By Justin Spohn, Interactive Director – Nemo Design
Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart – Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was “SEO strategyâ€. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who we’re doing them for. (Really, I’m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: we’re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, we’re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that it’s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, it’s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course – we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they don’t show is what the viewer wanted and didn’t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. It’s TV, with craftier Nielsens.
But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, we’re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. It’s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all we’re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then aren’t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our client’s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities they’re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.
What’s the difference? If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) you’ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.