Search is more than just keywords and links

With eight years of professional involvement with search marketing on both the organic / algorithmic side and the paid side, it's surprising to see how, in many cases, the discussion tends to have a singular focus: drive traffic to my site.

Not that there's anything wrong with that - eCommerce and ad-supported sites really do need an ever-growing stream of traffic to sustain their business. But for most of us, there is a world of search beyond your domain that can sometimes be even more important than the traffic arriving at our site.

Enquiro, a research firm commissioned by Google, produced a study that outlines that effect. It confirmed an intuitive feeling I had long ago, that the search engines have an effect on brand. For example, ranking well for the term "running shoes" will indicate to most users that one is an authoritative brand/store/voice on the topic of "running shoes".

Nielsen Net//Ratings then released a study in April 2009 on how trustworthy various forms of advertising were, in which "recommendations from people known" and "consumer opinions posted online" ranked as #1 and #2 respectively, with #4 being "editorial content posted online". And the first one doesn't necessarily mean your best friend - "people known" can be anyone that someone trusts, in some cases even respected public figures or industry leaders with whom the user feels some type of connection with.

In other words, sometimes the best search results for a brand may not be that brand's website at all. And, even if the brand website is ranking well, having a multitude of other touchpoints out there definitely doesn't hurt (and it can help you defend that ever valuable first page).

Ensuring your brand (and not just your brand homepage) is well placed in this ecosystem is becoming ever more important. Be sure you consider the broader aspects of search, including how search can influence brand, the effect of 3rd party content on the results, and search outside of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

After all, search has evolved into one of the most critical pillars of the modern web ecosystem - search engines don't just send people to websites, they can make or break brands, influence opinion, and take the pulse of the world in real-time.