Recent Google Trends

2010 – Some Trends, Search Engine Changes and Implications for Your Business Online
2010 has seen many changes in the way people use the Web, and particularly in the last half of 2010 how changes with Google and how Google compiles and displays its results. All of these changes ultimately have implications for your Web presence, your traffic, your click through rates and your conversion. Here are a few examples of trends, search engine changes and possible implications.

Trends

The combined efforts of Yahoo and Microsoft in the ‘Bing’ search engine or ‘decision engine’ brought about the beginnings of a change to the long established volume patterns in the search engine world. The present in the U.S is often a good indicator of the future in the U.K., and in September Hitwise figures showed Google’s volume share to be approximately 71%, Yahoo’s to be approximately 14%, and a fast rising star in Bing with nearly 10%.

Even more widespread use of social networking and social bookmarking websites has seen a greater focus on websites like Facebook for business as well as leisure. Some recent estimates suggest that approximately 1 in 12 of the world’s population are Facebook members and December even saw Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebbok being named as Time (magazine’s) Person of the Year for 2010.

Google Search Engine Changes

Google introduced many relatively major changes all through the second half of 2010. June saw the introduction of Google’s new indexing system know as ‘Google Caffeine’. This system allowed updates and new content to be indexed and shown faster in Google’s search engine results.

‘Google Instant’ arrived next in September. This heralded the coming together of many technologies in an attempt to allow users to find and reach what they’re looking for more quickly and with less effort. Google designed this to be a ‘search as you type’ system that gives a combination of predictive searches and instantly displayed search engine results.

November’s ‘Instant Preview’ from Google means that a visual snapshot of your pages can be shown in the search engines results. December with Google has meant that there can now be 4 main listings from the same website in one page of search engine results if those results are relevant enough and likely to provide a good enough experience for the search engine user. There have also been major changes to the way that the results to local searches are displayed. Search engine results in these cases can produce many prominent links (with review links) to pages linked to Google places.

Implications for Business

There are now many more opportunities, and arguably some pressure, for businesses to take advantage of the business networking opportunities presented by social networking websites such as Facebook. Setting up a business presence on Facebook is now more important than ever in order to compete effectively, drive traffic to your web pages, and attract more high quality incoming links.

Optimisation of Web pages for Bing is quite similar to optimisation for Google, and the coming year is likely to bring a greater focus by businesses on how best to compete within Bing’s natural and paid for listings.

Google’s move toward ‘real time’ and the introduction of ‘Caffeine’ is likely to be more helpful to businesses as more current information and types of content become available to all more quickly e.g. your latest news, blog posts and new web pages. Potential challenges could be the need to point optimisation efforts more towards whatever is displayed in Google’s predictive keyword suggestions.

Short of businesses thinking more about how the design, appearance, and layout of pages could attract or deter clicks through from the search engines, the full effects of ‘Instant Preview’ are not yet really evident.

Search engine optimisation is still very important for businesses as emphasised by the introduction of a new Basic SEO Guide by Google, and the chance to potentially achieve the 4 listings on one page of search engine results. Finding ways of getting high quality incoming links and making each page in the business website as relevant to one main key phrase are still very important.

Making sure you are taking full advantage of Google Tools, and making the most use of ‘Google Places’ can help your business to achieve greater visibility in local searches. Good reviews and testimonials are increasing in importance for businesses e.g. the link to reviews displayed next to local search engine results.