Search Engine Musings

Sometimes people who think they need to buy search engine optimisation or internet marketing really need to buy common sense and a neutral eye.

I’ve been thinking recently about how a lot of business people don’t seem to be able to look at their websites (and maybe their businesses) from the point of view of a visitor or potential customer.

As is often the case I’ve had a batch of remarkably similar calls, this time from businesses who all work in similar fields, such as IT consultancy, business training, etc. but who all have a complete lack of identity or message in their websites. They want to be found in search engines. Their problem is not just in getting noticed by search engines but in getting read and understood by users if they do arrive on the site. The fundamental cause of their problem is they are not getting the message home about What It Is That They Do.

Their sites are usually full of business-speak - they talk about “complete quality solutions”, and “business focused learning” but don’t tell you what they are there to solve or teach you about! They are so lacking in real information that you sometimes wonder if they take their site text straight out of a generic marketing book which doesn’t actually mention the product.

Talking to potential clients the first question I ask is frequently “what keyword phrases do you want to be found for?” With these companies they often don’t know! If I can’t suggest keywords from looking around the site then I try to tease out of them what the business is about. In the worst cases they still don’t know!

But the important thing here is that the site has already failed! I’ve been designing and studying sites for 12 years - if I can’t work out what a site and a company is about in a few minutes of study what chance have they of capturing the attention of a user comparing a number of sites looking for information to justify spending money and probably making up their mind in a few seconds? (Studies have shown that users generally decide whether a site is any use after about 10-15 seconds.)

An ex-colleague was once working on a site about change management and had to re-write the content to focus the pages more efficiently. He asked the client to describe what it was the company actually did since it wasn’t clear from the existing site. He was sent some freshly written text to explain it but having read it he was no further forward and the situation wasn’t improved after three phone calls. The client may well have been excellent at what he did but since he couldn’t describe it to someone who really wanted to understand it his chances of selling himself were pretty low.

If you have a site that doesn’t seem to be working for you then try to look at it from the point of view of a user who knows nothing about your business. What impression does it give you? What phrases stand out? Can you immediately tell what the company does, what its specialities are, what it can do for you? If not then the design is already flawed and needs a rethink. Read the main text further; does it give a clearly stated idea of the main elements of the business or is it full of generic marketing language with no real meaning. If it’s the latter then you’ve missed the chance to tell people what you do and why you’re different enough to be worth giving the contract to. Worse still, if it’s not getting across the message to the user then the search engines won’t see it either because there are obviously no keywords in there. Result - very few visitors, very few conversions.

If you really are in a business like change management then you have to realise that if you want to be found in search engines you’re going to have to find some more specific search terms to go for - those two words are so generic that there are 53 million competing pages in the UK alone on Google. Fortunately most businesses have much more specific subject areas and talents - make sure the management committee or the marketing department don’t hide the specifics under loads of compromises and/or worthless jargon on your site.

Penalties are something that seems to evoke something akin to open warfare in search engine optimisation circles. There are those who flatly deny that such things exist, there are those who insist they definitely do exist, and there are those (who seem more interested in semantics) who contend that it’s really filters rather than penalties and can’t seem to make their minds up either way.

Personally I have little doubt that they do exist - I’ve seen too many instances of sudden changes in ranking that could only be the result of corresponding changes in content. And no, I don’t believe in coincidence. Someone once said that

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.”

and that seems a perfect description of our relationship with search engines.

So who among the search engines has penalties? Recently I’ve been dealing with a site that seems to have been suffering from a duplicate content penalty in Google. Having found some more duplicate content on the site and removed it I was interested to notice that there was an immediate improvement in Yahoo rankings for the terms related to that page. This tends to confirm a feeling I’d had for a while that Yahoo had introduced either a filter or a penalty for duplicate content. Nothing as severe as Google, who seem to dislike it a lot and have long memories, but a perceptible difference in ranking.

So far I haven’t seen any evidence of MSN having any duplicate content penalties. However they do seem to be developing their algorithms all the time so don’t rule it out for the future.

On a more general point I never cease to be amazed that anyone uses someone else’s content - is it just laziness? To me, if I’m trying to sell a product or a service to people, I want to use my own words, my own angle on things, to sell that product. If I know anything at all about what I’m selling and who my market is it seems clear to me that I’m the one who can best articulate that. Why would I want to rely on someone else’s view?

Write your own copy, or if you don’t have the writing skills then talk to someone who does, tell them what you want to say and get them to write it for you. …. and make sure their work is completely original.