Search with Design

To be good at any job, you need to like doing it. Not just the ivory-tower, CEO-stuff. But the boots-on, factory floor part, too.

An SEO should always be conscious of search. Trying to find a new restaurant, looking for a specific book, or in the case of my next example: looking through an online help guide.

I was busy converting some old Overture campaigns to the new Panama system recently. I was using their online help system to find out what [match type] meant (in the relative terminology of the system). I found the information I was looking for in the 3rd result, titled: “Importing Campaigns”, which contained a concise definition for every field name used in the importing process.

Every time I needed to refer to that information, I searched for [match type]. But eventually, I realized how stupid it was to keep using that term, despite the fact that I knew the title of the article I wanted was “Importing Campaigns”.

So, the next time I needed that information I used the search term [importing campaigns]. It took me about 3 times as long to find the information I needed because my first expectation was that the page I was looking for would be SERP #1. Nope.

Well, it couldn’t be any lower than #3. Nope.

Result #6 was the page I was used to seeing. So I went back to using [match type] to find the information I needed on importing.

What’s the takeaway? Well, if someone at Yahoo! was watching the logfiles, they’d probably see me importing campaigns, and searching over and over for [match type]. They’d think to themselves: “Wow, this guy is sure having trouble understanding match types. But he’s must be having a pretty easy time with importing, because he only searched for it once.” They might then conclude that I am new-ish to the SEM world, and that I don’t undertsand match types.

The course of action then is to improve the information on match types, and neglect the information on importing campaigns. When all I really needed was for someone to rearrange the SERPs for the latter.

It’s subtle, but it’s something to think about.