I was watching the perpetually caffeinated Mark Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and the creator of the first graphical web browser, talk to Charlie Rose about the future of internet companies. He was talking about how Google is not the next IBM, as many have asserted, and how Facebook is also not the next Google, because each of these companies has its own unique model, and have succeeded on the basis of new forces at play in our culture.
In the interview Andreesson was explaining why Google won where other search engines before it had failed, and he quoted his friend Bill Joy in saying that Google had a product feature known as the “It Works” feature. I really love that thought, because one doesn’t need to go too far on the web (or in one’s own home) to find a bevy of products that don’t quite have that feature (Bing, anyone?)
Google didn’t focus on being a universal web portal the way Yahoo did, and they didn’t focus on creating forms of advertising to monetize their traffic, as they certainly could have. They kept their homepage essentially, beautifully, blank and just gave you a search product that really, really worked. The idea was simple, even as the algorithm was (and is) staggeringly complex.
Any business thinking about SEO or web marketing should take a lesson from this model, and take a look at its offerings as a business. What do you offer with the “It Works” feature, where your competitors only think they have it? You can only get to the core of your customers’ needs if you have something that gives them unique value, or else they will leave in a single click and find it elsewhere.
Any good SEO effort will find and focus on these unique characteristics of your business, not only to leverage the selling proposition, but also to identify the narrow ways in which someone may be searching for something that you offer. SEO is about making connections, and the ideal connection is between a person with a true specific need and a business with the perfect working fulfillment of that need.
Read about how SEO works to learn more.
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