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I get the feeling we could all still be doing this 3 years from now but with PPC, PFR and Directory Placement we are going to be pushed further away from site development and page optimisation.
Many of my client are SME's who could compete with their bigger competitors simply by having a great site place alongside the big boys in the SE's.
This in the long run unearthed some 'jewels' for searchers who found good companies with innovative or value for money products/services. Now much of my clients' budgets will go on PFP rather than 'pay for quality', or they won't play at all. The only hope is that once every search engine returns the 'usual suspects' in the first 30 results, searchers will ignore the SE's and these companies and begin to look for other ways to find information on the net.
I've often thought about what I will be doing the day the SEs are the equivalent of a massive international database of paid advertisements. I won't be in that game. I am sure I will still make my living on the web, but being an advertising manager has little appeal to me.
If this is the future of SEO which I sincerely hope it aint, What would our jobs be worth anyway. I cant see companies paying a "Web Advertising Consultant" to tell them what most people already know. Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, can bring you alot of traffic. Please give me your credit card number. Any simpleton webmaster with a few grand to spare can do that. It doesnt take much skill to pull a wallet out of your pocket.
Being positive though, I believe that mark is right that once the public keep seeing the same payed results for every search variant for the topic they are researching, they will vote with their fingers and systems like Google (and Teoma) will continue to be top referers. As long as these models continue to expand, make profits, maintain their popularity, I think we will be OK.
I'm actually seeing a little evidence of this already. JohnQ senses that something isn't right, both with their traffic if they have a website and with their own search efforts. They just don't know what's going on behind the scenes ala ppc, pfp. I'm being asked more and more questions by small businesses in particular.
Having said that the moves that the SE's are making now are not based on any long term business plan or market research, far from it. They need to earn revenue and earn it fast, like a drowning man they are grabbing at anything that looks remotely like it will save them. In reality it will eventually lead to their demise, not because we want it too, not because the Internet should be free, not because a search engine that delivers relevant results is a cool concept. It's simple, the market demands it and you can't buck the market. Look at Googles staggering growth over the last 18 months with a radical and almost unique [in the lala land of SE's] business model, relevant results delivered quickly. In my opinion any SE that wants to be around next year would be wise to take this on board, it's not like it is a big secret.
>I think we will be OK
I *know* we will zero6, when the dust settles we will be even stronger.
Sounds like good news to me.
Maybe I'm wrong, but if I was CEO of a PPC engine, I would be anxious. I'd see Google with its simple model and massive popularity growth, and be thinking are we going down the right line with PPC? Could we already be digging our own grave?
A PPC engines revenues are directly related to public usage. That would be why Goto is so keen to buy up all the traffic from dumped portals - NBCi, Go.com.
Goto must be desperate to maintain and increase their market reach so that they dont have advertisers shift their marketing budgets away to pay for Google sponsored listings.
I'm sure JohnQ or Joe Bloggs are noticing the difference between PPC engines and Crawler based engines already, and I bet a good percentage of Q's and Bloggs' have already moved over to Google and similar for this reason. Maybe not consciously but certainly because they recognise good SERPs. I would also say that I think alot of searchers actually quite like seeing some of the chaff. Sometimes you get what your looking for on a site knocked up in half an hour by some madman and not on a site that has had $10,000 spent on web marketing.
Enough ranting... Given the continued growth of content going up every day, I believe there has to forever be some kind of free, simple, searchable database(s) that will be used by most people. As long as such a thing exists, we will all still be able to do our jobs.
