NB: This is a guest article by Justin Francis, managing director of ResponsibleTravel.
All businesses seek out marketing channels to help them reach out to customers, and that they can invest in over time.
As marketers, we don't assume any channel will always deliver for us – after all, each has its own needs and responsibilities to customers. We don't assume a press article will always be positive, for example.
If we aren’t meeting the channel users’ needs, it is helpful to hear why, so that we can improve.
However, it seems Google disagrees. The recent Panda "farmer" update is a case in point. Google introduced the biggest change to its search algorithm for years, designed to reward "high quality sites" who offer Google users the best content.
The update created chaos and confusion literally overnight as some businesses did better, others worse, and the SEO community and digital marketers tried to figure out why (understandably Google keeps the intellectual property of its algorithm secret).
Google is quick to provide marketers with information that will help them spend more money via its own services, such as PPC campaigns. However, despite having been asked for years, its analytics service does not identify specific opportunities or problems with websites in regard of major updates like farmer.
Google effectively offers no customer service at all in this regard, which sits uncomfortably with a business with such a large share of the search market. You can post on Google's webmaster forums, but cannot expect to get a reply.
It’s clear from this that Google either isn’t concerned with helping businesses improve their websites, or that they don't really know why some businesses have performed differently through its complex algorithm. Either is a pretty scary thought.
What I’m asking for is quite simple. Firstly, build into analytics a function to highlight which pages are failing quality scores and why. We are not asking for the solutions, that is our responsibility.
Secondly, when Google invite us to post concerns in their webmaster forums please do us the courtesy of replying. In doing so Google will help businesses, and in turn build a better search experience for its users.
Some may argue that Google search is a free offering to marketers, so we should not expect any service. However, those of us who run sites essentially grant access to Google to index our content for free, and to use it to make money (lots of it).
In granting free access to the world's information should we not all rightly expect some form of dialogue, just to point out where we might do better?
After all, we are all in the business of aiming to serve up engaging and appealing content to our customers. Some direction from Google as to what’s working and what’s not – in the eyes of its users – is surely of benefit to everyone in the long run, including Google itself?
Ultimately, without this, the marketers’ confidence in Google will lessen and the growth of social media marketing will be heightened further.
Businesses like ours are rapidly moving our time and investment into peer to peer social networks where we get direct feedback on how to meet customers’ needs better.
I know very quickly via Facebook or Twitter, whether or not the content I am posting is of good enough quality to be interesting and engaging. And I know quickly when it is not.
As a result, I can make the user experience better, and ultimately this is where the future lies and what Google should be striving for too.
NB: This is a guest article by Justin Francis, managing director of ResponsibleTravel.