Often it’s the things you see every day that you don’t notice changing, your face in the mirror, the length of the grass and then all of a sudden you’re an old man pushing a lawnmower.
Where am I going with this? Other than into a scary future, well Google. Noticed anything different lately? Probably, like me and my developers who look at the Google letterbox everyday, not much on the face of it, yet our ‘Frenemies’ as Martin Sorrell likes to call them keep adding brilliant little search addendums and waiting for us to spot them.
Seen the wonder wheel yet? Put in your company name and with wonder wheel you can see which areas of the web your profile inhabits and your relationship with other online brands. This ‘mind-map’ of word association is a real boon for SEO, enabling you to find the words most frequently associated with your brand and add them to your keyword list.
Part of the problem for Google in publicising these gizmos is that they don’t want to mess up the mega successful, minimalist front page of Google which, incidentally came about because Page and Brin couldn’t decide how it should look so just left it functional (typical techies).
We’ll therefore have to continue to peel back the layers of Google’s big white onion to find the good stuff underneath. It does beg the question, if we as SEO specialists have a hard time keeping up with Google developments, what chance has a broad focussed marketing department got?