Written By Noah Mallin | June 5, 2008 | Share This |

Profile Optimization

So you’ve done everything right to get noticed by your potential customers. They search for relevant terms on Live Search or Google or Yahoo! and – bang-o! Your site is number one. But when you look at your data for returning visitors your heart sinks. How do you keep them coming back?

Reuters had a story yesterday about researchers at Northeastern University in Boston who used cell-phone signals to track people’s everyday travel patterns. Aside from the obvious impact this kind of study has on the plotlines of TV’s 24 (take the chips out of the phones everyone, they’re watching!) their basic conclusion was directly relevant to search marketing: “…humans follow simple reproducible patterns…This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modeling…”

Or if we run that statement through the Professor Frink to English translator: People are creatures of habit and habits are hard to break once they are set. What the profs at Northeastern U. didn’t get a handle on with their comprehensive study of portable ear cancer devices was what formed these patterns. I take a particular route home from work mostly because of speed and convenience. Similarly, if people come to your site for a product or information it should be easy and fast for them to get to what they want. The clean simplicity of Google’s search page for example is a big part of why they have surpassed Yahoo in search.

Scott Karp at the Publishing 2.0 blog made a similar point about the Washington Post’s website. During a severe weather event in the local Washington DC area he went to their site to get the latest breaking news online and in real time, reasoning they were a local paper. Turns out they had a great dynamic and constantly updated area on the story with all kinds of interactive goodies but it was buried under layers of static pages that had none of the real-time content. Sez Karp:

“And what’s the root cause problem? The useless article with no real-time data and no links was written for the PRINT newspaper. And the homepage is edited to match what will be important in the PRINT newspaper. And the navigation assumes I think like I do when I’m reading the PRINT newspaper. Want local news? Go to the metro SECTION.”

Here’s a case where the Washington Post had useful interactive local content, the kind of stuff that makes a site sticky and users reach for their bookmark tool, and it’s not upfront. Rather than digging deeper the next stop for most of them is almost always going to be Google.

Buying the keywords that your customers are looking for doesn’t mean squat if they lead to a page that doesn’t have matching relevant content. Landing page design plays a huge role in the performance of search marketing campaigns – you can test keywords, swap out creatives and generally over-optimize until you’re blue in the face, but if the page that people show up at post-click doesn’t deliver a compelling useful experience, it’s all a waste.

Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, ECommerce, Publishing, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: Local, Search: News |