SEO Speedwagon

Imagine walking into your local car dealership and hearing a conversation similar to this one. The salesman approaches a couple and begins to extol the virtues of the gleaming, midnight-blue sedan in front of them.

He covers all bases, making sure that no feature is left unexplained, no spec left unquoted:

• Horsepower
  
• Mileage
  
• Turning radius
  
• Cargo volume
  
• Passenger count
  
• and on and on...

When he finally takes a breath, the couple look at each other, then at the salesman.

"But what can I do with it?" the woman asks.

"Yeah," her husband adds, "do we sit in it? What does a car do?"

In this context, such a conversation is silly and impossible to fathom. But in SEO/SEM, growing evidence shows it happens all the time. Some recent examples:

• A forum at DigitalPoint describes the fallout of the current Google update, nicknamed Jagger. One specific post gives curious insight into the surfing habits - and search understanding - of a certain type of user:

  My customers are more elderly people and I found out they do not know how to bookmark a site for example so they are using Google like bookmarks in their browser. What is happening now is, these customers just keep browsing the search results until they find my site. I had 3 customers complaining as to why I have moved my site in Google, which they find very inconvenient.

  No search marketer, whether on the agency side or client side, who has explained his or her job to a befuddled friend or relative, should be surprised by that consumer behavior, yet I still was. To suggest that the 80/20 rule applies to search engines (i.e., that 80% of search engine users focus on [or even know about] only 20% of the engine's feature set) is likely a large understatement. It's probably closer to 98/2.
  

• ClickZ reports that few publishers or online agencies know about Google's ability to serve AdSense ads on RSS feeds, which comes as no surprise, the article points out, when you combine a topic the public knows little about (contextual advertising) with a topic they know nothing about (RSS).
  
• Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodney recently attended the Direct Marketing Association Convention and found out that many DM experts know little about search:
  

  In talking to some of the Search Engine Marketing folks that were in sessions on Saturday, I discovered that the vast majority of DMA folks are very, very, very new to Search Marketing. I'd go so far as to say many of them are incredibly clueless about the process, benefits, costs, etc.

So are engines getting ahead of themselves offering ads on RSS feeds when the vast majority of their users won't venture beyond the main search box?

Yes. Industry-wide, both engines and SEO companies need to engage in a massive program of search education. In our interaction with the public - whether we consider them potential searchers or potential clients - search engines and the tagalong search marketing agencies often commit the same big mistake: We're droning on about torque when we haven't adequately explained what a car is.

Once a critical mass of users understand and embrace the myriad ways that search results can appear, memories of a seven-fold increase in profits will seem like the "lean times."

add'l thanks to Threadwatch and SERoundtable