SearchWiki: Now or Never for SEO
There has been a lot written about Google’s new SearchWiki in relation to SEO. The initial reaction in most of the posts I’ve read is that SearchWiki sucks and it’s going to ruin SEO. Some SEO bloggers have entered into full Chicken Little mode claiming the sky is falling. While the long term effects of SearchWiki can be debated (in fact, you’ll get my take on just that in the next post) I think a lot of people are missing the most immediate implications of Google’s newest “improvement” for their search engine.
By allowing users to edit the results they see in a search engine result page (SERP), Google has effectively given SEOs a proverbial gun to hold up potential clients. While it likely isn’t their intent, the big G has made SEO the most pressing and immediate need of any online business. SEOs, the next time you try to close a potential client, give them a few facts and see how they react.
- Users are now able to edit the results they see in the SERPs.
- When you thumb up a site listing in SearchWiki, you move that site to the top of any and all searches they might show up for.
- Right now, your competitors are ranking well, and having users vote for their site in SearchWiki, which means not only are you not ranking now, but you might never be able to outrank that competitor for any of the terms you share in common.
- That pattern is being repeated hundreds, if not thousands of times and will only become more prevalent as use of the SearchWiki feature increases. Every minute you’re not ranking, is a minute you’re losing potential rankings, forever.
Now what kind of horrible salesman do you have to be to NOT close the deal when you have those facts staring the prospect in the face. And you know what? Every one of those 4 points is 100% accurate.
SearchWiki is making first impressions more important than ever before. Once a user votes up a competitor’s site, you just lost the #1 spot (and all the traffic that’s associated with it) for that person forever (or until Google decides they’ve made a mistake with SearchWiki but I don’t see that happening any time soon, again more on this in the next post).
While some in the SEO industry are lamenting SearchWiki as the silver bullet that will kill SEO forever, few have realized that it also just provided SEOs with a HUGE weapon to use in a sales pitch to potential clients. So, you can either piss and moan about how Google’s new toy is going to put you out of business in a few years, or you can use what you’re given to close more deals, gain more clients, deliver more value, and create more long lasting business relationships. Are you going to take action or complain?
The choice is yours.
While it is true, it is only true for one person. If someone thumbs up a result, it’s only for him, not for others, right (at least for the time being)? Considering the participation rate on websites, I’d say that 10-30% of *logged in* use the feature, which really is a few (or several) per cent of total Google users. So it isn’t that bad. For now.
Of course, if you do the research to debunk/support my assumption, so much the better.
You could’ve held the same argument with link building, too, though. The sooner the business starts building content and links for the website, the better of he’ll be in the long run for the very same reasons:
– not getting more loyal customers
– letting competitors gain larger market share
– it’s getting relatively harder to outrank others
Yura, yes it’s for only one person but participation will only increase, especially if Google promotes it. They’ve also recently said that, surprise surprise, this data might well be used in the ranking algo in the future. So, while it *currently* is on an individual basis and doesn’t have quite a huge adoption rate yet, I think it’s much more urgent than many people are giving it credit for.
Your comment about linkbuilding is a good one and could be an interesting approach, however I think there’s more of the ability to catch up to your competitors in links than there are in thumb up votes in SearchWiki.
I think the the WikiSEarch is only one part of big process to increase the importance of user as ranking factor. The SEO will change, when people affect on the SERPs – that’s for sure.
I think with every advancement in technology comes some sort of abuse and with this the abuse will happen.