How to get ahead of the search engines in 3 steps

Posted by Toby Jenkins

Search engines in 3 steps

Marketing in The Age of Google (by Vanessa Fox) is an insightful book about search, how it’s impacted the web and our lives, and how to make the most of it for business.

Vanessa goes into detail about the specifics of search engine optimisation and how search engines can be used for business planning, research and testing. i definitely agree with the tag line: “Your online strategy IS your business strategy”. The information is good, tying together the various concepts and tools available with examples and diagrams.

The parts that stood out for me were these quotes (bolding mine):

According to leaked 2008 Google quality guidelines, utility (how helpful the page is for the searcher based on intent), “is the most important aspect of search engine quality.”

A much better strategy is to focus on what the search engines are trying to achieve with all of those algorithm tweaks – showing the most relevant results for a given query.

Remember, the customers remain the same – they are simply adapting new behaviours to take advantage of the world of search.

What does this mean for you?

Don’t wait for the search engines, get ahead of them.

How?

Let’s look at search engines in 3 steps:

1. Be useful.
2. Be relevant.
3. Be easy to use.

Because the customers haven’t changed, only the way they are finding information!

The reality is, if you are all of these things, the search engines will eventually catch up to you. With 26,316 seriously smart people at Google, (not to mention all the staff at Yahoo!, Bing and the others), they are bound to tweak their algorithms to catch up and deliver the most relevant and useful results.

Side note:

It was great to see that Vanessa’s concepts closely aligned with our Web Strategy Planning Template, particularly the idea of “search personas” mirroring “buyer personas”.]