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I watched another potential lead go by today and decided not to purchase the information because the prospect was in a medium sized market.  Their sole criteria was that they wanted to rank in the top 3 spots for a certain local phrase. It’s important that you as a small business don’ t make this mistake:  there are no more ways that rankings can be counted. There are lots of SEO specific phrases that tie into this concept.  Ignoring them for a minute, here’s what you need to know:

  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on the physical location of the Internet connection you’re using.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on whether you have a Google account and are logged into that account.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on how other searchers have interacted with a page and query over time.
  • The Google results you see for a query will likely vary based on constant testing Google does for thousands of variables.
  • And our new favorite, Google Social Search.

Forget about Social Search for a moment.  Remember this because it’s critical business advice that predates the Internet by thousands of years. Who cares how many people visit your store, call your 800 number, stop by your cave to see if your wheel is more round than Ogg’s, say your cow’s milk is the best or think you’re a dandy doctor?   Referrals and word-of-mouth are great, but the bottom line remains the bottom line.

If people walk in to a retail store, quickly mutter, “Just browsing” as a spell to ward off salespeople and leave without buying anything, you’ve perhaps gained some brand awareness (but it may be poor), and you’ve used sales resources on someone who didn’t buy. That’s what happens when businesses say they want to “rank” for a term.  They don’t want to rank for a term.   They want to make the most profit possible given the enterprise’s constraints.   Having a great location helps retail walk-in traffic for some businesses.  Having a great web location helps too, but the days of static placement on search engines are over.  Stop asking about them.

We, the person reading this post and I, can sit down side by side, type the same phrase in a search engine’s query box and receive different results. Rank is worthless. Traffic is only slightly better, and the only reason you should care about traffic is as a function of profit. So back to Google’s Social Search, now being beta tested in Google Labs.   Right now, this is opt-in so you have to want to see this information, but Social Search will change the results page based upon people identified as part of your social network.

What does that cover?   Well, consider that your Facebook friends list is likely wide open.  Ditto for your LinkedIn contacts and your Twitter feed. Here’s a killer.   Once a search engine can associate your account on that search engine with a Facebook, Twitter or other account, then the true social “graph” is reality.  Here’s something else to chew on:  if a search engine associates your account with four other networks and finds that of all the people, you’ve “friended” four other people, the knowledge it can glean by micro-targeting will make today’s web advertising look primitive. So please stop asking for “rankings”.   You’re a smarter businessperson.  Ask for profits.  And demand ROI from your online marketing efforts.

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Big Thinking is kicking off a series about How To Communicate Bad News because we see too many partners, clients and friends often miss the mark and make bad situations worse.

There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops
There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops

The first guideline we’ll share is straight out of today’s headlines:  

Be Honest About The Rules.  

There is an incalculable multiplier if you break the rules, your actions cause problems and you are not immediately forthright with every possible stakeholder fast. Lightning fast.  Greased lightning fast.   So fast that you may not have a solution yet, but you’ve already assured people you are resolving the matter right now.

The problem may be as basic as a spreadsheet error that only becomes a broken rule if you cover up the mistake.  Or the problem could be as specific as flying a jet with more than 100 passengers for more than an hour past your destination.  The comments the cockpit crew made puzzled everyone.   The federal government announced today that the flight crew claimed they were using laptop computers in the cockpit, were distracted and ignored radio calls and other signals. If their story is true and they were looking at new schedules resulting from their merger, they have hopefully handed over their untampered with computers and will face whatever disciplinary action occurs when you don’t do your job and fly 160,000 pounds of plane on top of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.  

But Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole blew their chances for problems by releasing cagey statements since Thursday.  Only today, on the fifth day, have federal investigators released a statement about the events that caused Chaney and Cole to operate their plane in the way they did. Imagine two headlines. One reads, “Pilots Reprimanded, Suspended for Using PC In Flight“ The other reads, “Government Investigators Uncover Truth About Stray Jet.“

Your responsibility is to tell the truth when things go bad and own up if you were breaking the rules.  Coverups don’t work, and the fallout is always worse.  These pilots may have thought they were protecting themselves, but they were really causing massive brand damage to Delta and Northwest who are already balancing the intricacies of their merger.  That ripple effect directly impacts tens of thousands of employees and millions of individuals who own retirement funds that have invested in the company whose stock price might suffer in the short run. Communicating Bad News is not hard, but there are standards to which you must adhere.  Be Honest About Breaking The Rules is the first standard.

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Most people working in the online marketing world have known the truth about Google‘s infamous PageRank scoring for several years:  it didn’t work, it wasn’t terribly accurate and attempting to classify the billions of pages on the web into 10 clusters was just plain silly.

PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the two Google co-founders.  The company included the score on its web toolbar so that someone surfing from one site to another could see that they had moved from a PageRank (PR) 4 location to a PR 3 location. That meant nothing to anyone, of course, and PageRank grew more meaningless over time.  It grew so meaningless that Google removed the metric from its Webmaster Tools section this week. Googler Susan Moskwa posted about PageRank in an official Google forum Wednesday:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

What Susan didn’t unfortunately comment on was that Google’s toolbar that many non-marketing users have access to still includes PageRank.   Those numbers haven’t matched up with “real” PageRank in years, and the marketing community has differentiated between the two for years by referring to the latter as “toolbar PR”.

PageRank is not a meaningful metric, and you should immediately stop using it in any context.  If your marketing agency refers to PageRank as a metric, you should fire them just for being dunderheads who are out of touch with the marketplace.

This underscores a big issue.   Just because you know a piece of data doesn’t mean that you have the context, training or skills to interpret that data.  My doctor sent me an electronic medical record on CD with all my tests from my last physical.  Not having gone to medical school (sorry, Mom), I have no idea what the numbers mean, but I’m sure that some web site somewhere will convince me I can read the chart.  For my sanity, I think I’ll let the medical folks worry about that data while I explain to them that they can stop worrying about PageRank. Now if only Amazon would admit that Alexa’s data is easily manipulated garbage, we would could really start cleaning up.