Feb

18

HubSpot: Rank Officially Has Died As a Metric for Businesses to Obsess Over

February 18th, 2011 by Larry Keltto | Posted in Marketing

I typically don’t post on Friday afternoon, but I didn’t want you to miss this.

From HubSpot.com:

Google yesterday launched an upgrade to its search engine, adding social results for users signed in with their Google accounts. In addition to traditional website search results, searchers will start seeing results from their friends on Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.

So what, right? Um, not so fast.

Here are the ramifications of Google’s move, according to HubSpot:

With this latest update from Google, rank officially died as a metric for businesses to obsess over. It now doesn’t matter if you rank in the top slot for a certain keyword, because Google is quickly scaling personalized and social search. This means that everyone who searches will see a different page of results, based on their location, search history and their connections accross the social web.

You won’t get any complaints from me. But my questions are: How does this affect PPC strategies? What opportunities does this present for solopreneurs? In the comments below, let me know what you think.

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5

Comments

  1. Jon Humberstone says:
    February 18, 2011 at 3:05 pm

    Hi Larry,

    … and have you noticed the search filters Google has added on the left of every search results page? I can now filter the results by:

    “Discussions”
    “Blogs”
    “Videos”

    ..and, here’s and interesting one, “Realtime.”

    So, if I only want to see what bloggers are saying about a topic, or what the social media conversation is, I can filter my Google search results.

    My personal favorite filter, though, is the ‘Time’ filter. I can filter by results in the past year, month, week, or even the last 24 hours on just the last hour.

    This has actually been quite useful to me because many of the sites that have earned rank through keywords and content have done so over a period of years. So now they have a top position, but with content that is several years old.

    When I’m looking for new technology, or technical support help, for example, I get the top 10 results that all contain answers that are out of date.

    Then there is Topsy.com.

    It is not the only one of it’s kind, either. These are search engines where the ‘recency’ of a page/post and the amount of social bookmarking attention it has gotten are the primary factors rather than the keywords and content.

    Anyway, sorry for the huge comment, but I’ve been noticing this trend and it is one reason why I am actually becoming convinced that social media does matter to everyone after all.

    Plus, I’m excited by the doors this opens up for solopreneur’s to possibly compete for visibility in the search engines in the future.

    Best,
    Jon

  2. Larry Keltto says:
    February 18, 2011 at 3:34 pm

    Hi Jon:

    Thank you for your comments.

    How do you think this affects AdWords? Will it will make PPC more targeted, thus more effective and affordable for niched businesses?

    Larry

  3. Larry Keltto says:
    February 18, 2011 at 4:58 pm

    This is amazing. I just did a Google search for my city, Owatonna, MN, and turned on the social settings. It gave the typical search results, plus any recent social-media activity with the city’s name in it. Just think about the possibilities that opens up.

  4. Jon Humberstone says:
    February 18, 2011 at 5:17 pm

    Larry,
    I have not read anything about how this will impact Adwords.

    I suppose they could change the way that they choose ads to display by including the same kind of ‘social network’ factors, ie giving position preference to ads that people in my network have clicked on.

    Or, better yet, somehow incorporate a ‘quality score’ for the ad buyer’s site that is based on their social authority.

    If they did that then in theory I could get higher ad position based on genuine social authority and it would not just be based on the highest bidder.

    However, it seems unlikely that Google would do anything that adversely impacts their own adwords profitability.

    It would be very cool if you could bid based on social characteristics and not just adwords, though, wouldn’t it?

    Jon

  5. Larry Keltto says:
    February 18, 2011 at 5:42 pm

    Jon:

    I agree that we’re in the “first one’s free” stage right now.

    Quality score is a very, very interesting idea.

    What’s your sense of how many people are using Topsy? I was using OneRiot quite a bit last spring.

    Larry

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