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Seth Goddin has a great quote in the opening page of his new e-book which launched today. It is the simplest way to describe the problem at hand. “The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack. And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.”
It is a good read because it highlights an often missed aspect of search ranking success called ‘recency’. Building lots of cross referencing weblogs and websites, or creating piles of content filled pages isn’t a shortcut to clicks. Businesses trying to win clicks need to provide valuable content, keep the content current, dynamic and be a little different. Same old doesn’t work, by default you are simply one of many.
Customers often ask why we change the Saasu.com website regularly, this is one of the reasons. It is one of the factors which helps us maintain a position on the first search page in Google.com for “online accounting”.
Are you in a crowded market space?
So the dilemma is if you are in a demographic that a lot of other businesses compete in then ‘unique’ isn’t simple to achieve. How do your create niche, differentiation and value beyond the crowd?
Applying a bit of Spock logic tells me that you can only create value over and above in one way.
- Be an inventor, creationist, a generator of IP
- Deliver it to your customers and potential customers.
- Do this on a regular basis through communication, product and customer experience.
Then they shall become fans.
37signals have done a good job of this and so has the grandmaster himself Seth Goddin.
You may be wondering why I am such a fan of Seth’s work. Seth brings authenticity and morals to marketing. If the worlds great doers all operated the way we would be giving half our newspapers content to scientific discovery instead of sport stars and bad advertising. We could all spend more time with family rather than working to fund the huge slice of consumer product price that is spent on interruption marketing.
