maps and Images, Gmail, Google Documents, and dozens of others. Yahoo and MSN have strong email providers as well as search engine functionality, but they have lost ground in recent years, probably because of a lack of strong innovation. Google, on the other hand, shows no sign of slowing down.  Rather, it’s diversifying into fields simply unthought of previously- Street View being a prime example.

We know the company is in a very strong position. Just how much of the search pie belongs to them is open to debate, but estimates for the USA range from about 60 to 75%, and some sources have it at more than 90% for the UK. At first glance, that doesn’t leave much for Yahoo, MSN, Bing and all the others, but when you consider that hundreds of millions of searches are run every day, it doesn’t seem so small.

Google provides some pretty good SEO tools to help with analysis, keyword research, and provides very easy advertising solutions. While they don’t hand out exact details of their algorithms, search engine optimisation companies do know a lot about what goes on inside a Google search enquiry, and they do give some helpful guidance, so the argument for letting that one company guide your SEO efforts is quite compelling.

However, keen observers have noticed a few trends in Google itself. The newest edition to the Google family has provoked quite a lot of speculation in SEO forums and blogs. Buzz is an add on to Gmail, and clearly aims to provide a social media, Facebook/Twitter style connection with friends and contacts.

Also, if you look at the bottom of your Google search engine results page, you might find a blog box. It’s not as obvious as a map search result, which is the first thing the eye is drawn to, but it is there. In it are recent blog articles the engine thinks are relevant to your search terms, not actual websites.

So, Google is moving towards social media. Seems natural, of course, with the meteoric rise of this kind of communication. They are a very smart company. But there is another motive- while many of us search for what we want using an engine, the proportion of web traffic generated from social media sites is growing, and it may be that referrals from that kind of location are taking up what once would have been search traffic. Recent research suggests this might be the case. Are Google protecting themselves from future trends away from normal searching?

We don’t know, but it is very interesting. Google seems to be pointing the way for SEO professionals- unintentionally in all likelihood- and telling us that social media marketing is going to be increasingly important in the future. Perhaps we will be paying less attention to Google rankings and more to social media optimisation before too long.

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