RealTime Search – Raising The Speed Limit!

The emergence of RealTime search is placing pressure on businesses to not lose traffic to market competitors. The integration of RealTime results with word search means that pay-per-click and search engine optimisation strategies will have to change.

Businesses, especially eCommerce, cannot afford to miss out on providing potential customers quicker access to minute-by-minute product or service status and availability.

RealTime search means being able to look at content instantly as there is no delay between it being created and published. Search engines are rapidly moving towards the goal of delivering the most up-to-date, relevant content on the web, indexed and ready for display, higher in the search results!

Essentially, this means that the bar has been raised in competing for word search visitors, customer capture and maintaining maximum website accessibility. According to a recent report, it’s estimated that as much as 40 per cent of all searches today have a RealTime component. The static results generated by traditional search are no longer enough to satisfy users’ desire for up to the minute information.

For online businesses, marketing strategies have to come to terms with RealTime search and become part of the ‘conversation’. This must now involve engagement with social media environments like Facebook and Twitter. Communities, forums, status messages, breaking news, blogs, articles and interest groups are also in the conversation. In the new world of RealTime search, all manner of diverse content elements may now feed into Google search results pages.

As an outcome of the widening of included content, one critical issue for RealTime search is the noise or irrelevant content that is generated. Stream everything without any filtering, and a search could return much unwanted, irrelevant info. Filter too strongly, and a search might omit important trends that have just been detected.

No doubt, the impact RealTime search will have on both organic and paid search (PPC) will increase as RealTime results become more prevalent and it’s likely that some businesses will be more affected than others, depending on their type of service provision.

Either way, no business can now afford to remain out of the powerful new marketing threads being spun across the web. Consulting with web design professionals is imperative to keep informed of what you need to do to keep growing your business, even as the new channels and platforms swerve into view.