Article - Real Time Search is Impacting Your SEO (Be Ready with Three Easy Steps) By Jim Yu, BrightEdge

Real Time Search is Impacting Your SEO (Be Ready with Three Easy Steps)

Jim Yu , BrightEdge - Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments | Add Yours

About The Author:

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge. He combines in-depth expertise in developing and marketing large on-demand software platforms with hands-on experience in advanced SEO practices. Jim holds an MBA from Stanford University, a Master's of Engineering from the University of Virginia, and a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from the University of South Dakota.

The new world of SEO

There is no question SEO managers are facing new challenges in dealing with organic search. What used to be a simple focused exercise to optimize a limited number of page assets is now a much more complicated task with increased visibility inside organizations. What’s more, the rules of SEO - as defined by the ranking algorithms of the main search engines - are constantly being refined, creating unpredictability in what was once a fairly stable, slow moving market. Among the main culprits: real time search.

Freshness trumps relevance

To see real time search in action, just go to one of the main search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo - and search on breaking news or a popular topic at that moment. For example, I am writing this article while the NCAA basketball tournament is in full swing. A search for “ncaa” brings up real time news on teams and scores. The placement and importance of these news results vary by search engine but they are usually placed in some of the most valuable positions, near the top of the first page.

Freshness trumps relevance

The search engines are balancing a number of factors in order to serve what they consider the most relevant content at the point of search. One of the key signals is called Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) which tells the search engines when and by how much to increase the importance of recency. QDF is triggered by sudden changes in a number of factors including search volumes for specific keywords, news coverage, and blog chatter. Recently, search engines have added twitter as one of the triggers for QDF, underlying the importance of tweets as a signal of real time significance.

And the Impact on SEO is Huge!

What does it all mean to your organic search efforts and to your business? In a nutshell, your top ranking can go down one or more positions on major news. This might have a marginal effect if you are ranked below the fold or if real time search only impacts your second tier keywords. But the effects can be devastating for your critical keywords, those brand or non-brand high-value keywords that you have spent time and money optimizing and that drive a large share of your organic value.

To give you a sense of the magnitude of the impact, we conducted a study at BrightEdge with one of our customers in January 2010 as important news came out about their company. We looked at the organic referrals – the number of visits from organic searches - before and after the news for their most important branded terms where they had a #1 position. The difference was higher than any of us could have anticipated: referrals on Google dropped on average by 40% (!) with the maximum drop occurring one day after the news when QDF was weighing freshness at its peak compared to relevancy.

3 Steps to Prepare for Real Time Search

Even though we might think we cannot control when and how real time search results show up, there are simple steps we can take to mitigate its effects. Whenever you have a new product launch, scheduled announcements, or any company news, you should expect that those news are going to disrupt organic referrals on brand terms.

We recommend three simple steps to get ahead of your competition:

1) Optimize for freshness with a steady stream of new content.

Real time search increase the important of recency and freshness, enabling sites with lower authority to get visibility near the top. That is the bad news. The good news is that you too can optimize for this by posting fresh content regularly on blogs, twitter, community pages, etc.

2) Combine freshness and authority on a few select pages.

Good SEO practices are not going away and getting to high authority continues to be important. Develop a handful of newsworthy pages such as press releases and news commentaries with solid on-pages strategies, internal links within your site, and a few select external backlinks. The combination of freshness and relevance will help you rank high when QDF is triggered.

3) Run PPC on brand terms for insurance.

As a last resort, we recommend being ready to run PPC on your brand terms. Companies have varied beliefs on whether organic listings are sufficient on branded terms or if adding paid search has a positive ROI. Whichever camp you fall into, this is a temporary situation where your best listings are getting pushed down and that can warrant paying a small insurance fee.

And of course note that you can also turn real time search to your advantage and use its bias towards freshness to go after your competitor’s own branded terms…

Conclusion

Real time search is changing the rules of the already complex SEO discipline. Real time search – triggered by Query Deserves Freshness – increases the importance of freshness at the expense of relevance. Important news push down your most valuable rankings, impacting your SEO in a major way – decreasing SEO value by 40% in one of the BrightEdge studies. However, with the right preparation and execution, you can turn real time search into an opportunity to increase your SEO value, not to mention pre-empt your competitors on their own branded terms.