magnify360 Blog

Without a doubt, Google has changed the way we live our lives. Whether searching for information, shopping for shoes or comparing deals on your next vacation, there is hardly a time when we don’t just Google it.

While this cultural transformation came on fast, it didn’t come by accident. Since its inception, Google has strived towards one goal and one goal only (and no, it’s not refraining from being evil) and that goal is informational relevance.

It’s this relevance that has made Google the world wide hub for information, shopping, email and all things online. However, this dominance brings with it some pretty unique challenges. How do you stay one step ahead of the marketers looking to game the system to win a lion’s share of traffic for their site? How do you prevent spammers? In general, how do they stay one step ahead and keep everyone pursuing Google’s Holy Grail of informational relevance and premium user experience?

The answer is both simple and quite complex.

Google’s constant optimization and an obsessive commitment to user experience are simple. However, the way that this is executed upon is quite complex.

At the heart of this complexity is Google’s algorithm or the way that they measure relevance. It is a semi – black box mix of information rankings, taking many items into consideration. Keyword density in relation to the search query, URL naming conventions, overall performance and too many other factors to name here, all play into how pages are served when the user queries a search.

It’s this constant pursuit of the perfect experience that has kept Google modifying this algorithm and kept marketers, almost obsessively, asking what is the next step in the progression?

In a recent release, Google is saying that now, their quality score will be calculated in real time, dynamically every time a query is made.

So, it appears that the answer would not only be HOW the quality score is calculated, but HOW OFTEN. I guess it’s only logical. As technology continues to increase, and marketers continue to increase their savvy, this is another way for Google to raise the bar.

This new shift in the process is huge. As marketers scramble to figure out Google’s newest riddle, the firms providing real-time landing page optimization and behavioral targeting will become a marketing necessity.

If you’re landing pages are not providing relevance in real-time, your quality score will decline, along with your ranking and ROI, not to mentioned that your CPC will increase.

So, while real-time optimization is definitely “web 2.0” it may soon be the standard. When looking back at how fast Google went from being a new, boutique search engine to a business and cultural cornerstone, it is easy to envision these real-time optimizers as being another mandatory tool in the web marketers arsenal.

magnify360 is one of the sponsors of the current Online Marketing Summit’s Summer Tour.  The events runs through September at various cities across the country.  Here is an update from the Boston stop on the tour.

Aaron Kahlow, the founder of OMS kicked things off with a presentation geared to wake us up, literally!  He mentioned that organizations continue to hit the “snooze button” on the alarms going off around online marketing and do not continue to invest or reinvent themselves on the web.

Throughout the day, the sessions centered on topics such as search engine marketing, analytics and user experience, email marketing, social media strategies, demand generation, multi-channel metrics as well as behavioral targeting and technology.  Each session contained valuable insights for both the novice and experienced online marketers attending.

A highlight of the day was the keynote panel, when the attendees got to ask their industry peers direct questions about the state of online marketing. The topic this time was how big brands were driving success through social media, SEO, SEM, websites and testing.  A recurring theme for the panelists was the need to increasingly personalize and humanize the online experience.  They also enforced the need for analytics, and suggested that organizations use existing social networks to their benefit, instead of recreating the wheel with their own brands.

Be sure to check out the OMS website for more information or to register for one of the upcoming tour stops.