Implications of Yahoo’s New Social Search

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Yahoo is rolling out a new search feature (in beta) called Social Search. This falls very much in line with my comments yesterday regarding Google’s Upgraded Personalized Search.

I just wanted to add a quick addendum to that in regard to the impact of these new specialized focus search capabilities. I don’t believe in any way that SEO will die or that these new search features endanger the business of SEO. However, I’ve said many times before SEO (much like any business) must learn to adapt in order to stay relevant.

Personally, I believe that SEO, by itself, will become increasingly irrelevant to businesses. Top rankings are cool but conversions are much more important. SEO by itself will become largely ineffective at producing those conversions and will therefore have to merge with more marketing oriented services.

While SEO will always remain an important part of web visibility other services such as usability testing and conversion tracking along with other on- and offline marketing efforts will be essential for businesses to survive on the web. Those services will work together to ensure top ranking performance in standard results and in personalized and social searches while increasing conversion rates, and therefore revenue, at the same time.

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Tags: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo! Search
Posted in Search & Marketing