About two years ago, I made an active decision for Holistic Search to take a back seat. As Head of SEO for MediaCom, my role had become larger and larger as the MediaCom i-LAB brand picked up traction in bo
th Manchester and London.
In those two years a lot has changed. The digital product at MediaCom North has grown massively, i-LAB is now the digital brand for MediaCom across both London and Manchester and my role now encompasses SEO, PPC, Display and Affiliates as Group Head of Digital for MediaCom North.
It’s not just my circumstances that have changed. The digital landscape has changed significantly in that time. Two years ago, enhanced campaigns were the buzz of PPC, now we talk audience targeting, DMP’s and systems thinking.
SEO in particular has seen its own trials and tribulations. Google eventually started finding their feet with regards to weeding out irrelevant results from the search engines. The evolution of their algorithms from Panda to Penguin and more recently RankBrain have seen a far more complex foundation for Google to evaluate content across the web – and accordongly they are able to factor in a number of additional factors into their algorithm beyond traditional explicit search query signals.
These days implicit signals are increasingly prominent in what results are returned for a query. For example, what the user may have searched for before, what device they are searching for, even what they may have been doing within other Google properties such as GMail or Google+.
It’s this ability to personalise that is increasingly prominent across other digital channels as well. If one looks across the paid search landscape, advertisers are now able to tie 1st party data across the paid search landscape using complex DMP’s where they can combine this with second or third party data to truly personalise the customer journey with data playing a fundamental part in this new complex digital landscape.
The rationale therefore for a holistic approach to digital cannot be underestimated – as in an increasingly connected world across both on and offline its not just what we say – it also matters where, when, why and how we speak to clients that matters