Holistic Findability vs SEO vs Director of Search?
Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart - Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was “SEO strategy”. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who we’re doing them for. (Really, I’m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: we’re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, we’re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that it’s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, it’s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course - we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they don’t show is what the viewer wanted and didn’t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. It’s TV, with craftier Nielsens.
But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, we’re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. It’s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all we’re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then aren’t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our client’s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities they’re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.What’s the difference?
If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) you’ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:36 am
I don’t sweat search much these days. Largely that’s because I obsessed about it for five years and now it is something I incorporate invisibly. SEO pulls people in that are already interested in you or your topic space, which is great because they tend to be ready to transact. However, the people that are ready to buy, also don’t want to “get to know you”.
Beyond findability is discoverability. It’s nice to be in the path of someone search for you, but it’s even better to be socialized with someone that didn’t know they wanted to know you. To me, the *real* findability these days is in the social web. If I have a message that I want to get out there, I don’t turn to Google, I turn to Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and the places where people are. I don’t see me inbound links as my most important asset, I see my friend list as my #1 possession.
Getting people started in the social web has taught me a few things about how people come to understand the value of social findability. First, people connect with people, then they’ll listen to the messages. That means that the people within an organization become the most valuable link to advancing an organizations messages. If it’s people are well liked, then their messages will be shared. The biggest catch is that building up friend lists and trust takes time and social skills, which means most businesses lose interest before the value arrives. I help clients be patient by showing them timelines from previous projects and the success they experienced. If they are *still* having a hard time swallowing the value of social finability, tell them the interesting thing about being successful socially first, is that it leads to grips of fresh inbound links, which seriously strengthens your SEO.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:52 am
I don’t see those as oppositional. Use SEO to showcase the great interactive content area you’ve set up. There are hand in hand, supporting each other. That means if you’ve built a fun flash piece for a snowboarding site where people can converse/interact on the killer snow on the slopes this winter, then be good in also building an auto-generated from that user input a txt file thats then thrown up on the backend for search to spider. Hand-in-hand. Not oppositional.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:40 am
I think there is still no “best” way, and that SEO is still a very viable goal, depending on the site/product/brand, as well as the one-way sales pitch.
If I’m selling funny t-shirts, my goal is traffic. I’m selling a low-margin, high-volume product, and the more people to my site the better. In this case, my friends list is important, but not so much as a high SERP ranking for the big keywords. Now, I definitely want people to engage with the brand; i want them to come back and tell their friends, I want them to buy shirts over and over… But I’m still focusing on volume. And in that volume, I’m more focused on showing my product (as a channel– or old media) than communicating.
However, let’s say I’m Jive Software. Suddenly, one great lead or connection with a potential client or existing client can mean a massive opportunity for my company. Suddenly search is much less important, connections, relationships, sincere communication paths are vital. And in this case, a traditional broadcast message has little importance over a newer find-able paradigm based on relationships.
Now, to agree with Sharon, the two are complimentary. If I can take my t-shirt business, and get my audience to become my evangelists *in volume*, sending out messages to their friends lists, telling my story to their social media connections, then I get both: a sincere conversation at a high-volume, scalable level.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
what I’m hearing - with different harmonies and rythms - is the same 1st rule: It’s about the audience.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Justin: “I don’t sweat search much these days.” Im with you here. My feeling is that if you architect the site correctly, your SEO is built in. Unfortunate, not all of our clients see things this, they ask us for a specific SEO strategy, at its at these times I find the need to articulate, as best I can, what a broader vision of search might look like for them. Im curious though about your friend based discoverability. Do you find there are specific types of projects where this more successful than others?
Sharon: I don’t find them at odds either. I hope thats not how I came off. My goal with our clients here is work with them to try to always see things from the customers point of view. Really for me ‘find-ability’ isn’t instead of SEO, its really just a different way of looking at it and defining who were optimizing for and from that context, what optimized means.
Jason: I agree to a large extent. I will add though, that even if Im selling shirts, I may still not be going for just volume. I want to get the right people, to the site, and then, I want them to be able to find the shirt they love. And if they’re not ready to buy then, I want to make it easy on them to find the same shirt once they are ready. As for the Jive site. Im only tangentially familiar with Jive, so I can’t speak specifically to that, however, we are in the middle of the first complete rebuild of the Nemo site in a few years. In the early stages of this, we did a lot of thinking and research about who we’re actually talking to with this site and what they are looking for. Some things we found is that the primary people coming to the Nemo site are people in the industry looking for work. After that, it was people doing research on design and development firms, but they we’re the people who were actually in the position of making a choice on the matter. In both of these cases, it became pretty clear that it would be critical for us to make a site where it was easy to find the type of content each user wanted, and also for them to be able to pass this content around and find it repeated times.
For those of us who work in the industry, a lot of these things are second nature. For our clients though, it may not be.
me2i81sour2: yes. same old thing. You’d be surprised how many of our clients forget this though.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:26 am
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