As I have said before obtaining high search rankings in Google is relatively easy. All you have to do is ask the right questions (i.e. Headline Hooks) and then provide the right answers (i.e. Posts). Get this equation right and the high Google page rankings should follow. Then all you have to do is count the referral traffic.
This means a good copywriter should be able to achieve a high page ranking on Google for any topic. You simply need to be asking the right questions from the audience’s perspective - i.e. trying to solve the target audience’s problems by thinking like a search engine.
What I continue to question is the actual value of chasing those top page rankings on Google. That’s because the one thing a good copywriter cannot deliver by achieving a high page ranking on Google is a high click-through rate (CTR) (See So what is a top page ranking on Google worth? and Why your ignition strategy isn’t going to be Google) and, needless to say, the key to achieving success on Google isn’t just about obtaining high page rankings but also delivering high click-through rates (CTRs).
By analyzing the last 30 days of data from Google’s webmaster tools we discover that the posts here on Excapite received 40,500 search impressions on Google in December but only 1300 of those impressions have led to click throughs. This means we achieved an average CTR of just 3.2%.
Even the posts that achieve Top 3 page rankings on Google achieve CTR’s of less that 10%. For example the most popular post - So how much money can you make writing an eBook? – delivered a CTR of just 7%. Compare this to the published industry data that suggests Number one position should deliver CTRs in excess of 50% and you can see just how poor Excapite’s CTR performance has been in December.
Now there could be 3 possible reasons why the CTR is so low.
- Google is providing the wrong answer most of the time to most of the questions posed by most of the users
- Most users are asking Google the wrong question most of the time, or
- Most people only click on links to web sites they recognise and/or trust.
I will let you decide how high or low the probability is on each of these three issues. I suspect the low CTR contains elements of all three. What I do know is all three answers represent three key opportunities for anyone wanting to disrupt Google’s dominant market position.
- If Google is incapable of providing the right answer most of the time then there is a significant opportunity for a new search engine that can provide the right search answer.
- If most of the audience is struggling to construct search queries then the answer to the search problem isn’t a better search engine. What the audience need it is something more intuitive and responsive to the audience’s capabilities to construct the right questions to help them discover answers they seek.
- If brand recognition is the key barrier then no amount of SOE is going to entice the audience to click on the link no matter what the Google page ranking and the real opportunity isn’t in building better search engine but building a better branding building engine.
Analyzing the raw data we quickly discover the real reason the data scientist will beat a team of copywriters every time at playing Google is because succeeding with Google has nothing to do with the quality of the content (i.e. the answer). It doesn’t even have anything to do with the quality of the question. That’s because they understand implicitly there is no point in playing a game that involves trying to match a singularity (i.e. the content or message) with an infinite number of possibilities scattered across an ever expanding network.
What Google has shown us is that if you want to win on the web you have to simultaneously provide many answers to many questions. Copywriters lose because they are in the business of one Ad:one Message. They deal in absolutes and singularities (i.e. Hook, Brand and Slogan) unaware that the game is about possibilities (i.e. Destinations, Directions and Signposts).
The Data Scientist wins because they know they are not in the business of trying to attract an audience by creating a hook. They are in the business of placing a spread bet on where the audience will be when they have a problem the data scientist’s client can solve.
To the Data Scientist advertising is message agnostic. It’s all about being there for the prospect when it matters the most. When they are thinking about where they should go next in their search for answers.
That’s why the future of advertising is all about Decision Point marketing.
This is not to suggest that playing Google is the long term answer to the challenge of successful Decision Point marketing. On the contrary it is self evident that if your objective is to bring multiple parties to the exchange and profit from the transaction then being there at the end of the search journey is far more important than being there at the beginning.
In this context Google is a relatively crude solution to the Decision Point marketing problem – a blunt instrument if you like. But this is simply because the web is in reality a crude solution to the problem of creating a collective memory… after all the web’s foundations lay in a archaic and now defunct word processor markup language accessed through an aging and increasingly inflexible user interface (i.e. Keyboards, Mice and Windows).
To build a better Decision Point marketing platform you need to build a better Google. To build a better Google you need to first build a better web and that will take some thinking about. Certainly HTML5 isn’t the answer. It is just another iteration of a fundamentally flawed – and increasingly Baroque - construct.
Indeed the challenge I see moving forward for the mobile web is it is something of an “end of product life cycle” solution to the problem of building and navigating a global collective memory. For the mobile web to become a truly effective Decision Point marketing platform it needs to evolve into a new type of global collective memory network that can be created and navigated by handheld mobile devices.
At the moment mobile apps are achieving elements of this new collective memory in isolated pockets. The secret I suspect at this stage – and I may well be very wrong on this – is to somehow wire all these apps together into a global collective memory rather than trying to push the very limited boundaries of HTML any further. That’s why the future of the Mobile OS is going to be more important than the next generation Mobile Browser.
The Mobile OS needs to evolve into a network OS rather than a device dependent OS.
Something to think about for next year maybe?
Further Reading
Posted on December 31, 2010
0