What is the absolutely
most important thing about a
web site? A clean look? Attractive graphics? Usability? I say that win, place
and show for a web site is visitors -- being found. That means that when
picking a digital partner, there is really only one selection criterion that
matters: how good are they at SEO/SEM? That, in a nutshell, is the case for iCrossing.
I've written about this before. But I'm thinking about it
again because I just reviewed the slides from the recent iCrossing Board
meeting. The meeting was in Scottsdale concurrent with customer meetings, so it
included golf and other pleasant, sunny events. Meanwhile, New York City is
still digging out from a record snowfall, so naturally I chose to stay in NYC
and skip the meeting. What else is a nerd supposed to do? What do I know from
$%^$ golf, the surest
way to ruin what might otherwise be a perfectly pleasant walk??
Among the events reported at the meeting were a couple customer
wins in which the general-purpose digital agency of record was replaced by
(supposedly SEO-specialist) iCrossing. The losers must be grousing about what
idiots they have (had) for customers, firing wonderful, charming,
does-everything them and replacing them with a "niche
search-specialist" player like iCrossing.
Partly, the grousing is wrong. iCrossing is, in fact, a
full-service digital marketing agency. They build web sites, do design work,
etc. But mostly, the losers are missing something important: it is unbelievably important to be unsurpassedly, awesomely great
at SEO.
It all becomes clear when you use physical metaphors instead of
the usual barrage of TLA's.
Let's suppose you've got a store that sells sweaters. It's a nice store, with
its name out front in big letters: "Sally's Sweater Store." It's got
a big window by the sidewalk with an attractive selection of sweaters. The door
is inviting. This is the equivalent of building a website. It’s important!
However, the store is located at the end of a dead-end street away from the
main shopping area of a small town.
Which activity do you think will be most rewarding to Sally, the
owner of the Sweater Store:
1.
Get in some experts on “store face” design to get her a better
sign and display window.
2.
Get in some experts on “shopper usability” design to work on the
in-store displays, aisles, mirrors and other factors that make the store more
pleasant to shoppers.
3.
MOVE THE BLANKITY-BLANK STORE to a high-traffic area of a major
city with convenient parking, lots of foot traffic, and other stores nearby that
attract people who want clothing.
If the answer isn’t obvious, I can’t help you at all.
However, I will admit that while the answer is perfectly obvious
in the physical world, it can be a bit confusing in the on-line world. This is
because the equivalent of action #3 above involves making internal changes to
the site, just like actions #1 and #2 – but they are entirely different kinds
of actions, changing different kinds of things for different reasons.
You see support for the MOVE THE STORE, STUPID strategy every day.
Just today, a up-and-coming e-commerce company hired an ex-Google exec as CEO. What
is she going to concentrate on? According to an article
about her in the NY Times Bits Blog, “Ms.
Singh Cassidy said she planned to concentrate on bringing more users to
Polyvore.” In other words, she wants to move the store.
You might think that I think that the “S-factors” (SEO, SEM) are
the only ones that matter for growing traffic. Of course, we all know that
social media can have a huge impact site visits. (BTW, iCrossing has a great
social media practice, too.) There is nothing like having positive words about
your site be spread among a network of friends or twitterers. I don't claim
that SEO and SEM are the only factors in generating site traffic -- far from
it. But based on experiences I’ve had with a variety of sites, I would say you
would be well advised to resist painting the walls and fiddling with the
display windows, and instead put more effort moving your shop out of that
dead-end street it’s on now.
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