I am preparing my Search Analytics talk for Search Engine Strategies on December 7th at 10:30 in Chicago – which includes smart folks likes Jim Sterne and Matthew Bailey on the panel. This is the outline in which I am asked to talk:

“Cut to the chase! Use analytics tools to get the specific answers you need about your search marketing campaign’s economic performance, your users’ on-site behaviors, and how to look for major red flags in traffic patterns. This slate of experts will keep you focused rather than poring through hundreds of pages of meaningless statistics.”

I know this is the usual promotional event pitch, and that’s OK. The easy response (presentation) would have been a focus around the magic, one can pull out of behavioral data in conjunction with search data. And that would be OK as well. I was, however, reading an article from Jacques Warren [1], who as a web analyst is as smart as they come, and during the post he concludes the following:

“Google organic accounted for 65% of all visits, 89,5% in December, 87% in January, and 84% so far in February. That’s only one search engine (and its various properties)! In a word, we LOVE Google.” [2]

I decided to use that as my outset and I in particular focused on what I bolded above (the capital letters are his). Before I move on, let me be clear that this is not a bashing of Mr. Warren, by no means. His post, and specifically the above comment, in combination with my talk in Chicago, just happened to trigger something in me, to finally utter my concern around the unfair relationship between content owners and search engines. This includes, what I believe to be a set of unhealthy search success metrics, or for some people, even a naïve belief in a search engine friendship.

Any other person, might just agree on how fantastic the traffic influx from Google is, in the above example, and continue to thrive on the euphoria of that – and perhaps even apply additional search engine optimization processes across multiple search engines and aggregators in regards to new content. But doesn’t this seem wrong to you, that we celebrate yet another winner of the Google organic search lottery ?

If I ran a business where most my revenue, if perhaps not all of it, depended on visitors to my site, I would be very dissatisfied to the extent of concerned by the fact that my life was in the hands of a random search engine.

To marginally illustrate my point, but mostly for us to continue the debate, let’s have a look at Figure 1 and Figure 2, and the apparent question that’s comes with those two data sets, such as; which of the below two trends would you describe as more successful (forget all about the usual ‘it depends’ and just assume that all the stars are aligned to your satisfaction).

My point is that, in the scenario of monetization being most successful around returning visitors (as we see with a lot of content owners), figure 2 is the more successful trend. AND the accompanying suggestion could very clearly be that by the introduction of Search Engine de-Optimization one might be able to force such a pattern. One action could actually be to remove some of your content from search engines all together! Drastic, yes, and this is certainly not for everybody, but think about it twice, before you conclude that I am completely crazy.

Conclusion
It seems fair to debate whether or not search engines and other content aggregators extract too much the webs value, leaving less for the content creators (originators) – if this is true, one should introduce tactics such as Search Engine de-Optimization to destress the dependency!

I’ll prepare myself for the bashing and first hit in this blog post – it might mentally prepare me for Chicago. So there you go! Dear search engine, I don’t Love you anymore. – and it’s not you, it’s me that changed

Cheers
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)

[1] If you are coming to Chicago Jacques, Diet Cokes are on me!
[2] You can replace Google with any other content aggregator and the above critique still rings true

Copyright VisualRevenue – Search Engine de-Optimization ..and the bogus celebration of yet another Google organic search lottery winner