expertSEM

Yesterday, I mentioned to my staff that I think it was a great day for our business, the search engine industry and for those companies who truly understand all aspects of search. From an industry point of view, the two-horse race is now on, and it will push both companies to stay innovative in the search arena. I often felt that if Microsoft didn’t fully get behind search marketing, it would be only a matter of time before Google was the only player in the space. And we always see a lack of innovation when this happens. Most companies feel are reliant on Google for the vast bulk of their ad spend, but that’s not the most ideal situation to be in. It works, but when you have another larger player like MicroHoo, you potentially have another large entity to rely on.

I realize some people might be saying that the volume of search inventory will be the same; it will just now be combined in one interface. And that is true. Microsoft adCenter has been showing a lot more progress then Yahoo!’s Panama, which will show a marginal benefit at first. However, paid search is not the only place I foresee benefits.

Paid Inclusion
Paid inclusion (PI) will be gone. PI is a way for companies to pay their way into Yahoo!’s natural results. Google and Bing do not offer PI, and this is where I see a great opportunity for companies who are proficient in search. Some keywords are almost impossible to get on the first page of Yahoo! without paying a CPC price. With Yahoo! changing to Bing’s algorithmic search engine, ranking will go to those with better SEO skills.

Content Network
MicroHoo will align two of the largest trafficked content networks on the web. On their own, neither company has been able to really make an impact in the marketplace with a self-served system. Now, the inventory that can be started and stopped by a flip of a switch (a la AdSense) will be a powerful network, as long as adCenter progresses. All those (eventual) advanced-targeting capabilities in a self-serve application will give companies a great opportunity to generate a large amount of targeted traffic. Google relies on domainers and other content sites for distribution, but MicroHoo is poised to monetize both networks with adCenter. This will be their major advantage, because they own the content as well as the ad serving.

In the end, it comes back to the realization that Microsoft is a great technology company. Its major downfall has been the lack of scale needed to really test its software effectiveness on search traffic. Knowing that they have such great content and an extensive user base, I always felt that Microsoft, as the third largest search engine, could develop the technology needed to compete with Google. It just needed a much larger sample of search queries running through its network. With this search alliance, MicroHoo may just have the search volume it needs to legitimately battle Google.