Search Sense

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

At MacWorld on Monday Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., delivered an impressive preview of the forthcoming iPhone The great design is combined with usability that looks to have that pick-up-and-play quality that the iPod was famous for. It offers WiFi access so is a step toward having the internet in your pocket.

Steve demonstrated Google Maps on the device. This seamless demonstration saw him locating where he was, searching for a service, finding the nearest store and calling them up. The fact this was utilising search on a fully-featured web browser running on a mobile device is a clear signpost as to what the future holds. That he was then joined on stage by both Google CEO Dr. Eric Schimdt, as well as Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! only emphasises this point.

To fully benefit from this coming ubiquity will only be possible if you can actually be found when a potential customer searches for the service you happen to offer. If you don’t presently optimise your website to be search engine friendly then your offering will always be less relevant than a competitor who does. If you haven’t yet set aside a proportion of your marketing budget for search then now is a great time to do so. If you already have a search strategy then you should be thinking about how to evolve your approach to take advantage of mobile search, which is one of several areas where Spannerworks can help.

The necessity of having a strong presence in the search engines is more pressing than ever. As time passes the bar to having great visibility for the most searched-for terms in your market sector only gets higher. The technologies in the iPhone place both communication and search at the heart of one portable device. Have a look at this overview to get a full idea of the sea-change potential that is afforded by this product.

To quote Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice-president of Nokia:

“In the mid-Nineties I said that if you don’t have a mobile phone you will be making a declaration that you wanted to be outside organised society. People said I was crazy, but now everybody has a mobile phone. Today I’m saying that in 10 years’ time the same will be true if you don’t have the full internet in your pocket.”

With the advent of Apple’s product that timescale can easily be cut to 5 years or less. It also makes search the most relevant area to focus one’s marketing efforts.

The iPhone is to be released in June in America and will come to Europe later in the year.

The new Ask City Search has an impressive set of features and a huge improvement on Ask Local. Compared to other players in local search, this really stands out for functionality and usability if not the wow factor of MSN and Google maps and aerial photos.

Ask gathers review information from many existing sources including Citysearch, ServiceMagic, Yelp, Tribune, OpenTable, RottenTomatoes, TripAdvisor, InsiderPages, JudysBook, Fandango and combines them with the business listings.

Under each listing there’s a link to help locate other businesses nearby. Very handy for locating the good restaurants near your hotel. On the mapping side, you can save maps and access them from a list of thumbnails.  You can draw freehand on the map and label places of interest for easy reference. And the thing I like most – drop a marker anywhere on the map to retrieve the address.

Can’t wait for the UK version.