My Errant Mind

I happened upon an article this morning about maintaining page rank when moving your site to a new domain. It is a good source of idea fodder, but something about it bugged me. Actually, two things did.

In response to the nagging at the back of my mind, I have written a three-part series addressing the issue of search marketing dependency and why I think it is unhealthy.

Moving Is A Stressful Life-Event?

The author of the article on Clickz.com, Mike Grehan, said he recalled having read somewhere that moving is the second most stressful life event—right after losing a spouse. I was sipping coffee and smiled to myself, and let that comment inspire this post. You see, to me, moving is no such thing. I moved five times in the last year alone.

[Note: I, too, have heard this same suggestion about the stress of moving mentioned before.]

Is it some protection mechanism that helps make my lack of stress possible? Not really. Just lots of practice. I moved more than a few times before I had graduated high school, and upon graduation went off to basic training as a member of the US Army Reserves.

I next attended the University of Oklahoma. After my financial aid paperwork was delayed and I found myself unable to pay for the second semester in time, I decided to enter active duty military service. Packing my bags and heading somewhere new at a moment’s notice became a job requirement.

Over the years, the concept of ‘home’ changed. It became a place where I happened to be rather than a particular building.

It morphed from the concept of a structure and associated memories into any place where I felt relaxed, comfortable, and able to do as I pleased. This transposed itself onto my broader perception of where I was from. I began to think of my ‘home’ in broader terms of the region where my ancestors had lived and died for generations.

What does any of this have to do with server-side tweaking, DNS management and search results? Your business ‘home’ should be flexible.

Building Safety Into Your Business

The important concept here is one of being able to operate relaxed and feeling safe in any given situation or place. You should approach your business this way, environmentally speaking. If moving it will make you an emotional wreck, you have made a critical business mistake. You have tied the concept of your business to a building, or in the case relevant to us, an IP address.

A Lesson From Lynchburg

Sure, I understand location and its importance to business. Take the famous Jack Daniel’s distillery. If the Jack Daniel’s distillery burned down, it could be rebuilt. However, to protect themselves, the distillery maintained its own fire department for many years, until Lynchburg’s fire department was capable of handling its duties more adequately.

This is the same principle behind backing up your data. It is building in protections and freeing yourself from dependencies.

Why would anyone want to depend on search traffic for their company’s future? If someone working for me ever suggested such a dependency was a good thing, they would be looking for a new job.

The Randomly Morphing And Roving Billboard

Think about a bricks and mortar equivalent. Would you utilize a single billboard owned by someone else for all your advertising? Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you could conceivably get away with it.

But, what if that person changed the size and shape requirements, or the angles and method of display every month—and made you redesign your advertisement to accommodate this madness? What if they told you that if you don’t change your advertisement, not only will they make display changes anyway, but that the billboard will be moved to a different location than where it was last month? That is, in effect, pretty much what the search engines do.

Yet, people are afraid to say no to search marketing because they have been led to believe it is mandatory for survival.

Only if you make it so, my friend.

The Dangerous Dependency On Search

Ask yourself the following critical questions based on one premise: “If I removed search engine traffic from the equation…”

• What would be the impact on my business?
• Could it meet stated goals? If not, why?
• Would my business fail?

There is more to this issue than whether or not it is worth the spend to fire up your latest Pay Per Click campaign. It is about smart business practices in the information age. Too great a dependency on search traffic places control of your business and its future in the hands of engineers at Google or Yahoo! rather than where it should be.

There is more to marketing than PPC advertising and constant tweaking or agonizing over your site’s ‘fit’ for search algorithms.

You should be asking yourself the following question periodically:

“How can I protect my business model from unhealthy dependencies?”

If your business is already dependent on the Internet, allowing too many additional dependencies can be a good way to meet with a bad situation. Do not forget the importance of strategy and neglect it to focus exclusively on tactics.