In your battle for consumer attention, can you afford to be
lost in the crowd of losers? Probably not; probably you should be talking with these guys. But read on…
If you’ve got a web site, the one thing you need, above all
else, is attention.
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You may want attention for its own sake if
you’re writing a blog.
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You may want attention because you’re a media or
content site and page views translate into sellable inventory that translate
into ad sales.
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You may want attention because you’re selling something,
directly or indirectly.
You may not think about “attention” much. Instead you may be
focused on brand awareness, conversion rates, the plummeting rates for your
run-of-network inventory or something else. But the root of everything you
think about starts from attention.
You get none of the things you want unless the people who look, type and click
make their way to your site. Unless consumers pay attention to you, you’ve got
nothing that you want.
To make it simple, I’m going to assume that you already have
some attention. If you’re a first-time blogger, you’ve given your URL to
your mother, your friends, and as much of your e-mail address book as you have
the nerve to. If you’re a brick-and-mortar kind of place, you’ve got a URL that
is close to the name consumers already know, and a bunch of consumers who
already know who you are and are well-disposed towards you have found their
way. If you’re pure e-commerce, you’ve got some customers who have bookmarked
you.
Given this assumption, the question becomes, how do you get
more attention than you already have?
Chess
This brings us to Chess.
Perhaps you’re already familiar with this board game and its
arcane rules; for example, pawns can only move forward one square at a
time, except on the first move, when they can move either one or two, and
except that they may capture an opponent’s piece that is one square diagonally
ahead of them. The rules for the other pieces are similarly weird.
Chess is a famously challenging game that takes piles and
piles of excess brain power to avoid embarrassment when playing against
precocious teen-agers. It is a classic nerd-magnet.
One of the things that famous chess players seem to like to
do to demonstrate how awesomely great they are is to play
simultaneous matches against many opponents.
The grand master walks from one board to the next, glances at the move the
opponent spent agonized minutes of intense concentration figuring out, makes
his counter-move in insultingly few seconds, moves on to the next victim, and
keeps circling until everyone is vanquished. The great chess master, endowed
with an overabundance of overactive brain cells, single-handedly defeats a
large crowd of pretenders, each of whom is probably good enough at chess to dispatch
normal mortals without breaking a sweat.
The participants in this kind of one-sided battle know
they’re going to lose, though a few naïve ones may hope otherwise. But the ones
who are check-mated in six moves feel like crap, and the few who are still
alive and giving the master a match at the end feel like winners.
Google, the gate-keeper of consumer attention
This brings us to Google.
You’re an eager aspirant for consumer attention. How do you
get attention on the web? When people are looking for what you’ve got, how do
they discover that you’ve got it?
In many cases, they go to Google (or Yahoo, etc.) and type
in something like what they want. Suppose they want to buy a cool sweater. They
might type in “buy sweater” or just “sweater” and get a list of millions
of sites that have something to do with sweaters. If your site sells sweaters,
where are you on that list? You might be in the second hundred thousand, which
is actually pretty good, because that might put you in the top couple of
percent of sites that are relevant to sweaters.
Being in the top percent or two or your graduating class is a great
achievement. However, being in the top percent or two of Google results is
abject failure. No consumer will ever spend hours scrolling down to your
listing, picking your site above endless pages of results that are higher in
the list than yours. In fact, if you’re not on the first couple of pages, you
can forget about consumer attention. You’d be better off standing with a big
sign at the busiest local intersection you can find.
Awful. What can you do about it?
Google the Chess Master
When a consumer types “sweater” into the search box, it is
entirely Google’s business who it selects to display in what order in the
results; unlike chess, the rules are made by Google, they’re secret, and they
change the rules any time they feel like it. Google is like the brainy,
arrogant chess grand master who likes to show off by playing a host of
opponents at the same time, and always winning. Your job isn’t to “beat”
Google, but to come out on the first page or two of the results list; in other
words, to be less of a loser than everyone else who “plays against” Google.
You make your “move” for top search results by carefully
crafting your website for maximum “searchability” for the search terms that
interest you the most. Google examines your “board” (web site) and everyone
else’s Google is “playing against,” applies the latest version of its secret
rules of the game, and decides the outcome. For most of the players, the result
is always the same: Check Mate, you lose!
No one can “beat” Google. Google controls all the boards,
makes up the rules and decides the outcome based on its made-up rules. It's like "blindfold chess," only with Google, it's everyone but Google who wears blindfolds.
iCrossing and SEO
This brings us to iCrossing’s search practice.
Lots of our
companies depend on the web for their business, so naturally they get pretty
good at playing against chess-grand-master-Google. For some of them, this skill
is life-or-death. But even the best of them only have their own web sites to
learn from, and have to focus on their business. What’s fun about iCrossing is
that optimizing web sites for search is their business (at least an
important part of it). So not only are they real good at it, they’ve developed
a bunch of tools to find and fix problems, and monitor the results.
If this sounds like an ad, I guess it kind of is, but not
intentionally. After one of my visits with their search gurus, I really got
off on what an ever-changing problem they’re solving. Then when the chess
metaphor popped into my head, I just couldn’t drop it – it’s just so
appropriate to the challenge everyone faces in getting visible on the web.