Marketers are concerned about the influence real-time Web results will have on their respective company's query ranking in the top half of organic search results. They believe that real-time
feeds from Twitter, Facebook and others could push company listings below the fold.
They voiced these concerns in casual conversations with me during the opening day of the Search Insider
Summit in Captiva Island, Fla. So I asked experts for help with this issue.
Nectarios Economakis, director of search marketing at Media Experts, a traditional and digital agency, has begun to
see more search engines experimenting with different ad formats because it's in their best financial interest to have more real estate on the page.
"One sneaky little thing that Google
did was move sponsored listing on the right a little to the left," which puts the paid search ads more in the line of sight, he says. "It just confirms that companies need to be on page one in organic
listings, because if you're not, you simply don't exist."
Reliable-SEO Founder David Harry says real-time search hasn't been shown to be overly effective. Queries return much less
RTS-related information. Marketers should look more into universal elements -- Google news, video etc. -- rather than the RTS ones. "Many of these only show up in certain high level query spaces,
which means there are plenty of opportunities to improve on mid-range and long-tail queries," he says. "We still need to be mindful of how the search results pages evolve. But are [marketers] taking
the [real-time] 'buzz' too seriously? Probably."
Harry says it's not as easy to control RTS results. The percentage of real estate remains small. He believes the real estate at the top of
the query will remain with the media relations and social sites.
The HuoMah forum ran a survey in December to ask search engine optimization (SEO) community members how Google's real-time
search will influence SEO. Although it was a small sampling, 37.1% felt it would have limited impact due to query types. Twenty nine percent felt Google "opened a can of spam," followed by 19.4% who
believed it was a "game changer."
"If you create a company Twitter account, it will rank, along with retweets and conversation," says Andy Beard, SEO professional. "I just searched for IKEA
in the U.S., U.K. and Poland and there are no real-time search results."
The search query returned press releases, news results, blog posts, etc., but no Twitter tweets, Beard. says. He
points me to IKEA's Twitter handle, which looks as if the company has it parked and reserved.
"If you invite social media into your house, make sure
anything you don't want people to find is well hidden, and maybe hire some bouncers so your house doesn't get destroyed," Beard says.
You would have thought IKEA's $1 billion investment in a new Russian store would have prompted some chatter on Twitter, but it didn't, Beard adds. The U.S.
has two stories about a gift card scam, and one for news. Beard, who live in Poland, tells me his native country doesn't return any news but gives him a nice map to his nearest IKEA store, about 70
miles away.