SEO helps businesses connect to consumers via search engines. For consumers, that means it’s easier to find what they’re looking for online. I think it’s easier to illustrate with a story:
I recently landed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city I haven’t visited since 2001, long before my thoughts ever turned to things like Facebook, Twitter, or SEO.
Search engines like Google existed back in 2001 but we didn’t rely on them as heavily, especially for things like local search, i.e. finding local businesses via Google Maps. When I first visited Buenos Aires, I navigated the city with paper maps, word-of-mouth, and the original ’stumble upon,’ which involved actually stumbling upon new stores and places.
Fast forward 8 years to 2009–living in Baltimore I had become accustomed to finding almost any business in Google Maps or any one of the other local search sites like Yelp, Cityguides, Topix, or local sites like 600block.com or CityPaper.com. Those sites are effective in large part because of SEO.
When you search for “greek restaurants in baltimore”, you get a listing of 10 Greek restaurants in the Google onebox, plus a number of other sites in the organic listings that either take you directly to a Greek restuarant’s site or to another search site like YellowPages.com where you can find more listings of Greek restuarants.
So what’s the big deal?
Monday morning I woke up in need of a local cell phone. I loaded up Google Argentina and began searching for a place where I could buy a cell phone. I tried a number of keyword combos, including “telefonos moviles”, “moviles”, “telefonos celulares”, all modified with location keywords like “buenos aires”, “capital federal”, and even “argentina.”
No luck! I spent about an hour trying to search for one web result that would tell me where I could buy a cell phone in Buenos Aires. I tried Google Maps. I tried Live Maps. I did manage to discover the names of a few mobile carriers here but much to my chagrin, they didn’t have a Store Locator feature on their site.
Eventually I just left my apartment and started walking down one of the main avenues, until I happened upon a store that sells cell phones. Yes, that’s how we did it in the old days.
I couldn’t help but think that if the cell phone providers in Argentina were on top of their SEO game, I never would’ve had this problem. If you’re selling something, you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find you online. There’s nothing dishonest about this–to the contrary, it directly benefits the consumer!
SEO, like other forms of marketing, is a process for communicating useful information from businesses to consumers. When your SEO fails (or doesn’t exist), then you’re failing to communicate via one of the biggest and fastest growing sales media–the search engine.
Comments on this entry are closed.