The 7 Biggest Trends In Google Web Search

To­day I’m list­ing the 7 most im­por­tant trends in web search that I think will soon spell dis­as­ter for busi­nesses who rely on Google search to get traf­fic, leads, and customers.

I’m not say­ing you shouldn’t do SEO. But in my every­day work I see lots and lots of small busi­nesses for whom Google search is the ONLY source of traffic.

For “in­ter­net mar­ket­ing ex­perts” it’s easy to for­get that of­fline busi­nesses don’t have our knowl­edge; they don’t have our en­thu­si­asm for so­cial me­dia or con­tent mar­ket­ing. They don’t have vi­ral YouTube chan­nels, or whatever.

Google search is chang­ing mas­sively, and it’s go­ing in a di­rec­tion that ALMOST ALL small and medium sized busi­nesses as well as many SEOs com­pletely ignore.

Trends 1 and 2: How Google moves traf­fic away from your small or medium biz web site.

1. Di­rect an­swers. Googles goal is not to send searchers to your web site. Google’s goal is to an­swer what­ever ques­tion a searcher might have. In an ideal Google world the searcher does not need to click away from Google at all.

The trend is that Google will an­swer all ques­tions di­rectly on the search re­sults page .

Look­ing at the some­times still ques­tion­able qual­ity of cur­rent search re­sults you may think Google is not tech­ni­cally able to so. But this is wish­ful think­ing, and the fu­ture will prove it wrong sooner than most peo­ple would be­lieve. Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence is in the mak­ing. Google’s abil­ity to pro­vide an­swers is al­ready im­prov­ing at as­ton­ish­ing speed.

These ma­chine gen­er­ated an­swers will be shown promi­nently on SERPs, with tra­di­tional web site list­ings way below.

2. Au­thor­ity over rel­e­vance. Now more than ever Google fa­vors au­thor­ity sites over “smaller” sites, even if con­tent found on the smaller sites is more rel­e­vant to the search query.

Au­thor­ity sites are those with the most pages, most back links, most fre­quent con­tent up­dates, most fre­quent new con­tent, and sites that have been around for years.

For smaller sites it will be in­creas­ingly harder to out­rank au­thor­ity sites. Soon the first SERP will be filled al­most ex­clu­sively with au­thor­ity sites.

Ad­di­tion­ally 75,000 new do­mains are reg­is­tered each day who also want to com­pete with you on Google’s top spots.

Trends 3 and 4: Why SERPs will lose importance.

3. Voice based search. What – in pub­lic per­cep­tion – started with Apple’s Siri will be­come the norm in a few years.

Peo­ple will change from us­ing a key­board to us­ing voice. Of­ten they will also get the an­swers to their search via voice.

Ask your­self: what’s the point of be­ing on top of SERPs when the user doesn’t look at the SERP anymore?

4. Tiny Screens. While smart phones are get­ting big­ger screens, we’re see­ing new types of de­vices com­ing up with tiny screens. For now those are smart watches and glasses.

Both do not have enough screen space to show you tra­di­tional SERPs in an easy to skim and easy to use manner.

Once smart watches and glasses are well de­vel­oped I ex­pect other types of wear­able com­put­ers which might not have any screen at all.

Trend 5 and 6 and 7: Why Google web search will lose importance.

5. De­cline of Google web search mar­ket share. I’m us­ing the term “web search mar­ket share” loosely.

Not in the sta­tis­ti­cal sense that com­pares searches be­tween tra­di­tional search en­gines , but ac­knowl­edg­ing that peo­ple in­creas­ingly per­form their searches on sites other than search en­gine sites.

The most promi­nent al­ter­na­tives right now are Face­book, YouTube, Twitter.

Every search per­formed on these sites is one where your top place­ment on tra­di­tional Google SERPs is wasted.

Apart from that I ex­pect Bing to gain greater mar­ket share at the ex­pense of Google.

6. Di­ver­si­fied Dis­cov­ery. Not only will peo­ple more of­ten search on sites other than Google, they will also more of­ten skip “search­ing” com­pletely and in­stead “dis­cover” content.

For ex­am­ple in­stead of typ­ing their query into a search box, they might type it into the sta­tus up­date box on Face­book and ask their friends in­stead of ask­ing Google.

Or they might dis­cover con­tent by click­ing #Hash­tags in­stead of us­ing Google search.

7. Al­ter­na­tive ecosys­tems. A few years back be­ing on­line meant be­ing within a web browser look­ing at the in­ter­net.  Now tra­di­tional in­ter­net is los­ing view­ing time to closed ecosys­tems sep­a­rate from browser based internet.

The ma­jor­ity of those are smart phone op­er­at­ing sys­tems. They do have tra­di­tional browsers, but they also of­fer tons of con­tent jailed within apps with no di­rect con­nec­tion to Google search.

Plus, peo­ple start view­ing con­tent on de­vices like Kin­dle, again be­ing in a space some­what sep­a­rated from tra­di­tional in­ter­net and tra­di­tional SERPs.

Con­clu­sion: For the seven rea­sons listed above busi­nesses can ex­pect to get less and less traf­fic from Google search. At the same time achiev­ing top po­si­tions on search re­quires more work.

I’ve writ­ten a few posts about the risky changes in search before.

One feed­back I got this week was that my last post on Google SEO raised a few eye­brows. ‘

This is the best I can hope for, and in this spirit I’m pre­sent­ing these 7 search trends open for a lively discussion.