What is Findability?

According to Wikipedia, Findability is a term for “the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website (using search engines) and by users already on the website."

Let’s broaden that definition a little bit. To have excellent Findability, your website (or blog or video or Tweet) must be the one that comes up when someone searches not specifically for you by name, but searches for your product, service or information. And, it must come up on Page One of a Google results page—because with so much information out there and so many companies competing for business—hardly anyone goes past the first page of results.

If you are not ranking on the first page of a Google search—then for all practical purposes you are not findable online.

Findability is critical to Internet marketing success, and over the years has developed into both an art and a science. The art of Findability is to look at search marketing from the customer’s perspective. The science of Findability shows exactly how to be visible to your customers, when they are just searching for information—and when they are ready to pull out that credit card and do the deed.

Successful Internet Marketing is directly related to keyword-driven searches. But no two minds think alike. For any given product or service, people can be using hundreds of different search terms. Which are the exact keywords that you need to use to give your site Findability?

Active Elements of Findability:

• Conducting a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign that gets results in two areas: Identifyig your highest performing keywords, and (obviously) getting traffic and sales.
• Optimizing your Website, (Search Engine Optimization) using the aforementioned, proven, high performing keywords.
• Giving your potential customers the most relevant result when they land on your site—in other words, making sure they get exactly what they were searching for.
• Staying current with the ways consumers are finding information and products online today: Social Media and Mobile Marketing. If you think you can pass these by in this day and age—your customers will very likely pass you by!

To learn more about these different elements of Findability, check out the in-depth articles in our online Findability University.

The secret to Internet Marketing Findability is to use the right keywords at the right time—so searchers can easily find you. But it doesn’t stop there; you must also provide a relevant result in response to their search. That is equally important, because it provides a satisfying user experience. Nothing is more irritating than searching for something specific, and landing on a web page that has NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT YOU WERE SEARCHING FOR! (Can you tell this is one of our pet peeves?)

A Different Formula for Findability

We have developed our own formula to put you on Page One of search engine results. 

Imagine someone searching for your business’s products or services, and getting a results page where every result is your company—your (optimized) website, your (oh-so-relevant) blog, your (interactive) Facebook Fan Page, your (highly instructive) YouTube videos, your latest (helpful) Tweet. 

That is what we call “dominating Google.” Sound good?

Contact Us for more information about Findability for your business.

Order The Findability Formula—The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing, by Heather Lutze. (Published 2009, Wiley and Sons)

(Yes, that’s correct—we wrote the book on Findability!)

Watch this testimonial about Marketing Speaker Heather Lutze: