September 20, 2007

It’s been a strange two weeks for me.

We recently took the kids to Water Country.in Portsmouth, NH, this was after weeks of nagging. Somehow someone turned them on to the water park with the constant commercials throughout the Boston TV markets “Water Country, Water Country, Ooh Ooh have some fun!” It’s a very catchy slogan and after visiting the website with the kids, and seeing the map, I knew my fate was sealed and we would be making one visit before the end of the summer and school started.

We debated when to go. “I hear it’s too cold, if it’s not 80 degrees,” my wife would say. “So we need to go on a warm day,” she would say empathically. The other factor in our decision to go was crowds; the weather has been relatively nice in the Boston and New Hampshire regions for the second-half of August into September. So we were planning that there would be a lot of people thinking the same thing, especially on one Saturday near the end of August it was close to 90 degrees, we decided to take a day off and head there on the Tuesday before Labor Day weekend.

It ended up being a perfect day that was not that crowded, and was just about 80 degrees. My daughters loved it, but my son who is a little young for all the rides, wasn’t quite convinced, so we spent the day together and I carried him around and in the wave pool, I pulled him up and down at least 50 times. I was a little stiff and tired but felt fine. We stopped at McDonald's and I had a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I hadn’t had once since the early nineties. I just had a craving so I went for it. We stopped because there was a play place – we stop at McDonald’s with play places even after being at a water park all day, that’s how important it is to play in our family.

On the way back to Massachusetts, we stopped on the north shore where the kids were spending some time during the summer vacation and I stayed the night, I ended up eating even more before bed. The mattress I slept on wasn’t great. I was uncomfortable and around 4:00 AM and I was so restless I headed back to Boston, MA. I had to pull over by Jordan’s Furniture and stretch out my back. It was a burning pain between my shoulder blades that made it almost impossible to drive. No shortness of breath or chest pain. It was definitely my back, I was sure of it.

I thought I must have done something to my back, carrying the cooler, or carrying my son most of the day. After a while the pain subsided and I was able to get back to work.

The next two days were fine, but later in the week we went to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. I picked up my son when he tried to climb into a few of the bird exhibits. We stopped for dinner at IHOP and I couldn’t resist the ham and cheese omlette, and pancakes. (Does any one else eat like a monster after watching the kids all day?)

Later that night it started again – a pain in the center of my back, between my shoulder blades it was around 10 pm and then I tried to get some sleep, but woke up around 2 and couldn’t get back to sleep, pacing the house. I watched TV, and I had never seen The Deer Hunter, so I watched it and finally the pain stopped enough for me to open the computer.

I tell this long and complicated story of my back pain to give an example of the factors that might go into someone’s perception before they start searching for answers to a problem.

I started to search for back pain and the best medication for back pain. I had taken Tylenol and Alleve to no avail. I wanted to figure out what was wrong so I could head to the pharmacy and get something for the pain. Eventually I would head to the doctors once I figured out the problem. I digressed off to searches about back pain and the major causes and treatments, I even took a quiz to test my knowledge about back pain and looked for medication.

I was thinking maybe that my back was out of alignment or I had slipped a disk, or something painful, because that’s what I was focused on. My conception was that I had a problem with my back and that was the information that I had, but it turns out that I was wrong. I was looking for a solution to the wrong problem.

The pain came back one night when I ate late – I didn’t see the connection with food at first but it was there, every night I had the pain – it was always at night, and after I ate. The pain came right back to the center of my back. I decided to go to a doctor the next day.

He said that I had atypical pain and that it didn’t sound like back pain – but he wanted me to get a CT Scan to be sure. The results indicated possible Gallstones – pain in the middle of the back, late at night, after eating fatty foods. Eventually the back pain ended up as abdominal pain and I was admitted for two days for a minor medical procedure to remove the gallstones and may need to get my gallbladder out.

Many searches start out with a problem or desired solution or the goal of an experience, and then end up with something different because they receive more information or different information or their perspective changes, they change their mind because of taste or inclination. This is true for consumer searches and business to business searches as well. I didn't know that I was searching for Gallstones but I was.

How do you account for this when performing SEO? Take for instance someone performing a search in travel. Let’s say they were looking for a tour or a vacation. They might start their search for a vacation and then qualify that by looking in certain regions and then will further indicate what they are looking for by including what I call “indicators.” These are searches that indicate preferences or tastes. Someone searching for a cruise or a tour along with a region is performing an open search. At that level they are looking to visit a place but are uncertain, they may even be open to other destinations. Give me everything on Italy Tours. When they begin to define and target by indicators, wine tours, art tours of Florence – they move into activities, places they want to visit. This information indicates that they are interested in these activities and if you can provide the information they need to make a decision they may become a customer. They may not know what they want except the experience of escape. You need to give them the experience they want, in many cases before they know what they want.

For example you may want to show them specific places and stops on the tour and maybe you can influence the indicators or direct how they continue to search, or search or your site.

You may already know what your organizations important broad searches are but you should build supportive search content around those terms. Build that content to be both informative and experiential. Give a searcher the information they desire, and try to convey the experience of your trip.

This is also true for business to business search, or search for an educational outcome. What benefits will the searcher receive if they adopt your solution? How will their experience be different? What will a college or private school education mean for career advancement, greater salary and a deeper richer educational experience for a child?

Think of your visitors and think what else might they be searching for and then think about your main search terms, and then think about those searchers and the possible indicators they might be able to give you, and how you can expand on those areas to bring in more visitors, who don't know quite what they want, or what they are looking for..

Let me know what you think.

Francis McGovern

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