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Q&A: David Freeman, business director – SEO for Havas Media Group on integration, Google & wearables

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

December 3, 2014 | 7 min read

David Freeman, business director – SEO for Havas Media Group is the latest of The Drum Search Awards jury to open up with his views on some of the developments taking place in SEO at the moment.

David Freeman, Business Director – SEO for Havas Media Group

How did you get into working in search?

In a way, SEO was an obvious career path for me looking back. From an early age, when I first got access to the internet, I developed an interest in how websites were built and this interest evolved to the point where I taught myself how to build websites and then how to drive traffic to them. This led me to study Computing at A Level, which in turn led me to study Computer Science at University where I had the opportunity to learn more about Information Retrieval, alongside web development and enterprise database systems.

The Information Retrieval module not only taught me how the underlying algorithms of search engines work, but a core part of the course was to build a search engine from scratch. It goes without saying that this provided an incredible level of hands on experience into the inner workings of search engines and how they deliver results.

At this point SEO was the obvious route, but in all honesty I didn’t know SEO was a profession, so I went down the route of web development. Luckily, whilst interviewing for a client side role I was offered a dual PHP and SEO role due to my studies. From there I made the move agency side into a pure play SEO role and later joined Havas Media to head up their SEO team.

Search has quickly become a crucial component to every marketer's brand strategy - but where do you feel it is still falling down generally?

For me, integration is one of the biggest areas where search is not performing as strongly as it could, especially within the areas of organic & paid integrations and organic & content strategy.

If we look at the integration of paid and organic search we see many disjointed strategies across the market, where the paid search strategy is being run without consideration of organic search performance.

Content is a hot topic currently and brands have rightly been placing a lot of focus on content strategy. But there is still a tendency to leave search and particularly SEO out of this conversation, which results in a myriad of lost opportunities.

Spend through search has become a normal approach over the years, are we near an end to seeing people truly attempt to game the SEO system or will that never go away?

Many of the SEO’s, agencies and brands that traditionally gamed the system have moved on and realised that the long term risks and financial implications of a rankings penalty are simply not worth the short term gains. At the same time, many have also realised that a wide range of the techniques they were deploying were becoming less effective and weren’t delivering the results that they were able to achieve a few years earlier. This has led many to clean up their approach and deliver ethical strategies.

However, whilst there is an algorithm that can be gamed (and financial gains to be had by doing so) I doubt we will ever see a complete end to these strategies.

Google dominates the search landscape - in your opinion, how does this affect the sector?

I think it’s really important to remember that no one is being forced to use Google - users choose to do so and they have chosen in their masses. This is arguably because Google is continually pushing forward to offer users the best search experience and in my view they are miles ahead of the competition in this respect. This is the key reason why I don’t think that Google’s domination should matter, as taking a simplistic view brands just need to be where their audience is.

There is the view that we are at Google’s mercy as they continually evolve their product offering, organic search algorithms and paid search model. Naturally the changes they make won’t please all brands, but the ones that tend to question Google’s domination are invariably those that get negatively impacted by algorithm updates, as they are trying to get the quick wins by taking risks.

Without Google’s domination, search would likely be years behind where it is now. For instance, would Google otherwise have been able to develop Android (which has been a large contributor to the rate of change we have seen in mobile development), which in turn has contributed to a huge rise in mobile search and ecommerce?

Having said the above, I think we need to challenge the perception of what we think of as a search engine and when we do this, it is clear to see that Google doesn’t dominate all aspects of search:

• Amazon – dominates product search

• TripAdvisor – dominates travel search

• Rightmove and Zoopla – dominate property search

• Auto Trader – dominates automotive search

It is these search engines that concern Google the most and this has become more apparent recently with the launch of Google’s flight search (to compete against the likes of Skyscanner and Cheap Flights) and again last month when Eric Schmidt stated that Amazon is Google’s biggest competitor.

Will wearables or the Internet of Things impact the search sector and if so, how you see that evolving?

Wearables and the Internet of Things will undoubtedly change search, but we shouldn’t get carried away The majority of connected devices won’t really have a direct search impact as we traditionally think about it, but rather our connected devices and the data that they share will likely provide a much greater level of personalisation and predictive search.

When we think more of the traditional impact on search, for me the automotive sector is an area where we will notice a real evolution in connected technology, which will have a huge impact on local and voice search. A study by CAPGEMINI predicts that by 2020 there will be a six fold increase in connected cars and this will firmly bring us into a world of six screens.

We only have to look at the design of the Tesla Model S to see how they are placing a tablet sized connected device at the heart of their dashboard. These technological advancements will not only increase the level of local search, but will provide new opportunities for search engines and app developers to provide localised offers and suggestions direct to drivers dashboards.

What will you be looking for while judging The Drum Search Awards?

For me it’s about brilliant basics, sustainability, innovation and performance. I want to see first rate demonstration of skill and work that we can be proud of as an industry.

Find out more about The Drum Search Awards at the official website.

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