By Chris Lee

Search engines are often the shop window for organisations, especially for those companies seeking to sell directly to consumers and fulfil a sale online. In 2010 it emerged that almost half (49 per cent) of UK organisations were spending more than £50,000 a year on search marketing, according to Econsultancy, representing steady growth from previous years.

2010 saw Google’s continued domination in the search market, including the launch of its Google Instant Preview tool, which displays search terms as users type in words in real time, and a new Web indexing system - Google Caffeine. Such changes can dramatically impact search marketers’ tactics, so NMK tapped into its contact book to gauge what the industry thought 2011 would bring for search marketing.

Steady as she goes

For Nick Beck, managing director of search marketing agency Tug, Google’s Instant Preview tool should not impact traditional search strategies as much as originally feared in many quarters.

“In the first case, a person more or less knows what they are looking for. Let's say they want the London Dungeons website they'll know what to expect when they get there. In the case of transactional searches a person will want to see in detail the result and price, for example when looking for a Canon 550d camera,” he said. “In the case of informational searches, site design could play a more important role, but also the offering of the site. Let's say you type 'rock t-shirts', regardless of the design, the basic thing you are expecting to see are different t-shirt ranges. Currently the preview tool can't see Flash sites so it will be interesting to see Google's solution to this.”

Caffeine bomb

For Kelvin Newman, creative director of search agency Site Visibility and co-presenter of the Internet Marketing Podcast, the roll-out of Caffeine represents a challenge for search marketers as Google appears to change the way it presents results on a weekly basis.

“At the time I felt a lot of people over-stated its importance, it was only a change in technology not the algorithm, but it allowed them to roll out dozens of changes in the user experience that they’d clearly wanted to make for years,” he told NMK. “Those changes aren’t always changes in algorithm but the tweaks in how results are displayed almost certainly are going to change the way we conduct changes.”

Going local

For Dr Horst Joepen, CEO of search analytics software company Searchmetrics, search marketers will have to work hard in 2011 to focus on building up authoritative links and move away from the reliance on ‘linkbait’, content deliberately created with the express intention of encouraging other sites to link to it.

“In 2011 search marketers are going to need to focus on more sophisticated link building strategies. While in 2009 it was all about linkbait, in 2011 it’s going to be about ‘trustbait’. That means organisations will need to develop links from more ‘neutral’ sites such as news portals or appearing in a search engine’s own news stream, as links generated from blogs, for example, tend to have varying value,” he said. “We’re also going to see more regional-based SERPs (search engine results pages) via sites such as Google Places, so location-based keyword analysis is going to become even more important.”

So is search marketing still all about Google? For Site Visibility’s Newman, very much so.

“I can’t see any of the major engines ever toppling Google,” he concluded. “The biggest risk to Google is themselves; if they change too much they’ll lose what made them special in the first place. If anyone beats them at search it’ll be a few guys in a garage with a technology we never envisaged.”

[Disclaimer: The author has worked with Searchmetrics’ UK PR team]