Monthly Archives: August 2012

Climbing the Slippery Slopes of Mount White Hat

First published August 30, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On Monday of this week, fellow Search Insider Ryan DeShazer bravely threw his hat back in the ring regarding this question: Is Google better or worse off because of SEO?

DeShazer confessed to being vilified after a previous column indicated that Google owed us something. I admit I have a column penned but never submitted that Ryan could have added to the “vilify” side of that particular tally. But in his Monday column, Ryan touches on a very relevant point: “What is the thin line between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?” For as long as I’ve been in this industry (which is pushing 17 years now) I’ve heard that same debate. I’ve been at conference sessions where white hats and black hats went head to head on the question. It’s one of those discussions that most sane people in the world could care less about, but we in the search biz can’t seem to let go.

Ryan stirs the pot again by indicating that Google may be working on an SEO “Penalty Box”: a temporary holding pen for sites that are using “rank modifying spammers” where results will fluctuate more than in the standard index. The high degree of flux should lead to further modifications by the “spammers” that will help Google identify them and theoretically penalize them. DeShazer’s concern is the use of the word “spammers” in the wording of the patent application, which seems to include any “webmasters who attempt to modify their search engine ranking.”

I personally think it’s dangerous to try to apply wording used in a patent application (the source for this speculation) arbitrarily against what will become a business practice. Wording in a patent is intended to help convey the concept of the intellectual property as quickly and concisely as possible to a patent review bureaucrat. The wording deals in concepts that are (ironically) pretty black and white. It has little to no relationship to how that IP will be used in the real world, which tends to be colored in various shades of gray. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Alan Perkins, an SEO I would call vociferously “white hat,” some years ago came up with what I believe is the quintessential difference here. Black hats optimize for a search engine. White hats optimize for humans.  When I make site recommendations, they are to help people find better content faster and act on it. I believe, along with Perkins, that this approach will also do good things for your search visibility.

But that also runs the danger of being an oversimplification. The picture is muddied by clients who measure our success as SEO agencies by their position relative to their competitors on a keyword-by-keyword level. This is the bed the SEO industry has built for itself, and now we’re forced to sleep in it. I’m as guilty as the next guy of cranking out competitive ranking reports, which have conditioned this behavior over the past decade and a half.

The big problem, and one continually pointed out by vocal grey/black hats, is that you can’t keep up with competition who are using methods more black than white by staying with white-hat tactics alone. The fact is, black hat works, for a while. And if I’m the snow-white SEO practitioner whose clients are repeatedly trounced by those using a black hat consultant, I’d better expect some client churn. Ethics and profitably don’t always go together in this industry.

To be honest, over the past five years, I’ve largely stopped worrying about the whole white hat/black hat thing. We’ve lost some clients because we weren’t aggressive enough, but the ones who stayed were largely untouched by the string of recent Google updates targeting spammers. Most benefited from the house cleaning of the index. I’ve also spent the last five years focused a lot more on people and good experiences than on algorithms and link juice, or whatever the SEO flavor du jour is.

I think Alan Perkins nailed it way back in 2007. Optimize for humans. Aim for the long haul. And try to be ethical. Follow those principles, and I find it hard to imagine that Google would ever tag you with the label of “spammer.”

Direct vs. Distributors: Clash of the Compensation Models

First published August 24, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The world of marketing is heading for a head-on collision, thanks to consumers who seem to think they have the right to inform themselves prior to purchasing. The problem? We marketers trying to jam a semi-trailer full of legacy channel baggage into the sleek new  two-door direct-marketing roadster we’re taking for a spin.  Simple physics dictate that something has to give. My money’s on that bloated distribution chain.

Here’s how this particular pain was recently expressed to me: “We’re double paying for our leads. We get them through pay-per-click, they come to our site, go through the quote engine and get a price, then they go to one of our dealers and buy there. We have to turn around and pay the dealer a commission again, on top of what we already paid to get the lead in the first place. We have to figure out how to stop people from doing that!”

I get the frustration. I truly do. But in this case, it’s just a byproduct of transitioning to a more efficient marketplace. There are also vestiges of hard-to-change buying behaviors. When you have one leg in the old world of marketing and one in the new, and the two are diverging rapidly, groin injuries are not a surprising outcome.

The problem here is that traditional distribution networks were created to get around the problem of geography. For many reasons, you had to be in the same market as your prospects to sell to them. Buyers simply didn’t have the resources available to adequately research future purchases, so they used relationships with distributors as proxy. They relied on the opinion of a person they knew, knowing that if that person steered them wrong, they knew where he/she lived. This risk mitigation mechanism became more effective the more you did business with a particular distributor, so distributors expanded their scope of service, becoming one-stop shops for multiple products or services. The religion of the relationship ruled the market.

But the advent of digital information is in the process of changing this system. Now we can research purchases — and we do. Information is slowly replacing relationships. While we still rely heavily on the opinions of people we know, including distributors (this emerged as the single most influential factor in B2B purchasing in our BuyerSphere research), online research is not far behind, and it’s gaining ground quickly. Humans being humans, we don’t switch en masse from one behavior to the other. We transition over time —  typically, a lot of time — as in several years or even decades.

This, then, is the marketplace that the modern marketer is trying to straddle. In many marketplaces, particularly B2B, we’re seeing a decoupling of product research from the actual purchase. Buyers are quickly learning that distributors have very limited information on the average product they carry, so they’re turning directly to the manufacturer. But when it comes time to purchase, transactions often go through traditional channels. Hence the double paying for each lead the aforementioned marketer was complaining about.  You pay once to gain entry into the prospect’s consideration set while he’s researching, and you pay again to actually win the business.

This double paying isn’t some behavior that can be corrected in buyers. It’s the price we marketers are paying for our efforts to transform the marketplace. In the meantime, as we build new information networks, we have to hold on to our traditional distribution networks. In the long run, it will be a good thing for marketers, as the problem of geography is slowly being eliminated. But it will never be gone, as long as consumers’ trust in information provided by marketers is less than total. If there is a lack of trust, we will still rely on proximate relationships as a mitigating factor. The higher the degree of risk in a purchase, the more we will turn to those relationships.

Living a B-Rated Life

First published August 16, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I love ratings and reviews — and I’m not alone.  4.7 people out of 5 people love reviews. We give them two thumbs up. They rate 96.5% on the Tomato-meter.  I find it hard to imagine what my life would be without those ubiquitous 5 stars to guide me.

This past weekend, I was in Banff, Alberta for my sister’s wedding. My family decided to find a place to go for breakfast. The first thing I did was check with Yelp, and soon we were stacking up the Eggs Benny at a passable breakfast buffet less than two miles from our hotel. I never knew said buffet existed before checking the reviews — but once I found it, I trusted the wisdom of crowds. It seldom steers me wrong.

Now, you do have to learn how to read between the lines of a typical review site. Just before heading to my sister’s wedding, I spent the day in Seattle at the Bazaar Voice user event and was fascinated to learn that their user research shows that the typical number of reviews scanned is generally about seven. Once people hit seven reviews, they feel they have a good handle on the overall tone, even if there are 1,000 reviews in total. This seems right to me. It’s about the number of reviews I scan if possible.

But we also rely on the average rating summaries that typically show above the individual reviews and comments. When I read a review, I tend to follow these rules of thumb:

  • Look for the entry with the most reviews.
  • Find one that has a high average, but be suspicious of ones that have absolutely no negative reviews (unusual if you follow Rule One).
  • Scan the top six or seven reviews to get an overall sense of what people like and dislike.
  • Sort by the most negative reviews and read at least one to see what people hate.
  • Decide whether the negative reviews are the result of a one-off bad experience, or possibly an impossible-to-please customer (you can usually pick them out by their comments).
  • Do the “sniff test” to see if there are planted reviews (again, they’re not that hard to pick out).

I’ve used the same approach for restaurants, hotels, consumer electronics, cars, movies, books, hot tubs – pretty much anything I’ve had to open my wallet for in the past five or six years. It’s made buying so much easier. Ratings and reviews are like the Cole’s notes of word of mouth. They condense the opinions of the marketplace down to the bare essentials.

It’s little wonder that Google is starting to invest heavily in this area, with recent acquisitions of Zagat and Frommer’s. These are companies that built entire businesses on eliminating risk through reviews. The aggregation and organization of opinion is a natural extension for search engines. Of course, we should give it a fancy name, like “social graph,”, so we can sound really smart at industry conferences, but the foundations are built on plain common sense. Our attraction to reviews is hardwired into our noggins. We are social animals and like to travel in packs.  Language evolved so we could point each other to the best cassava root patch and pass along the finer points of mastodon hunting.

As Google acquires more and more socially informed content, it will be integrated into Google’s algorithms. This is why Google had to launch its own social network. Unfortunately, Google+ hasn’t gained the critical mass needed to provide the signals Google is looking for. I personally haven’t had a Google+ invite in months. Despite Larry Page’s insistence that it’s a roaring success, others have pointed out that Google+ seems to be a network of tire kickers, with little in the way of ongoing engagement. Contrast that with Pinterest, which is all the various women in my life seem to talk about — and is outperforming even Twitter when it comes to driving referrals.

I personally love the proliferation of structured word-of-mouth. Some say it negates serendipity, but I actually believe I will be more apt to explore if there is some reassurance I won’t have a horrible experience. Otherwise, this weekend my family and I would have been having Egg McMuffins at the Banff McDonald’s — and really, is that the life you want?

The Virtuous Cycle of SEO

First published August 9, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Virtuous cycles are anomalies. They fight the universal law of entropy, and for that reason alone, they are worth investigation. Rather than a gradual slide toward dissipation and equilibrium, virtuous cycles build upon themselves, yielding self-sustaining returns cycle after cycle.

In marketing, there are not a lot of virtuous cycles. Most marketing efforts need to be constantly fueled by a steady stream of dollars. The minute the budget tap is closed, so is the marketing program. But there are a few, and SEO is one of them, if done correctly. Let’s take a quick look at the elements required to build a truly virtuous cycle.

The Power of Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is the engine of a virtuous cycle. It’s what drives sustainable growth. Think of it as the compound interest paid on your marketing efforts.

In an SEO program, positive feedback comes in the form of the algorithmic love shown to you by the search engines, dragging in an ever-increasing number of eyeballs. These eyeballs also contribute to the feedback loop, creating new links, new user-generated content, new activity, all of which continue to drive rankings, up, which drives new eyeballs, which… well, you get the idea. And the cycle continues.

Investment Required

Virtuous cycles require an upfront investment, and it’s usually a significant one. You can’t collect compound interest on a zero balance. Cycles don’t start from scratch.

In SEO, the investments required come in the form of content and an engaging user experience. You have to give a user a reason to come, to engage and to evangelize to really leverage the benefits of SEO. You can evaluate if you have the makings of a virtuous cycle by asking yourself the following questions:

–      What are my users coming for?

–      What will they do?

–      How can they engage?

–      Why will they care?

–      Will their expectations be exceeded?

If you have a less than satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you don’t have what it takes to create a virtuous cycle.

Appealing to Human Nature

If your cycle depends on human behavior, as most do, you have to appeal to one of the basic tenets of human nature. As complicated as we can be, we are generally driven by a surprisingly small number of basic needs. Harvard professors Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, in their book “Driven,” identified four fundamental human drives: We need to acquire, to learn, to bond and to defend. Examine any virtuous cycle, and you’ll always find at least one of these drives at the heart of it.

Ask yourself how your online presence contributes to these drives. Remember, for a cycle to begin, positive feedback is required. And positive feedback depends on engagement from your visitors.

Universally Beneficial

Finally, a virtuous cycle needs to benefit all parties in order for it to be sustainable. It needs to be a win/win/win. If, somewhere along the line, someone gets screwed, the cycle will ultimately fall apart.

In SEO, this means you must play along with the algorithm rather than try to beat it. Short-term thinking and virtuous cycles never go well together. One algorithmic update to crack down on a SEO loophole will shut down your cycle in a heartbeat. But if you work with a search engine to make a great user experience discoverable, the cycle will begin.

Three Catalysts for Healthy Social Networks

First published August 2, 2012 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Look at any graphic representation of a social network, and you will see a somewhat globular cluster of nodes — and, at the center, you’ll find the subject or owner of the network. The density of the nodes will be greater near the center, but there will be small clusters of interconnected nodes that will appear throughout the map. This pattern, the visual interpretation of human connection, looks much the same now as it did for tribal humans 100,000 years ago. But there is one important difference. Then, you probably only had one network you belonged to, which was defined by geography. Today, you can belong to many networks, and they’re often defined by ideas.

Connecting the nodes in a typical social network map are small lines representing the glue, or ties, of the network. At the simplest level, a network can consist of just two nodes and one line, called a dyad. The line represents the relationship between the two nodes. But what is the raw material of that line? What causes it to exist in the first place? Sometimes, we can find clues in language. If that line represents a relationship, what causes two people to relate to each other? The word relation comes from the Latin noun relatio, which has two relevant meanings: carrying back and to narrate. Both meanings depend on communication. Communication, in turn, has its etymological roots in the latin comoenus, which means shared. From this, we see the structure of a network depends on both the sharing of a common concept (a value, goal or ideal) and communication. These are the raw materials of those little links in the diagram.

Those who analyze social network structure often look for reciprocity in those links: are they two-way links?  Reciprocity is hardwired into humans. Evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists have found that the most successful survival strategy is something called “tit for tat.” Even if you’re among the 46% of Americans who don’t believe in evolution, you still can’t ignore reciprocity. Every single religion has as one of its tenets its own variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It all comes down to the same thing: it’s not beneficial to keep investing in a one-way relationship. If we keep inviting you for dinner and you never invite us, sooner or later the invitations will stop coming (offspring and certain relatives being the exception — and then there’s another whole evolutionary dynamic at play).

Here we have the three foundations for a stable social network: communication, sharing and reciprocity. Not exactly rocket science, just plain common sense. Yet it’s amazing how often we lose sight of these three things when we start applying them to our marketing efforts. Let’s take just one example. Look at any company’s social presence, whether it‘s their Facebook page, their Twitter feed or their Linked In profile, and see if there’s evidence of reciprocity. Is all the communication going out, or are people responding? Active user feedback is one of the primary signals we look for in a healthy social network.

Another signal is clear evidence of shared values. As I’ve said before, frequency of engagement (especially if it’s of the nonreciprocal variety) does not lead to brand loyalty, but shared values do. Are the values of an organization clearly evident in their social outposts? Are there active conversations based on those shared values?

Finally, we have communication. Marketers have to take every opportunity to facilitate communication. Often, commercial social networks are based on the sharing of required information. Companies (especially in the B2B space) have to become much better at sharing the wealth of information they have in their own particular industry. They have to start thinking like publishers. And they have to enable forums to allow for active feedback.

Get these three things right, and strong social networks will grow organically.