Two days ago I wrote a post about the future of search, and how it will dictate the future of SEO.  In particular, I mentioned the possibility of search moving more toward a social media aggregation model, an end to which Twitter is already working.

Social media-based search would be an interesting shift in our search paradigm, a shift that would create interesting new challenges for SEO.  But just last night, Marissa Mayer, VP at Google mentioned the possibility of an even more radical paradigm shift: search engines that return answers, not just results.  Listen to Marissa Mayer’s commentary.

Now this could make SEO a very interesting job.  Just imagine: an SEO’s role would no longer simply be to drive traffic to a website, but to convince a search engine to include a website’s content as part of a greater solution returned to a user.  It’s hard to imagine exactly what Google means by delivering an “answer,” but one example Marissa gave was assembling a chart or video to answer a searcher’s question.

One implication I could envision for SEO is a shift in targeting strategy, making SEO less like direct marketing and more like advertising.  Given the nature of search today–a search engine returns results deemed explicitly relevant to a particular search query–SEO strategy generally begins with keyword targeting, or identifying specific query spaces where a website can intersect a user.  Generally, these query spaces must be highly relevant to a website’s offering.  But in “Search 3.0,” a search engine would try to “figure out” the entire picture of what a user is really looking for.  So a site could “rank,” in a sense, for terms other than highly-relevant query spaces.  For instance, “used volkswagen” might not just turn up information on where to buy a used VW, but where to find aftermarket outfitting, too.

How do you imagine the evolution of search into an answers rather than results might mold SEO?  Share your thoughts!

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