Google has started testing a new feature where a small magnifying glass icon is displayed on the right side of each search engine result. When you hover over the magnifying glass icon, a full page preview of that page is displayed to the right (see image below). This was first discovered (publicly) by Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm, and later verified by TheNextWeb.com.
This feature is not enabled for paid search and covers the right hand side of the page where the paid search ads reside. This is a concern for current advertisers, but like I have said in the past, paid search is Google’s money maker and they will not do anything to cause a dramatic drop in clicks on paid ads. Read Full Entry
Google launched Google Instant search this week to help speed up searching. Google Instant works by predicting what you are searching for in real-time. The search results update as you type in the search box. Google claims that Google Instant search will save users 2-5 seconds per search because we read faster than we type. It is currently only available for desktop searching with mobile coming this fall.
What does Google Instant mean to those searching (and marketing) in the healthcare/pharma space?
Read Full Entry
One of the big challenges in search engine optimization is link building.
Creating a solid link strategy and executing that plan can be a job in itself. In a highly regulated environment such as pharma, traditional link building tactics are all but squashed. Now pharma is falling further behind due to the insurgence of social media, and Twitter specifically, that is dramatically altering the webs link graph.
Before the rise of social media and Twitter, links on the web were more static and lived on a less dynamic Internet. Links that did become more viral were shared through email and IM – where even broad sharing didn’t and affect the SERPS (search engine results pages) because the search engines could not see or index them.
Then came forums and blogs, but even these outlets cannot compete with the continual volume of updates and links that flow from the Twitterverse (is that a word?). Every week millions of links are counted into the search engine algorithms that are sent through social media sites (I am not suggesting these links hold much weight, but we have to assume that a popular link in Twitter gets recognized as such).
No need to get into a rant on pharma and the big scary social media environment. Where the pharma companies are going to feel pain is their consistent struggle to rank well in the search engines. Many third party sites and disease state web properties have no problem using social to not only get the word out, and the resulting links that stream from these sources. A recent study by the WeissComm Group and Pfizer found that FDA regulated sites only account for 22% of first-page search results.
Most pharmaceutical companies lack a complete search engine and linking strategy and this can be seen by their internal linking. Not only on individual sites, but between all the web properties they control. Pharma does not optimize on all the sites they control and many of these sites have established domain trust and authority (the reason they have established this trust is due to the few links they do have often come from other trusted medical and healthcare sites). The longer that the FDA waits to make an executive decision on new web trends and most (but not all) big pharma companies watch from the sidelines, the farther they will fall behind.
Last July, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo agreed to a search engine deal to improve both of their chances and market share against Google. The deal will see Yahoo and their family of sites use Microsoft’s search technology for both organic and paid search. How will this affect pharmas use of search marketing?
Currently, Google is the first stop for any search marketing spend for a brand. Few extend their budgets onto Yahoo and Bing. For December 2009, comScore reports that Google sites currently has 65.6% market share followed by Yahoo sites with 17.5% and Microsoft sites with 10.3%. Now Microsoft search will have 27.8% market share instead of 10.3%. Can you afford to ignore over a quarter of the search population?
All paid search will work through MSN’s adCenter once the transition is complete. Both Yahoo and MSN have awful paid search admin portals. Tie that into small market share and poor paid search results, and many brands choose to focus on Google. Now that you will have one location to reach almost 28% of searchers, it will be hard to ignore.
On the organic search side, the Bing algorithm will get much more attention from search marketers. Yahoo is currently the only search engine that does not have a unique health solution, like Google Health and Bing’s version (see left, red box), at the top of the search results. But with Bing now delivering Yahoo results, all the major search engines will own the top spot of organic for health keywords.
The end result of the Microsoft/Yahoo deal and pharma is the new partners have created a pull of market share that makes them hard to over look. Microsoft will now deliver organic and paid search results to over a quarter of searchers and that is hard to ignore.
