This article also appears in the September edition of NZ Marketing magazine

What is search engine optimisation? The usual reply is “oh, that’s placing keywords on the homepage of your website”. Truth is there is much more involved in optimising a website, and it is goes well beyond just the words on your pages.  Indeed, where the end goal is to generate qualified traffic to a website to reach marketing objectives it does not necessarily mean that only your website needs to be optimised.

The term “Blended Search” represents the various online media and search products that can be found in search results today. Traditional web search is only one product offered by search engines. Other search media include images, video, news, people, maps, documents, directories, books and blogs.

The major search engines including Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live now display different search media within their search results with the intention of offering more “diversity of opinion”.  They take into account more than one source of opinion by including media forms such as news or video content that contain information about a specific topic.

By way of example try searching for the term “darth vader” in Google.com. Blended within search results are website pages, images, blog posts, micro blog posts (Twitter), YouTube video, wiki entries and more. Or closer to home, try search for “Auckland hotels”, the very first result is a map of Auckland with links to various Hotel sites.

If search engines are now favouring diversity of opinion and news, video or images will be included within search results, doesn’t that mean that those media should also be optimised to be found easily online? Absolutely!

Natural search marketing is about optimising and raising the visibility of all online media assets in search engines, and other relevant sites (Flickr.com or YouTube.com for example). Brand owners now need to look beyond their own website and consider the other media types that are available and how to best incorporate them into their full optimisation strategy.

Maybe a Twitter strategy [a form of micro blogging] is not suitable for all companies, but marketers can certainly find other online media types that are relevant to their line of business.

Blended search strategies do not necessarily mean new content needs to be created for the web, indeed many companies will have a range of existing offline media assets that could be easily repurposed for the Internet. It is rather a matter of optimizing all web assets to ensure that they can be found online to raise brand awareness and drive new traffic to your website.

And the mainstream search engines are not the only sources of qualified traffic. It seems everyone is jumping into video these days on the back of YouTube’s success, and as this space gets more competitive, it becomes necessary to optimise your assets if you expect to rank well for relevant keyword queries.
For example, if you search for the competitive term “travel auckland” in YouTube NZ, at the time of writing there were only 350 listings.  The first page of results contains 8 listings from a particular travel agency, “Kapai Travel Auckland New Zealand,” out of 20 possible results. This is a small business that has done a good job of gaining visibility for this term. Larger players such as House of Travel or Flight Centre do rank well for their brand terms, but do not appear in any listings relating to destination terms such as “travel auckland”.

The emergence of blended search results creates challenges for marketers as the business of optimising content for search engines has becoming increasingly complex. Where previously a website may have enjoyed certain rankings, the introduction other media such as video, maps and images may well push those results further down the page.

Search is at the heart of all online media and the onus is now on marketers to implement strategies which maximise the value of these assets in search engines like Google and Yahoo, but also in the results of destination media sites like YouTube (the 3rd most visited non-search site in the world). This means taking a systematic approach to optimising all your web assets so to maximize their value.