This is part four in the Searching, Searching Everywhere and Not a Link to Click arc, an anecdote about learning a little (very little, I know) about search engines and search engine optimization. Please don't contact NextStage to do search engine work for you or your company, that's not what we do. We can direct you to some excellent providers, if you wish. NextStage's strength is in making tools others use to improve what they do (and that does include tools for search engine marketing).
We pick up with asking questions which were foreign and unthought of at the time...
These questions are important, of course. My feeling, though, is that these questions aren't important by themselves. Companies also need to answer "If someone is coming to my site motivated, what's causing them to go away unfulfilled?" This and similar questions are the more important ones, me thinks. Perhaps my days as a bible scholar are coming back to haunt me, but I've always been more curious about the one stray sheep than the fifty in the flock. This philosophy also plays heavily in what I find interesting in ET. "Yeah, okay, ET predicted something else with 99% accuracy. Those are things it's been predicting accurately for a while." I'm much more curious at what happens at the edges of the curves and equations. I'm much more excited when ET successfully does something it wasn't intentionally designed to do. "Yeah, great, it shaped the bell right again. Yippee van yahey," doesn't thrill me. However, "ET captured and correctly analyzed a trend that was off the edge of the curve? NEAT! Let's look at that," excites me in ways few things other can. So here was a case where ET could learn about a very distributed population to determine if what it new about a relatively small geography applied to a relatively dispersed geography. It was a chance to see if ET could figure out what to do with things which were off its known curve. Could it apply what it had learned "here" and see if it worked "there" and, if not, adapt what it had learned "here" so that it would work "there"?
Excellent questions these.
But it's one thing to know which search terms are bringing the most motivated visitors to a site, it's another thing completely to know why visitors are leaving your site without doing business.
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Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
(Information in this arc is from Chapter 4, "Experience Versus Expectation" of my next book, Reading Virtual Minds. Text and images copyright Joseph Carrabis and NextStage Evolution 2006-2007)
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