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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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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.

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Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Federal T...
FTC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. Image via Wikipedia

News around the blogosphere is rampant with warnings about the Federal Trade Commission‘s update to the documents used to explain and enforce actions regarding testimonials and endorsements. The big issue for online marketers is that spam blogs and blogs must disclose when a material connection is present between themselves as publisher and a post — even if that post is a review.

With my big disclosure that I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice, I don’t understand why legitimate businesses are concerned.  Isn’t disclosure a good business practice?  Certainly anyone reading this blog follows these sort of guidelines. Creating a spam blog is easy.  For that matter, we own multiple web properties that publish reviews.  If we accepted payment (the FTC says “cash or in-kind payment”) to publish a review then the review is considered an endorsement.   As an endorsement, the review then falls under advertising guidelines. But as I told group at a review site earlier this week, “You have always been responsible for what you publish online” Nothing has changed in that regard.

The FTC’s Guides are updated sporadically and these provisions don’t take effect until December.  On top of that, the FTC can make life miserable for bad businesspeople, but the FTC’s administrative actions are different from the FTC Act.  Yes, as good businesspeople you need to follow FTC guidelines and not be like the cretin I once advised about the FTC’s Mail Order Rule. “What is the penalty,” this person asked when I advised that their subscription model could be considered to be in violation of the FTC’s rules. Businesspeople who weigh penalties against knowingly violating rules and laws should be dealt with quickly.

Now the FTC has some more ammunition to go after people who create a new site on a different server through a variety of names every week.   Placing  a fake review site in the public and using good SEO tactics to rank for well-paying keywords is easy.  I can name more than a hundred people right now who have the skill sets across editorial, design, marketing and technology to put such a site in place tonight between the time they get home from work and the time they go to bed at a reasonable hour. The point is that they don’t do that kind of thing, you don’t do that kind of thing and people who follow best business practices have nothing to worry about.

If you want to read the rules for yourself, here is a PDF link to The Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Disclosure:  Neither Chairman Leibowitz nor President Obama nor any person affiliated with the federal government and specifically the Federal Trade Commission, made any payment regarding this review of the new Guides or an incentive to provide a link to the FTC’s site. It does get rather silly, doesn’t it?

Executive Summary: The FTC is there to catch the bad people.  Still, talk with your marketing agency or attorney about a blanket disclosure and make sure your policies regarding accepting gifts or payments for goods and services you promote are up to date.

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