So, what’s in store for search marketing in 2010? Well here’s my predictions as to what both SEO and PPC marketers will be looking at in the year to come.

Brandrank

As search starts to move away from Pagerank and towards brandrank a brands social graph will become more important. Merely monitoring social media will not be sufficient, brands will need to engage fully with social media to ensure they have fresh comments and links from the major social media sites.

Personalised Search

No two people will see the same results page on Google, this will mean straight forward ranking as a metric will truly disappear. Behaviour will group consumers together and this will require best of class web analytics.

Beginning of the end for the Browser

Google Chrome OS and Windows are both moving towards search in context, in other words right from your spreadsheet or word processor. The danger of this move is that search could become interruptive.

Filters over Indexes

Google rarely if ever filters results to display something different to that which is in its index. But, as trends and queries and clicks start to tell Google a story for certain quick moving topics filters may be the only way to display relevant results until the index has had time to catch up. For some the index may never catch up. Universal search was the answer to this but as so few news sources have access to Google News blogs with fresh content still struggle to beat old, authoritative pages.

Mobile Search

Pizza, Taxi… enough said? Okay, probably not, Yes people are now using mobiles to search and apparently for more than just Pizza’s and Taxi’s! Those two terms accounted for a huge percentage of searches on Yahoo’s mobile search platform. Mobile is here, it is different to web search. Less navigational terms, lots of misspellings, so be ready…

PPC in 2010

Like most advertising channels paid search has had a rough time in 2009, budgets squeezed, conversion rates down, longer user journey’s and a consumer focus on value.

PCG (FMCG)

Packaged Consumer Goods companies will ‘invent the challenge’ in 2010. Paid search hasn’t been a natural channel for these companies because of it’s direct response nature. With users now spending 13 hours a week surfing the web compared to about 3.8 hours a day watching TV this is a channel that can’t be ignored and won’t be ignored by this vertical. Especially when you consider how many people do both together.

The FMCG company that invents the challenge, asks the right questions and creates a search strategy that works will have competitive advantage. What’s the consumer action if we don’t sell online?

Split Testing

Major PPC campaigns have never had enough split testing. The idea of testing creative copy in paid search adverts is widely used, but testing copy/landing page/offer isn’t. Next years winners will be those who follow the pure players; be able to quickly test hundreds of landing pages against many different offers. The prize will be conversion rates well above industry averages and whilst giving cost benefits will also promote growth and profits.

Watch out in your vertical for signs of your competitors carrying out large multivariate testing on their paid search campaigns.

Vertical Search

As CPC inflation will continue the smart retailers are already fully embracing vertical search, feeds will become important, especially if we consider browser-less search.

Integration

Last year saw many brands embrace integration and this will continue in 2010 as they look to drive even more value from advertising budgets. I’m not sure the world is going towards full comms planning in 2010 but everything is shifting in that direction. As people live in-line (concurrently off-line and on-line) so integrated campaigns make more sense.

Pure-Play vs Clicks’n'Bricks

We will see a greater divergence in search marketing from these two differing business models.

Many pure players have ‘mature’ search marketing campaigns, gaining extra impression volume will require them to think outside of the funnel. I can see pure players heading towards becoming publishers as they seek out greater volume from ‘emotional’ as well as ‘functional’ keywords.We may also see the expansion of pure players into bricks and mortar, although Amazon have denied they are opening any physical shops.

The clicks’n'bricks retailers will move further towards multi-channel as ‘click and collect’ becomes more widespread. The key for these retailers will be analytics, finding ways to measure both foot traffic and phone orders prompted by search.

In summary it’s going to be an exciting year for search.