The Internet has been with us for at while now. We hear stories about how 500 million people are members of sites like Facebook and more impressively how that ‘customer’ base has been built in just a few years.

Nevertheless, there are still many businesses who don’t prioritise the internet as a source of revenue, who have been conditioned to think that a company’s web presence is a job for the guy in IT or that agency that charges more than the lawyers.

This week I have seen headlines in traditional media with headlines like ‘Why you should consider Internet marketing’ as if it was still the bleeding edge of promotional activity – as if there was some reason why you might not do internet marketing.

Functions that are fundamental to business are still being marginalised internally and that provides technology companies that can explain the business benefits of their services an opportunity.

Take search. Even a 5 year old entrepreneur with a lemonade stand knows that location is important. If nobody knows where to find you, no-one can buy from you. Nowadays, even passing trade can be hijacked by competitors making real-time offers to tempt your customers down the street using location based services, but your customer’s journey probably started much earlier – with an internet search.

Why then, do savvy business people who understand that location is important, not think about the location of their website in a page of search results?

Perhaps it’s too hard. Perhaps the mystery built up by the ‘search industry’ has convinced business owners that they are powerless to have an effect on the corporate machinery of sites like Google, bing and Yahoo!

Even if that is the case, why aren’t search experts then given the same priority as an accountant or lawyer?

In fact, it’s not the case that search is hard. While Google is not as transparent as the yellow pages, there are simple rules that have not changed for several years that almost anyone can follow to get the basics right.

Like accountancy or tax, there is a level of expertise that will meet basic requirements and then there are more complicated issues that require more expert knowledge to make the most of the system.

(It’s at this point that I feel like starting this blog again, having come up with the analogy between search and tax, but that will have to be another post!)

If you accept that location is a fundamental business requirement, then how you rank in search engines becomes a priority ahead of many other business functions. You page rank in relation to your key search terms or keywords needs to be a metric that has the same importance as your sales conversions or gross margin.

What if you could have a tool that did for search what MYOB or Sage does for accounting or what SalesForce does for CRM? What if you could do search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘the Google way’ in a step by step way that demystified the process but provided real business benefits?

What would you want from that service suite?

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…

I’m a big fan of Twitter search. I have a cool plugin for Firefox that brings back the latests tweets for a search term and displays them above the same results for Google. It’s one of the reasons that Google is rumoured to be building similar functionality, to bring back real-time, real-people sentiments. But does Branding have to change in a world where only plain text is available? Without the fancy logo that surrounds your brand, can your customer find you?

Here’s an example to illustrate my point. Once upon a time there was a wonderfully innovative mobile phone brand called Orange. Famously, millions of dollars were spent to come up with the catchy strap-line “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange” and the brand became a case-study for marketing students of the 90′s.

But what happens to Orange when you take away the strapline and type just the brand into Twitter search? The  results include chocolate sprinkles, a county in California, termites, Orange juice, orange rolls etc…

Try the same test with Vodafone. Type the single word with no qualification into Twitter and every single result refers to the mobile phone / internet brand.

Why is this important? Well increasingly, smart branding people are using sites like Twitter to monitor brand sentiment. The power of having an uncensored feedback loop from your customers around the world allows marketing people to tweak the mix to satisfy the needs of their audience. Monitoring brand sentiment on Social media platforms is in it’s early days, but it is a lot easier when you have a distinctive brand.

Try it for youself. What do you get when you type your brand into search.twitter.com ? Is it a lock-out? Is the whole page filled with people talking about you, or is it muddied with other things?