When the Game Changes, Change With It

The new Jabulani soccer ball being used all month during the World Cup is meant to be faster, more accurate and more reliable. But even such noble qualities didn’t help the change find acceptance with those playing the game.

In an interview, Italy striker Giampaolo Pazzini said:

“It moves so much and makes it difficult to control. You jump up to head a cross and suddenly the ball will move and you miss it. It is especially bad for the goalkeepers if it means they concede a goal because they can’t judge the trajectory.”

Sound familiar?

Those of us doing SEO are accustomed to the task of aiming at a moving target. Changes to the ranking algorithm and search engine guidelines come fast and furious, with the intention of bringing a faster, more relevant experience to the end user. Adding to the complex challenge of online marketing are shifting user preferences, emerging technologies and the conventions of newly sprouted social watering holes.

This week Adam Audette gave us a thoughtful and tactically driven analysis of today’s search marketing landscape, offered in the midst of industry growing pains instigated by what is perhaps the largest tectonic shift the industry has yet seen. Consider the critical mass of Internet and social media users, the spiking adoption of mobile and tablet computing devices, and even the effects of the new Caffeine indexing infrastructure. A Turning Point in the Field of SEO may help refresh and reframe your current priorities in interactive online marketing in the face of the next Internet marketing era. Clearly the rules have changed since the first players made a dash to the top more than a decade ago.

And the rules continue to change. For a view of what could be the future of online interaction, check out Bruce’s tell-all predictions, shared with WebProNews at SMX Advanced Seattle.

Some highlights from the interview:

• Optimization is not just about search engines, either paid or organic, as SEOs have known for some time. Optimization applies to analytics, usability, site architecture and social media presence.
• Traffic past the first three results will have such a pronounced drop-off that the goal of SEO will shift from first-page status to top-three results status. The top three results are the new first page.
• There will be a distinction between “search” and “find”. “Search” will be about research while “find” will refer to the user’s desire to go to a specified online location.
• The application experience will become the new Web as mobile devices boom. However, developers won’t be creating applications for every website. Rather, the OS will become the new browser, communicating directly with websites which will deliver the data through an application shell experience.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.