The dominance of search

February 9th, 2010 Posted by tyler in Findings, Reviews, Software, Usability

Last night I attended a presentation for web professionals in the Chicago area. It was organized through meetup.com. The presenter was Matt Moog, Founder & CEO at Viewpoints. You can see his slide deck here.

Among his many relevant points was the notion he referred to as ‘the dominance of search.’ Matt’s focus for the evening was specifically on sites that serve up social commerce, but I think the search issue is something any site needs to consider seriously. What Matt was referring to was his claim was that 50-80% of traffic across the web comes from search. This was a profound, yet not to surprising statistic when I heard it. However, in my experience, clients are not very proactive in doing everything they can to make their sites findable. As web designers we should take more responsibility in educating our clients on the importance of being findable. Traditional means of SEO such as embedding tags in code, writing bot friendly copy, etc. are still a great start, however the effectiveness of user generated comments/reviews of your service should not be overlooked.

Matt remarked that a quality review can, and will, bring in roughly 50 people to your site. At which point. if you do a reasonable job of converting those 50 people to buy (say 3 or 4%), one could argue that the person who wrote the review for you actually played a more valuable roll while they were on your site than if they had actually made a purchase! This view may be a little subjective, but the key takeaway is that the people who are using your software and are actually taking their time to participate in the social sphere are extremely valuable users. They’ll give you credibility, get others involved, and help you create meaningful content. They are valuable for many reasons, but if for nothing else, they’ll bring other people to your site.

“Will my users be able to find me through search?” is a question Matt proposed everyone who wanted to have a successful presence on the web, should be asking up front. In other words, get your clients on board with SEO right out of the gate! There’s no way around the fact that there’s an overwhelming amount of content online. Having a site that is cutting edge, cool, innovative, clever, refined, well planned, etc. will not make your software successful based on these factors alone. You have to be findable. For more on findability you can check out findability.org or Peter Morville’s book called Ambient Findability.