Tag: Search

Miss..alien..us !

 

Miss..alien..us !

 

Grammar and spelling have taken a backseat in the above caption. Was it by design? Most certainly. Miscellaneous is the word I am referring to. That said, the culture we operate in buckets us in a manner that is alien, which means we miss the bus, more often than not.

 

You enter a physical book store or on Amazon, miscellaneous is always the largest category. With the smallest following. The internet and its reach has created the rather wondrous ‘ long tail effect ‘ which means there is an audience for almost anything and everything however small it might be.

 

The same web has made us lazy ( if there was a potential to be more so) – that irrespective of the order (or chaos), we will find it. That was not the way we were. Spoons went into a certain slot, so did shoes and socks, books and magazines, brooms and mops…everything had a clear slot and it was well sorted. Finding was a seamless default mode.

 

Taxonomy (or classification of things) help us get to where we want to faster and better. Being in ‘ search ‘ mode always takes away time, calls for more effort( and thereby brings in more of the accompanying inertia), derails momentum and flow and make us eschew the useful serendipity that comes with finding things where they need to be, where we expect them to be.

 

If you find yourself in ‘ find mode ‘ most of the time, it’s time to find a way out. The big sort will help. Unless, you are happy, re-inventing the wheel, all the time. In the process, ‘ missing the wood for the trees‘.

 

ENDS

 

 

 

 

It’s only Words, but they are all snapped up!

” Smile an everlasting smile, A smile can bring you near to meDon’t ever let me find you down, ‘Cause that would bring a tear to me..

 

The above lyrics are from the cult Bee Gees classic Words.

Now, try keying in Words into your search browser and see what gets thrown up. You will get everything but the song you are looking for. That’s because most of the key words( deliberately writing it as two words instead of one ‘keywords’) have already been taken.

 

SEO Strategy conventionally would have had us going for keywords that the search has the best potential to throw up high in the pecking order. But, that strategy is passe. You are not going to win that search. You are not even going to figure in page 30 of the search results. It seems as if most of us have lost the key to the keywords in the battle of the search.

 

Probably an ideal situation to pivot to doing something remarkable. How do we own our word? Do things that make people search for us by our name, our work, our projects. Showing up with the right work, at the right time, in the right places. Do the hard yards, the slow deliberate work hard of earning permission, building a tiny circle, the smallest viable audience. Over time, the tribe embraces you, the word (your word) becomes the shortcut to get more of what you offer.

 

The arithmetic is different here. The 5% is > the other 95%.  A lot of our time, effort and attention is spent on trying to onboard the laggards and the lurkers, the 95%. Whereas, our focus, gratitude and energy should be on the people( the Minimum Viable Audience) who are showing up for you and shipping out.

 

How about substituting SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) with another acronym? FEO- Find Engine Optimisation. Because it’s more reliable to seek to be found by people who were looking for you all along.

 

The chasm will get bridged at its own pace. That’s fine. Let’s take our word for it!

 

ENDS