» Danny Sullivan visits SEOmoz for Facebook Revolution and Search 3.0 Discussion

Danny Sullivan visited SEOmoz last Friday for a white board discussion on Facebook Revolution and Search 3.0.

Danny Sullivan discussed Facebook Ads vs. Search Ads. In his opinion Search Ads are the revolution. He mentioned that traditional advertisers are always desperately looking for new ways to advertise, for example on Facebook even if they don’t understand the new concept.

The idea behind Facebook’s model is that when you purchase a product or service online it will display on your page and catch your friend’s attention, hopefully creating a word of mouth buzz. However there are still many improvements that need to be made to this advertising model. One that was mentioned in the discussion is that when you try to target your ads by choosing keywords related to your business your reach decreases tremendously and you are only being seen by very few users.

Danny feels that there is still huge growth in Search and advertisers should be taking advantage of this. Search is still a cheap way to advertise compared to traditional advertising and your ROI is usually much higher than other forms of advertising. With search advertising you aren’t interrupting users, they are searching for you. Danny also discusses that when advertisers do try search ads they realize the benefits of search and want to keep it their own little secret in order to prevent competition in that space.

I agree with Danny about search still being the revolution. There are a lot of missed opportunities in this space especially for local advertisers. When users perform searches they typically want to see results from local businesses they trust. Most local businesses are missing out on potential revenue. Another thing that these local advertisers do not realize is that in general search is a very cost efficient way to advertise your business and the more specific you get with a location the less money you will spend. Education is the key to convince local businesses to use Search Ads. I am anxious to see how long it takes advertisers to realize they must move some of their traditional ad spend over to search advertising.

Danny Sullivan also discussed the evolution of search and predicts where it is headed. First there was Search 1.0 and this was based strictly on content and location and frequency of keywords. As you can imagine this was taken advantage of and led to Search 2.0.

Search 2.0 or off page SEO was based on click through rate and link building. This is still a huge part of SEO today.

Search 3.0 is happening now. It is the process of blending verticals into the search results. A great example of this would be local search. Instead of displaying your typical search results at the top of the page they are replaced by the first three local results for that search query.

Eventually vertical data will take over the search results and lead to Search 4.0. Search results in 4.0 will be based on personalization. The query results will take into consideration your past query history, personal data, and social data. The results will be rewritten based on you or people you know.

Danny’s predication of Search 5.0 will include live answers and human interaction. If a user is having trouble finding what they are looking for there will be an option for them to get help from a human. Yahoo Answers is an example of this.