SEO Game Theory - Changing The Rules
There must be days where you feel like Lando Calrissian negotiating with Darth Vader - he keeps changing the terms of the bargain without your consent. I am sure many SEOs were concerned when Google dropped its recommendation that people submit their sites to directories. Directory links are usually easy to get and some SEO firms have built their businesses on directory link submission. Google played Darth Vader that day but usually the search engines are more like the Man in Black (aka the Dread Pirate Roberts) in The Princess Bride (that link points to a brief Game Theory article on the movie). That is, the search engines don’t tell you that there is poison in both goblets AND they let you decide from which goblet you’re going to drink.
Or maybe you’d rather become Darth Vader.
In the economy of Web search, there is always some sort of negotiation going on. Publishers negotiate with Indexers, Indexers negotiate with Searchers, and Publishers negotiate with Searchers. In an abstract fashion a Searcher might negotiate with a Publisher through search, but we’ll leave that idea for another discussion.
Imagine yourself, the Publisher, standing in an open market with your little stall. Bonkoid the Indexer comes trundling into the market with three full wagons and a staff of serfs ready to do his bidding. His operation is bigger and fancier than yours, although you recently bought some trim and bunting to gussy up your cart and stall.
So there you are, wishing you could get more customers, and you see Bonkoid start referring people he cannot sell to — referring them to other vendors. Bonkoid is a classic middle man and it turns out he’s making money from customer tips and occasional payoffs from other vendors. You try the payoff trick for a while but even though you get some customers through Bonkoid, he is still sending customers to other vendors.
You have some options: expand your space, increase your wares, hire some help, and look more important. People will be more likely to come back to you for repeat business. Maybe you can get some of the other vendors to start sending customers to you after they make their own sales. But it is painfully obvious that you’re really at the mercy of Bonkoid’s whims. He has a system and he even provides people with a guarantee: if they don’t like a vendor he sends them to, they can come back and get another referral.
So now everyone in the market is talking about Bonkoid, how great it is that he is here to help everyone, blah, blah, blah.
Although Bonkoid did not make them, the market is now operating by rules that favor Bonkoid’s system, thus making him the most important part of the market. Why did the market settle on these rules? Two reasons: first, Bonkoid fulfilled a need that none of the vendors were taking care of efficiently. Sure, vendors might have recommended each other after making sales, or just to be helpful to occasional passers-by, but none of them really cared enough to organize the information about who was selling what. Bonkoid significantly improved the customers’ shopping experience.
The other reason is less obvious: None of the vendors objected to Bonkoid’s presence. If they had all gotten together at the beginning of the process and ganged up on Bonkoid, they would have driven him out of the market. Now, probably a few vendors did take advantage of Bonkoid to make him look bad. And maybe a few vendors who had once been important expressed outrage at losing their prestige in the shadow of Bonkoid’s information circus. But the market for the most part accepted Bonkoid as another vendor.
As a vendor you can play by the rules set by the market or you can take your business elsewhere. There are other markets out there. You may feel they are smaller than THIS market and therefore it doesn’t make sense for you to leave, but you have to ask yourself if being a little fish in a big pond will be as profitable as being a big fish in a little pond. There is no one correct answer to that question.
You can move to a different market and compete with other vendors or you can move your business to a location where there currently is no market. If you choose to do the latter, then you must build the market yourself and you need to pick a good location where you’ll attract customers. You’ll need to spread the word about your new market, too. Assume you have friends in the old market. They can tell their customers and other vendors about your new market.
The chances of your building a market that competes with Bonkoid’s market are slim to none (unless you choose to become another Bonkoid). On the other hand, you may just find you make more money when you get out from under Bonkoid’s shadow. People are not distracted by his presence, other vendors don’t draw customers away from you, and your wares and customer service are good enough that people recommend you to their friends and relatives.
Business can be good if you get out from under Bonkoid’s shadow, but you have to have a plan and the right assets to succeed.
Another option is to find one of Bonkoid’s competitors and build a relationship with that competitor such that you get more referrals from the competitor than from Bonkoid. The size of the competitor doesn’t matter. All that matters is how many referrals you get from Bonkoid’s competitor. The less dependent upon Bonkoid’s referrals you become, the more power you have over your own business.
In search engine optimization you can employ the power of marketing to bypass the search engines. While that may seem counter-intuitive to the process of optimizing for search, it frees you from dependency upon any one search resource. And that is a form of optimization of the highest value. In a market with 60+ search resources, your search optimization sucks if you live or die by the whims if just one search service. Blinding yourself to the potential business you can obtain by dominating a smaller search referral resource is not helping you.
This is why you have to look at search market share carefully. Search markets go well beyond how many queries each search engine responds to. They include how many people use the services and what people use those services to find.
In any game, if you change the rules to benefit yourself, you gain the advantage over all other players. The first step in changing the rules in search engine optimization is deciding which search engines will participate in your game. The second step is developing stronger relationships with those search engines you can better compete through.
And that includes site search. In fact, you may be able to double or triple your search referrals from any particular engine by adding its site search tool to your Web site. If you take nothing away from search engine A while building a stronger relationship with search engine B, you’re winning at your own game. You decide where the traffic comes from.
Another way to change the rules is to tell people where to search and what to search for. You can do that through advertising, through press releases, through interviews with the media, through Web site reviews, through articles you write about various topics, through links you drop to pre-defined queries. People will check out your recommendations.
Another way to change the rules is to create new, non-competitive resources that rank well for active queries and which act as segue points between searchers and your site. That is, create useful resources that recommend you primary site to their visitors. You can increase traffic to your site through a network of unique, useful sites that people enjoy visiting. They’ll trust the recommendations your other sites make (provided you only make trustworthy recommendations).
In short, search engine optimization goes well beyond just obtaining good conversions from any specific search engine. It includes managing your search visibility across as many search resources as possible as though it is concrete and substantial. Search visibility is a malleable asset that can be developed into a productive quality by search engine, search market, and search vertical. Optimizing your search visibility enhances your search engine traffic more efficiently than just targeting queries.
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published @ October 21, 2008