Google’s search engine results change con­stant­ly, keep­ing us mar­keters on our toes. While it used to be prized ter­ri­to­ry, a No. 1 rank­ing doesn’t look the same as it did six or 12 months ago. Search results are filled with more noise than ever, with local list­ings, mul­ti­ple paid search place­ments, rich snip­pets and Map Packs. It’s time for a uni­fied dig­i­tal strat­e­gy in order to real­ly gain the atten­tion of cus­tomers.

In Atlanta – my home­town – here’s what a search for “mar­ket­ing agen­cies” deliv­ers. Three paid ads stack the top of the page in addi­tion to the tra­di­tion­al right rail of ads. (Even now Google is rolling out a huge change to the way AdWords ads are dis­played, elim­i­nat­ing most right-rail ads.) We also see a Map Pack, which is typ­i­cal for loca­tion-based search­es, but is fre­quent­ly dis­played now when you search for ser­vice-based terms such as “plumb­ing.” You’ll even find the Map Pack pop­ping up when you search for prod­ucts in some instances. The num­ber one organ­ic search list­ing for “mar­ket­ing agen­cies in atlanta” didn’t make the screen­shot on my 13-inch Mac­Book. It’s below the fold.

What a dif­fer­ence a year makes. Here’s what the same phrase yield­ed a year ago, cour­tesy of Google’s Search Tools fea­ture. The ads are con­densed, there isn’t a Map Pack and the first two organ­ic search results appear above the fold on my screen.

It’s pret­ty obvi­ous that a one-dimen­sion­al dig­i­tal strat­e­gy that tra­di­tion­al­ly relied on organ­ic search just does­n’t cut it now.

Considerations For Your Multichannel Presence

Each chan­nel is impor­tant in its own inde­pen­dent way, but cus­tomer behav­ior has always been the dri­ving force behind the changes Google makes to its search results dis­play.

SEO

Be sure that your SEO strat­e­gy is fir­ing on all cylin­ders and that your busi­ness is doing every­thing it can to show up in all types of Google results. This means you need to con­sid­er Android App Index­ing, Knowl­edge Graph oppor­tu­ni­ties, and Map Pack results by uti­liz­ing Google My Busi­ness. For SEO, the hard truth is that a tra­di­tion­al No. 1 organ­ic rank­ing may not bring as much traf­fic to your site as it did a year ago – unless your audi­ence has a ten­den­cy to find and click on organ­ic list­ings no mat­ter what dis­plays above them. You may also want to reeval­u­ate how you attribute met­rics like traf­fic and rev­enue to SEO. With tech­nol­o­gy like the iPhone Spot­light search, some mobile traf­fic that should be con­sid­ered organ­ic search is like­ly being buck­et­ed as direct.

Paid Search

If Facebook’s Rea­choca­lypse proved any­thing, it’s that mar­keters have to con­sid­er pay­ing to reach their audi­ences. The evo­lu­tion of SERPs shows the same trend – it’s prob­a­bly time to con­sid­er paid search, even if it hasn’t tra­di­tion­al­ly been a chan­nel for your busi­ness. Even if you have uti­lized paid search, Google’s changes should force a reeval­u­a­tion of your paid approach. More than ever, your paid and organ­ic strate­gies should align so you can bal­ance organ­ic per­for­mance against paid search tar­gets. Even if you rank No. 1 for a term organ­i­cal­ly, you need to eval­u­ate the search land­scape for that phrase. Is it worth dou­bling down to appear on that SERP twice? Aug­ment­ing organ­ic with paid may be par­tic­u­lar­ly ben­e­fi­cial if your organ­ic list­ing falls below the fold for a search phrase. Regard­less of your con­fi­dence in your paid and organ­ic strate­gies, tools like User Test­ing can help deter­mine how your tar­get audi­ence inter­acts with the search results. Mul­ti­vari­ate tests can help you fig­ure out if your audi­ence is more inclined to click on the first list­ing they see, scroll to find the organ­ic list­ing, or inter­act with the page in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent way. The results can lead to an informed deci­sion about your paid search strat­e­gy as it relates to your organ­ic rank­ings.

Social

Search isn’t lim­it­ed to Google; cus­tomers increas­ing­ly use social chan­nels as search tools. This isn’t new, but these SERP changes cre­ate new oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands to real­ly nail and ben­e­fit from their social pres­ence. Uti­lize your social accounts to demon­strate your brand’s per­sona and cre­ate a mem­o­rable expe­ri­ence for cus­tomers. Two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion with cus­tomers and mem­o­rable hash­tag cam­paigns can help cus­tomers think of your brand first when using a social search engine. It’s a mul­ti­chan­nel win when brand­ed organ­ic entries and vis­its increase for your web­site.

Traditional Marketing

Omnichan­nel mar­ket­ing is crit­i­cal for a brand look­ing to leave a last­ing impres­sion with cus­tomers. Cul­ti­vat­ing a brand across TV, print and radio, can help to lead more peo­ple direct­ly to your web­site or help dri­ve peo­ple to your site via brand­ed search. This brand aware­ness can help cut through the noise, and sig­nal Google that you’re a vital resource for its users.

Site Strategy

Once a cus­tomer arrives on your site, a pos­i­tive user expe­ri­ence will keep them com­ing back. Pos­i­tive user behav­ior will also send good sig­nals to Google and help your organ­ic search efforts.

Email

Cre­ate an email col­lec­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­e­gy that deliv­ers tru­ly valu­able infor­ma­tion to your cus­tomers and poten­tial cus­tomers. If you can tar­get cus­tomers with behav­ior-based emails through mar­ket­ing automa­tion, go for it. These days, the brands that can deliv­er a mes­sage that real­ly gives cus­tomers infor­ma­tion they’re look­ing for will be top of mind. This also means that on-site con­tent is extreme­ly valu­able. If your site offers authen­tic, help­ful and enter­tain­ing con­tent, you can repur­pose it for email and use that con­tent as a land­ing page for email cam­paigns. Sites like Apart­ment Ther­a­py offer a shin­ing exam­ple for curat­ed con­tent repur­posed for its email cam­paigns.

Smart Brands Have Figured This Stuff Out

When you search for flights, South­west doesn’t allow aggre­gate sites like Kayak, Expe­dia, or CheapOair dis­play its fares. As a result, click­ing through to an aggre­gate site page you like­ly won’t see South­west in com­pet­i­tive pric­ing results. So what does South­west do about it? They bid on those same organ­ic phras­es that aggre­gate sites rank for and ensure it gets face time with poten­tial cus­tomers. Even if a cus­tomer does click through to Kayak or Expe­dia, South­west has kept its brand top of mind so that a deal hunter thinks to check the South­west site too before book­ing. As a bonus, South­west vig­or­ous­ly retar­gets cus­tomers via social media.

On Twit­ter, both Lyft and Uber have fig­ured out how to con­nect with their cus­tomers by tak­ing a per­son­al and proac­tive approach to reply­ing to tweets. I pre­fer Lyft’s GIF-heavy strat­e­gy, but both brands do a great job of mak­ing their cus­tomers feel lis­tened to and inter­act­ed with. Cus­tomer loy­al­ty is key.

When you search for a plumber in Atlanta, the Map Pack results aren’t the sites that rank on page one for organ­ic search. Most aren’t in the right rail ads either. By set­ting up Google Places well these busi­ness­es have giv­en them­selves a leg up that they oth­er­wise would not have.