“I think people prefer Google because of its simplicity. It’s clean, it’s a simple box, query and search result. In a bid to be more sophisticated, it’s also becoming more complicated.”
Thomas says that while the changes are definitely interesting, businesses should approach them with caution and shouldn’t adapt to them without thinking about what they are doing.
“What you should do depends on who you are. You shouldn’t be doing anything knee-jerk – we don’t know how many people are using these things already.”
West says that the downside of having results aggregated by the time they were posted may result in businesses simply updating their site for no reason with meaningless content.
“The downside of it is that you’re going to get more and more rubbish. You’re going to have people potentially putting in stuff for the sake of it – more and more noise, just so people get themselves out there,” he says.
“One side is that this whole push from Google and Facebook is pushing more and more noise out there, which in turn raises the question of the relevancy of a lot of it.”
Stewart agrees, and says there is a real danger of just “adding to the noise”, and that good rankings won’t matter unless people take you up on your services.
“It really just goes back to the question of, are you engaging your audience? Are you giving them a reason to want to look at your information? Getting people to hit your website is really only the first step; rankings don’t count unless they convert,” Stewart says.
“To get good results, don’t add content for the sake of adding content, you add it for a human audience. If you add it for the sake of the readers and not Google bots, then you can’t go wrong.”
The consensus of these SEO experts is that while these changes highlight the future direction of search, they are simply another part of Google’s evolution. That said, businesses need to be aware of the way Google, Facebook and Twitter are compressing time.
“Companies shouldn’t be too worried about it,” Batra says. “The only thing it does mean is that the relevance of news becomes important, time-wise. It just means you need to stay on top of it.”
Thomas says these changes are part of a broader scheme of changes to the Google search engine over the next few years, and businesses should keep their eyes open to see how they should adapt.
“It’s not really here yet, but what’s cooking is the ability to basically ‘wrap’ certain bits of info in your web page, and Google will display that in the original results.
“For example, if you’re in a product page and selling skinny black jeans, you can have a review result or whatever else wrapped into the results on the original search page. For our e-commerce clients we would be looking to introduce that feature, so businesses should be aware.”
But the overall message is clear. “Make sure you’re adding relevant content to your website,” Stewart says.
“More than ever, businesses need to be zeroing in on the brand persona. Who are you targeting? What are the sorts of phrases and keywords you’re typing in, what experience are they looking for?
“By targeting the right keywords and niches, you’ll get a better bang for your buck.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
