2008 August

photo credit: mattyturner

As I’ve made no effort to hide, I’m a fan of Seth Godin and in particular his philosophy on marketing as storytelling. This morning he wrote a nice post on “Creating stories that resonate” that leads to the inevitable question: does your website resonate?

This question is kind of an extension of an earlier question we asked — Is your website brochureware?, where we asked if your site is something that’s up there because you felt obligated to put it up, or if it’s a strategic, core piece of your company’s identity and marketing.

Having a website that resonates is not one thing. It’s not great design, it’s not great SEO, it’s not a great testimonial or whitepaper. In fact, many websites resonate while missing some of these components, and many fail to resonate with them.

What makes a resonating site different from their bland competitors is that they demonstrate an understanding of their intended audience and meet their needs.

What made MySpace or YouTube succeed where dozens of clones failed?

What makes craigslist such minimalist perfection and Copyblogger a site you can’t help subscribing to?

It’s not one element on the site. It’s the owners’ understanding of what their audience wants and a million minor things tweaked to meet those needs.

Once you’ve aligned your web site’s strategy to meet the needs of your customers, those million little things will start to work for you, too. The choices of keyword targeting become clear. The kinds of offers that work are evident. The design becomes a byproduct of function, not a me-centric portfolio piece. And of course, you start generating the stats that help you do better, and better, and better.

Just like there is no “quick fix” to turning around a site that’s not doing well in organic search, you won’t create a site that resonates from a bland one in a day. But you can start thinking about and connecting with, the hopes, fears, and desires of your customers and use that as your most important strategic advantage.

It never fails to surprise me how often I’ll click on a pay per click ad only to end up on a page that’s resemblance to my search query is worse than a Canal St knock-off. I experience this both as a consumer and a professional as I compulsively click on ads in an effort to understand the state of pay per click marketing and the often neglected connection to the customer.

Let’s take the search term “solar panels,” a nice, simple, fairly straightforward term, right? After all, what else could someone who types in solar panels be looking for other than, well, information on solar panels?

Well, the answer to that question varies –quite a lot — depending on whether you look at the organic search results or the paid listings.

In the organic column you see a mix of commercial sites with varying degrees of information, the token Wikipedia entry and a nice integration of Google Universal listings including some eCommerce retailers, a YouTube video, and blog entries. While getting dumped onto some of these eCommerce sites may be a little thin on the practical details you might be looking for, what would you expect when typing in such a generic search? (Try something like “learn about solar panels” if what you really want is information…)

What’s really fascinating, though, is how poorly the pay per click ads match the actual query. The answer to the question on most of the pay per click advertisers, instead, seems to be… what do we want people who like solar panels to think about?

This me-centric thinking leads to a variety of oddball ads — one promoting an energy audit (no info on solar there), another promoting the Democratic National Convention (powered by a lot of things, the sun not being one of them), one info-packed if ugly site for a solar panel retailer, and a half-dozen knock off sites by the same advertiser promoting a single product (which, by the way, isn’t a solar panel).

And we wonder why users are sometimes hesitant to click on paid ads?

On the flip side, paid search ads that are properly targeted are incredibly effective. After all, isn’t it pretty cool that I can throw “war and peace book” into Google and then see an ad to Amazon.com that shows me… the actual book? And hey, there’s the “Buy it Now” button…

Relevancy and specificity are critical to an effective pay per click campaign, as we’ll be discussing in our webinar this Tuesday afternoon — Pay Per What? (2:00PM EDT).

Well, if Googling yourself wasn’t already fun enough, you can now use Google’s powerful new Insights for Search tool to get a lot more information than you ever could before.

Irreverently called “Google Trends on steroids” by Andrew Chen, the tool allows you to type in a search term and then see relative search data based on time trends and region. The easiest thing to do is to go to the site, type in your business’ name, and then see how popular you are at home and abroad.

But there’s way more to this tool than voyeurism, which is why we’re so excited about it.

One cool feature of the software is its ability to track news releases (it’s a rather scattered implementation now, but I’m sure it’ll improve), allowing you to see how major events may have impacted the popularity of your site.

Another application is to supplement keyword research — while now it’s easy enough to get the raw numbers associated with a search term, getting a sense of its rising or falling popularity, and its geographic-weightedness, is a huge asset.

Isn’t it nice to know that “HR Software” is densely searched in Georgia?

Or that “marketing podcast” is a big hit in Germany and the Netherlands?

Already the web is filled with reports generated by the program, including regional popularity of social media sites as well as popularity of social media sites worldwide (and a great response from TechCrunch on their worldwide popularity).

Google’s accumulation of data is staggering, but it’s good to see them opening up ways to use this information for the public… well, I hesitate to say “good,” but for the public information, at least. And its help people like us do a better job of understanding what’s going on in the wild, wild web.

I have to admit, I was pretty captivated by the Olympics coverage over the weekend. From the men’s rowing to the women’s gymnastics, I couldn’t get enough of it. It was two days of intense spectator sporting. However, since it is Monday morning, and I’m at work, and can’t be home watching the games right now, I thought it only fitting to write a blog post about How Search Engine Optimization is like the Olympics, because let’s face it…it is.

1. It’s not a one time deal. You can’t go to one practice and expect to make the Olympic team. It takes longetivity, hard work, and consistent effort to make those dreams actualize. Same is true for SEO. You can’t optimize your site once and expect it to consistent be on top. In order to stay on top, you must exercise it’s content and keywords, feed it a diet of quality inbound links and make sure that the code is lean and mean.

2. There is no “I” in SEO. There are individual events and there are team events in the Olympics. But even the individuals belong to a team. They may compete alone, but they have the support of their fellow teammates and an entire country cheering them on from home. Your website’s SEO also needs a team. A team of solid code, strong inbound links (people cheering for you), and on & off page optimization, working together to bring home the gold.

3. Cheaters never win. Steroids or synthetic hormones mar the integrity of Olympic athletes, just as Black Hat SEO undermines honest SEO efforts. Cheating your way to the top may give you an instant win, however, it will likely come back to haunt you. Just ask Marion Jones.

4. There are winners and there are losers. There is only one gold medal, one top spot. Despite your hardest efforts, there can only be one winner. Some will be at the top of the rankings, some will win the gold medal, others will not. It’s okay. It only means you must keep working towards the prize. Don’t give up.

If you are interested in watching a little more Olympic SEO coverage, tune into our webinar, What you Need to Know about SEO, tomorrow, Tuesday August 8th at 2:00 EST.