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Word-of-mouth marketing meets SEO

November 10, 2009 | Internet Marketing

Shopping for a new digital camera? Considering doing business with a specific company? Search engines are becoming recommendation engines, and recommendations are coming from those people you trust the most: friends, family, and colleagues.

Currently, in addition to having a Google profile, you have to sign up to participate in Google’s social search experiment (and Yahoo announced last week that it’s incorporating the profiles into its search filters, too—all the more reason to start test-driving). The eventuality, of course, is that social results will soon become part of the search engine results page (SERP). And there are going to be some major repercussions.

First and most obviously, these “social results” will make getting on the first page or two of organic search results much more competitive. You’ll be competing not only with highly optimized competitors, but also with the searcher’s entire social network. Yikes!

And paid search ads? Right now the jury’s out. If the SERP is telling you an authoritative friend recommends Brand X, while the paid ads are touting Brand Y, which way are you going to go?

Get the full story at ClickZ

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