Serious about Search!

But is it all it is cracked up to be?

We who live by the rules of Google Analytics – where every action is geared towards persuading the visitor to click the ‘buy’ button – find our lives dominated by minor tweaks to content and layout, subtle shifts in emphasis, content refinement and all the other tools in the Search Marketers have to play with.

And yet isn’t it true that people who ‘buy’ online (or complete other calls-to-action) have done their research prior to taking the action? They’ve checked your site and competitors, they’ve listened to friends on social media, and they’ve evaluated the blogs and reviews.

So when they buy from you, they’ve probably already been to that part of your site before – or at least part-way. They already know the user-journey they are going to take, and any data we receive about buyers’ actions will therefore be misleading – and we don’t even realise it!

We Search specialists are so used to living in a myopic world of micro-management that we can’t see the wood from the trees – sometimes.

There’s a saying in Search: ‘Last Click Wins’. It’s something we have to guard against believing. Because websites, like everything else in marketing, are part of a complex marketing mix, made up of the four Ps; which means that every Search specialist should also be a marketer.

In other words, a Search specialist, let loose, can be a very dangerous person, unless they clearly understand the customer and the market in which they are working.

I’m Serious about Search. I’m also a marketer. I like to think that qualifies me to understand and make sense of those stats.