Cowboys looking forward: 2010 predictions (1)

Lisa Myers
Lisa was very quick and though she normally can say a lot now she stated:

“SEO will still be valuable.”

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Eduard Blacquiere

My predictions for the field of Search Engine Marketing in general are:

• Increasing importance of search engine marketing in all types of organizations, which will lead to more in-house search engine marketing specialists.
• More budget to SEO, both organic growth and a shift from PPC.
• Increasing measurement of search engine marketing efforts, especially integrated into measurement of other online media.

My predictions for SEO are:

• Increasing awareness of the importance and cost efficiency of SEO
• Social media will start to have serious impact on search engine rankings, varying from Social Search and Real-Time search to influencing the link graph of web sites.
• Speed/Performance of web sites will become a serious ranking factor.

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Evert Veldhuijzen

Real time search:
- will be spammer's paradise for a while, I'm afraid

SEO:
- Performance will be more important (Tip: download Page Speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ if you didn't already)

Personlized search:
- snippet optimization becomes an important SEO task (actually it is already important, but it will become even more important)
- branding will be more important

PPC:
- more different types of ads.
- some tricks of my presentation at SES Berlin will not work anymore :)

Mobile:
- Yes, next year mobile will be more important (like we say every year :)) No, seriously, due to the recent explosion of mobile internet use (thanks to the smart- and iphone) of course it will be
one of the focus topics.

Analytics:
- Sales attribution over different sources is definitely going to be a topic

Germany:
- government will try to forbid the use of Google Analytics and maybe some other Analytics tools, because of "privacy" issues.
unfortunately it's like that in Germany, so maybe I'll write my predictions of 2011 on Gibraltar :)

Agencies:
- number of inhouse teams will increase (both SEO and PPC). Agencies should focus on consulting, strategy and technological development to stay ahead in my opinion.

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Peter Young

A two engine world
Whilst we are only talking about the US and Western Europe here, the  way I have heard both Bing and Yahoo themselves recently talk about search , would suggest this is pretty much a given. Bing appear to be very focussed on breaking the search sector - certainly if their rhetoric is anything to go by - and I wouldnt be at all suprised if their current 5% market share looks more like 15-20% by the end of 2010.

Spending in SEO continues to increase
We at Mediavest have noticed a quite marked awareness and increase in SEO spend during the course of 2009, and I feel that this is a trend that we are likely to see continue during the course of 2010. That said however I would add I think the scope of SEO services is likely to be in evolution as well during of 2010. I would suggest though I would expect this spend to be transitory from offline spend rather than advertisers moving their budgets from paid to organic - as with a previous post I have already said I would suggest personalised search may well see some advertisers deploy more budget here as well

Search engine results pages continue to evolve
Given the amount of changes we have had to the SERPs in the last couple of months, one could be forgiven to thinking we have already had enough, however I can't help thinking that this will continue particularly given recent tests from Google - in particular the deployment of the blended search results within the searchbox (see below) - perhaps to finance (share prices and exchange rates perhaps being two) and sports

Twitter continues to grow
*/Whether this is standalone or not is open to debate - my thoughts are they may get snapped up this year -given the amount of interest in them from both Google and Microsoft this year. I would also suggest we are likely to see signfificant changes in the structure of Twitter based accounts - and how this integrate with distribution points such as Bing and Google

Continued diversification of Google
Google already heavily operate in display, however with the purchase of Admob this should help cement their positioning in the mobile display space. Their behavioural display product should also see some continued growth this year. Another area where Google may continue to really push is both the Video and Telecoms (Voip) sectors.

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Tomorrow: Jon Myers, Roy Huiskes and Barry Adams