SEO practitioners face new challenges

15:00 22nd March 2010

Digital marketing professionals could face many new challenges when carrying out search engine optimisation campaigns as people are expecting more and more from search engines.

According to search marketing expert John Battelle, who published The Search in 2005, search engines are going to have to adapt in order to meet the expanding needs of their consumers.

This could mean that digital marketing professionals need to change the way they set up their search engine optimisation campaigns in order to stay relevant to the new methods used by search engines to rank pages.

Speaking to Search Engine Land, Mr Battelle stated that people are expecting their search engines to do more of the work for them when they are looking for something online.

"People are asking far more complicated questions now and they're demanding far more nuanced answers, simply because they know they're out there," he commented.

Mr Battelle added that people now expect "a whole bunch more information" than they did five years ago when they are using a search engine.

He explained people may now want to find details of the comparative pricing of goods, repair histories and opinions of friends when they search for a product.

This comes after online marketing expert Debra Northart told Search Engine Land that businesses could use analytics tools to carry out research on their consumers before beginning a search engine optimisation campaign.