One of the challenges that people who work at home online are facing is to understand and prepare for the future issues of the online business world in general and more specifically, the search industry.

For that purpose, Search Engine Watch have conducted a survey among 83 search marketers, questioning what are the important issues search marketers will face in 2012? This is what they found:

Most Important Issues Search Marketers Will Face In 2012

1.  Mobile Search (43%)- The mobile industry bloomed incredibly in the last couple of years and many are believing that it will take over completely in the next few years. What surely reinforced this assumption is that Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

2.  Attribution Modeling (24%)- In short, attribution modeling is the optimization of gaining and attributing the “last click” to our website. In times when internet users are browsing and researching in many pages and websites, this has become a major concern.

3.  Impact Of +1 and Like Buttons (16%)- Emphasize two things: The social networking influence on search rankings (not too high yet) and that the +1 and the Like are predicted to be the most popular social buttons in 2012.

4.  Combining Paid And Organic Search (13%)- Search marketers are also somewhat occupied with an optimized combined SEO and PPC effective campaign.

5.  Video Search (2%)- Only few search marketers are thinking that video marketing will be an important issue in 2012.

6.  Branding On Facebook (1%)- I think that this data is mostly saying that search marketers find it more important to receive Likes and +1’s than optimizing the brand page itself on the social network.