Seth Godin on Search Marketing

Search Engine Land spoke with Seth Godin on the subject of search marketing. Seth has been critical of search marketers in the past and dishes out a fair bit of criticism in the interview. For example he makes this assertion:

“Spending money on ads or commodity-focused SEO is the last gasp of someone who is short on innovation, imagination and great stuff!”

Well I do spend money on ads, for my search marketing business and for my clients. Same with SEO although I’m not quite sure what is meant by commodity-focused SEO. If there’s a better way then I’d rather be doing it so I made a summary of Seth’s points to consider how to be more innovative.

1. SEO isn’t a replacement for doing the right things (the right things being building remarkable products, getting your best customers to talk about those products, building relationships and playing the long game without being too impatient to get a quick sale).
2. Personal recommendations are better than any alternative so the future is in blogging, private channels such as RSS, and human controlled sites such as squidoo. Search in its current form is broken.
3. Many advertisers are lazy. They don’t customise offers to match ads and instead send people to generic or home pages.

At the core of all this is trust, credibility and relevance. If someone we trust and whose opinion we respect recommends something of interest to us then we are quite likely to take action. If the outcome is good to the point that it’s worth remarking on then we are likely to be motivated to tell someone else.

We know this to be true when we’re talking about actual human interaction. I’ll try a restaurant if a friend tells me she had a fantastic meal there.

However, just because something on the Internet has attributes that might indicate a degree of trustworthiness and credibility doesn’t mean that it can actually be trusted or that someone will accept it as being so. I’m talking about attributes like putting a name and perhaps a photo to blogs and comments, or a third party recommendation for a product rather than the company’s own endorsement. These factors can help but we know social media can be manipulated, abused, and used for short term gain. Social media participants can “cheat” just as search engine optimisers can use aggressive tactics to rank highly.

Seth Godin claims that “search is broken” and elaborates by saying:

“Well, if search worked, then you wouldn’t need a strategy! People would find you when you needed to be found, and find someone else the rest of the time. Of course, search is always going to be a bit broken (though it keeps getting better) and the more human person to person recommending that gets included (including squidoo.com), the better it’s going to work.”

Introducing a human element for recommendations isn’t going to mean the true deservers rise to the top. Search and social media are just different mediums. They can both be manipulated and in both cases the “best” content (whatever that means) can remain hidden because the right things weren’t done to get the most visibility.

The search landscape is certainly changing and there are many more opportunities to get a message out other than ranking highly in Google. As Seth says the message may best come from enthusiastic advocates rather than self promotion. I don’t disagree with that.

Seth does actually say what he’d do in place of unimaginative ad placing:

“If I ran a travel site, I’d engage my best customers to build blogs and Squidoo lenses and to use Digg to point to reviews and insights and things that would make people WANT to seek me out.”

A good proportion of my clients’ prospective customers have never even heard of blogs, squidoo lenses and Digg never mind actually created content or looked at any examples.

I manage a paid search campaign for a travel site. We’re always looking at different ways to promote the products and are starting to see a lot more referrals from sites with consumer generated content such as tripadvisor.com. The reality though is that if someone wants to book accommodation online they are most likely to search using Google. A proportion of these people will find the paid ads to be more relevant than the organic listings. And yes when they click they get to an appropriate page and often a custom landing page if it’s a specific offer. Spending money on ads might not be the most innovative, imaginative thing to do, in comparison with say, creating a squidoo lens, but the good thing is, it works.