[Sigia-l] Search Engines: 99% Bad

[Fred Beecher]

On 1/10/06, Christopher Fahey <chris.fahey at behaviordesign.com> wrote:
>
> I suspect he wrote it because his clients increasingly believe that spending
> a million dollars on search engine advertisting/placement/keywords is a far
> better way to spend an online marketing budget than, say, actually fixing
> the web site. Why bother to fix something if nobody can even find it? Web
> marketing dollars need to be allocated to (a) the site, and (b) marketing
> the site. The SEM (search engine marketing) industry is thus in some ways a
> direct competitor to the web design/consulting industry.

What he seems to be saying is that SEM is bad because it's expensive
and as a result makes it more difficult for companies to make a profit
from Web site sales. However, in one tiny paragraph he says that SEO
(search engine optimization, aka organic placement) is no problem
although it can't be relied upon due to the constantly changing nature
of the rankings. This has more merit than the rather inflammatory
statement that is the title of this thread.

However, I will disagree with the "unreliable" part of his statement
about organic optimization. Although this revenue stream *is*
unreliable if left untended, it *will* be reliable if there is a
constant commitment to user research, both through site analytics and
traditional user research. Keeping an eye on who is coming to your
site from which search engine and with what keywords will keep you on
top of the ebb and flow of user behavior.

I would even say that organic SEO is a *benefit* to site usability, as
long as a site is designed to accomodate such a campaign. Over the
past year and a half, I have been involved in *several* IA projects of
which SEO has been a major component. In some cases, it has influenced
decisions about the structure of the site and sometimes even the
pages. During user research sessions, the question "How do you find
XYZ information" is almost invariably answered with "I type XYZ into
Google/Yahoo." This knowledge has influenced significant decisions
about site structure and is beginning to influence user testing
strategies. Whether to begin information-finding tasks at a search
engine home page has been an item of some discussion lately (where I
am, and I believe I've seen it on this list too).

Although I was highly skeptical of it when it first came on the scene,
I now strongly believe that SEO and usability go hand-in-hand. What is
it that we do, after all? We create Web sites that are structured in
such a way as to support user information-finding behaviors. Right
now, search is an enormous part of that behavior.

So, my point is that search engines are most definitely *not* 99% bad,
that they are more likely 99% good (with appropriate usability input,
of course :), and that Nielsen's article wasn't saying anything of the
kind. It was against pay-per-click SEM, not search engines in general,
which may (based on some mathematical voodoo) be an idea that has some
more merit.

- Fred