Yahoo!’s new Search Subscriptions, now in beta, means two things for SEO.
The first thing it means is that organic search is dead. Finished. It finally happened. Everyone can go home.
The second thing it means is that SEO is more important than ever was before.
Allow me to explain.
What Yahoo! Search Subscriptions is
Yahoo! Search Subscriptions is a search engine within Yahoo! that only searches subscription sites. It’s a little like a site search feature for several sites at once. When you arrive, you’re asked to click on any of the seven sites that Yahoo! can focus your search on:
Consumer Reports
FT.com
Forrester Research
IEEE publications
New England Journal of Medicine
TheStreet.com
Wall Street Journal
If you have a subscription to the sites that you’re searching, then you can proceed to those sites as you would from a typical SERP. If you don’t have a subscription to those publications, then you’ll end up on a page that says “this page only available to subscribers.”
In an aside in a recent instillation of my colleague Kevin Lee’s ClickZ column, Lee argued that what’s really happening here is the beginning of a variation on the much talked-about Google Wallet. I want to ignore that speculation for a moment, though, and take Yahoo! Search Subscriptions at face value.
How would you use it?
In the beginnings of the web, nobody really had a clue about what they were hoping to find. If they entered a query into a search engine, they would have to traipse through every website that the SEs gave them, until, at last, they found what they were looking for. Not because the SEs were giving them poor information - without the SEs, they would actually have had to surf - but because people weren’t familiar with websites well enough to know which sites were good, and which were idiotic.
Today it’s the opposite. Studies show that now, people are far more set in their ways in terms of the sites they like - and so a search engine search would far more likely be a way to locate a specific page on a website, a URL for a site they’ve already been to but whose address they’ve forgotten. Even if they’re looking for something more generalized, they often aren’t looking for sites they don’t know about; they’re looking for relevant pages on the sites that they already know.
One example. Today, a searcher looking for “size 10 womens shoes” might really be looking for the quickest way to the relevant results on Zappos, Shoes.com, Amazon, or maybe a clothing store like JCrew.com and the like. Even if www.best-web-shoes.com has similar search engine ranking to those other sites (and even if, in actuality, it’s a perfectly decent online shoe store), the searcher won’t be as excited about best-web-shoes.com as she will about Zappos. Why? Because she was looking for the Zappos, Shoes.com, Amazon etc. that she already knew.
And everything can get more complicated when you get to research. Because a bulk of the task of research - even offline research - is figuring out what, of all the information you have in front of you, is right and what isn’t. And what makes research even more complicated than, say, shoe shopping is that you tend to know what shoes you’d like (even if you haven’t found them yet), but you’re doing research precisely because you don’t know what it is you’re trying to find. So it’s that much harder to weed out what’s helping you from what’s leading you in the wrong direction.
That’s true of all research. On Internet research, when you’re dealing with millions of people telling you millions of different things, determining what’s true and what isn’t becomes a million times more complicated.
Enter Search Subscriptions. Each of the publications that it searches is a respected name in its field. And, as the name Search Subscriptions might imply, each of them are subscription publications. That means that most of the people using the Search Subscriptions service will already have subscriptions to one or all of the publications that they’re reviewing - in other words, they’ve already significantly pre-screened the sites that they want to search for.
The End of SEO?
The reason all of this is significant is that it means, essentially, that the second most popular search engine on the face of the earth has just admitted that organic search has failed. While it’s fun, in theory, to have the option of searching through the 8,058,044,651 web pages that Google offers, most searchers really only want to see one page, or maybe five pages, or maybe ten. You use search because you need to find a needle in a haystack in the ocean that is the Internet very, very quickly. Being forced to read through dozens of SERP results whose merits are hard to evaluate - even if they really are honestly relevant to your search - can feel like a waste of time. With Search Subscriptions, Yahoo! has effectively admitted this, and made a step toward making it better.
But while organic search might have lost some of its charm, SEO has gained a tremendous amount of importance for the top-brand companies. Because, if subscription search catches on as well as it does, then two things will happen: 1) people will increasingly use the search engines for what is, in effect, site-search; and 2) you’ll be competing with your closest competitors in Search more fiercely than ever.
Which really means that 3) you should start looking at the search engines as your pre-site sitemap. And, in a SERP that only shows results from three websites - yours and those of your two top competitors - you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure that you win in that SERP.
So your SEO needs to be absolutely, positively stellar. Not only in terms of getting positioning for your site, but in terms of being able to describe and present exactly the right landing page to the searcher who’s looking for what happens to be on your site. Because if you don’t do a stellar job of that, that doesn’t mean that your competition won’t.
And, by the way, if your SEO isn’t working the same way it used to be, you’ll want to bolster your chances with that other great search engine weapon - SEM.
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