Leveraging Web databases to build conversion-driving queries

We search in one of three states of mind: seeking specific information, general curiosity, and seeking distraction. Most Web sites intuitively address one of these three states of mind. Most optimized Web sites fail to address them correctly.

Why a searcher searches is almost a usability issue. Some search engines work better for distraction than others. Some search engines work better for finding specific information better than others. Some search tools are better suited for one state of mind rather than all three.

Web search optimization produces conversions on an almost random basis because SEOs adopt a “one-site-fits-all” states of mind approach. We typically never even stop to think about why people use queries that will include a site in their results. If you’re optimizing for “britney spears posters” you’re assuming that whomever uses that query is looking for posters (pinup pictures) featuring Britney Spears and not that they may be looking for posters (people who write in Web forums) about Britney Spears.

Experience tells us that most people are probably looking for Britney Spears posters — OR Britney Spears poster sites that appear in the search results (ranking searches are among the largest contributors for highly monetized query traffic). The ambiguity behind the query thus means that even looking at states of mind doesn’t tell us the entire story. Someone wanting to buy a Britney Spears poster is seeking specific information; someone wanting to rank for “britney spears posters” is seeking specific but different information.

We can further complicate the issue by conceding that someone may be curious about how many Britney Spears posters there are, how many old Britney Spears posters are still being promoted, and what Britney Spears looks like on a poster. Worse yet, we can also stipulate that some people many just want to be distracted by Britney Spears posters.

Someone in a curious state of mind may decide to buy a poster. Someone checking their rankings is a most unlikely conversion. Someone wanting to know if Britney Spears did indeed pose for a poster with a puppy dog (or not) probably won’t buy (especially if they lost the bet). Someone who collects Britney Spears posters is looking to buy.

Of course, there are other verticals we can talk about. For example, travel sites don’t typically provide much information up front. They’ll hammer you with flashy gizmos and promotional special fares that you usually don’t want but try just getting information from a travel site. You have to give them a lot of information before they try to book a flight or hotel room for you.

When you just want to know what the cheapest fares from Chicago to Los Angeles may be, why can’t the travel sites tell you something like, “Customers purchasing tickets from Chicago to Los Angeles paid from $400 to $800 in the last 48 hours for trips occurring from June through December”?

The trend in commercial Web site design over the past few years has favored clutter and impeding user progress in an effort to impress visitors with clever mechanics. If you just ask a search engine cost to fly from Chicago to Los Angeles you won’t see any recent information. In fact, none of the results are relevant to the query.

It takes fairly little effort to provide a disclaimer on a Web page (in prominently placed, large bold font) that “past purchases may not reflect what is available for your trip” but apparently travel site planners are incapable of creating a simple airfare feed that is updated via pings every few hours to help search engines index content that is fresh.

In fact, travel site planners have failed to take into consideration how many times people visit their sites just to see what a trip might cost without ever intending to book a flight. Instead of providing useful resources the travel sites seek immediate conversions, thus downgrading the user experience and making their queries for information more difficult to complete.

Consumers engage in “What if” modeling more often than business analysts. They want to know what it might cost them (based on recent sales) to fly from Indiana to Hawaii. They want to know what it might cost them to buy a house on the east side of Chicago. They want to know how long it might take them to drive from home to Mom’s house in another state.

There are few if any Web tools that provide quick access to this kind of information. Instead, travel, car rental, and real estate sites ask you for information and then try to sell you something, schedule an appointment, or sign you up for newsletters. But how easy is it to pretend you’re planning a trip without actually tying up airline tickets, reserving cars, and booking hotel rooms that you have no ability or immediate desire to pay for?

Sites that collect information from consumers VIA THE PURCHASE can create usable data resources that help people do simple cost projections. With appropriate disclaimers the tools would be useful in creating brand loyalty and it would take little effort to leverage the conversion efforts on the tail end of the what-if scenarios.

That is, if your trip planner tool tells me that “based on customer purchases within the past X days, your trip may cost approximately $800 for airfares and $200 for hotel rooms”, I would be more likely to give serious consideration to “CLICK HERE to reserve your tickets and rooms now (actual prices may differ from previous customers’ purchases — you will have an opportunity to cancel or set different dates before making the purchase)”.

That data can easily be reconstructed into a “recent purchases” ticker that updates like an autoblog. If Expedia, Priceline, Hotels.com, etc. featured “recent purchases”, “recent bookings”, “recent reservations” pages, you’d get much better search results than this. If the airlines told people what it was currently costing to fly across the U.S. or around the world, you’d see far more informative results than this.

Search engines do actually try to extrapolate some data from Web sites. Google especially loves to provide its users with little tools to calculate stuff, plot dates on calendars, etc. But no search engine can index content that hasn’t been published. The search engines cannot guess at what recent airfares and hotel bookings may have cost, much less sort through all that data.

If you want to capture market share in these high-traffic verticals you need to capture mindshare and you can do that by creating new and interesting tools and features that address states of mind that existing Web sites ignore or treat very poorly. Since most consumers are not looking to make immediate purchases, it follows that the most heavily used resources will be those that provide the most information with the least amount of distraction.

In other words, ugly works because it gives people what THEY want, not what the Web designer thinks is really cool. The SEO may not be able to persuade the Web design team from doing something stupid, but they can certainly show how data that is being captured at purchase time can be leveraged into providing consumers with a unique resource (spammers cannot publish this data as fast as the original sites — not even if they use XML feeds, which can be delay-published to show search engines where the most up-to-date information is being kept).

Your Website’s database gives you a serious advantage over every scraper and republisher on the Web. Leverage it.

And that is just a very small taste of what could be accomplished in the search results. The principle works in every vertical, every industry. It doesn’t matter if you’re running entertainment sites, news sites, or forums and blogs. In fact, many forums and blogs now have tools or plug-ins that show you what the latest commenters have said in their discussions. It’s even possible to show who the most recent visitors are and who has most recently linked to your site.

If your Web site captures dynamic information from visitors or other Web sites that is relevant only to your Web site, you can leverage that data to provide answers to questions that people currently have to ask indirectly. Before you run out to your keyword research tools to see how much activity there is for how much do chicago houses cost?, you need to understand that because no one has bothered to package the information for that kind of query people have to search for the information indirectly.

The query sometimes comes before the content. More often, the content comes before the query. Show people the information can be reached via the right query and they will learn to use that query. More importantly, as you build value into the query space you have an opportunity to experiment with page titles and meta descriptions before your competitors see what is happening and jump into the query space, too.

This kind of SEO doesn’t chase keywords, it shapes them.

This kind of SEO doesn’t compete for visibility, it creates visibility.

This kind of SEO doesn’t follow the crowd, it leads the way.

It doesn’t take as much innovation to pull this off successfully as it requires a change in the way you look at the Web and Web search. People are looking for information and/or distraction, but they are never always looking for the same thing. Your content can only address one state of mind, so build content for all three states of mind. The queries and traffic will follow.