Those of you following my Twitter feed may have noticed that there has been an increase in references to search and search engine optimisation (SEO) recently.

I’m currently working as a marketing consultant to a company that understands search better than most – who have created a suite of tools to help companies ‘do search the Google way’ and achieve better page rankings, increase traffic and do more business.

It wasn’t until I started looking at the services offered, that I realised how little I really understood about search despite its increasing importance. Given that consumer journeys are changing rapidly thanks to almost pervasive internet connectivity, search is probably not given the priority or resource it deserves in most businesses.

One of the reasons might be that search is full of jargon and complicated ‘black box’ processes that are almost impossible to measure and change on a regular basis. (‘black box’ is different from ‘black hat’ which is an even murkier aspect of search).

One of the other reasons that search is not given it’s proper place in marketing is that many business people have a sense of  ‘learned helplessness’ when it comes to Google and other search engines. This sense that nothing can be done to affect the outcome of a website’s ranking forces many companies to hire SEO consultants or agencies, without any mechanism to measure success.

Over the next few weeks, I will be noting some of the learnings I pick up from working with one of the most switched on companies in the space. While it is trendy to talk about Social Media and influence, there are a few ‘influencers’ you might be ignoring at your own cost.

My guess is that if you look at your website analytics, the biggest driver of traffic to your website, and therefore the entity influencing your customers the most is a search engine. Of course you are all running integrated marketing campaigns, so you have all allocated resources in accordance with expected outcomes, so it is redundant to suggest that you should be spending as much time building long-term authoritative, relevant links as you do cultivating the attention of more fashionable influencers.

I’ll reveal my client in the next few weeks as the product offer comes together…