As 2013 comes into focus, more and more business web design teams are turning their attention – and their clients’ campaigns – away from search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Should you take that as a sign that search marketing is becoming less important?

The short answer is “not really.” That’s because, with more than 2 billion searches processed per day, Google is still massively important on its own. And although Yahoo and Bing attract fewer visitors, they can both still be important to your online marketing plan.

So, it isn’t that search marketing is becoming less important, just that it’s getting harder to do. Google is getting more aggressive about filtering out sites that it considers to be “over-optimized,” leaving businesses with a dilemma.

Here are two quick things you can do to stay ahead of the pack:

1. Keep using Internet ads for targeted traffic. Because you can search for key words by sight and customer, it might be easier (and even more efficient) to target them that way.

2. Make your site better for visitors, not search engine. Since Google will penalize you for obvious search engine optimization anyway, why not pay more attention to buyers and what they want?

Search engines will still be important for many years to come, but it’s better if you worry less about them, and more about your own site and customers.

Call Marcy Design, a Columbus Ohio website design company to help with your web, marketing and advertising campaigns.