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How Are Smart CIOs Helping Meet Business Goals?
As the Web gets larger, search becomes the only meaningful way of navigating it.
Let's face it, people don’t type in URLs any more:
• Many TV ad spots tell consumers to search for their brand, rather than giving out a mumble-dot-com website address.
• A surprising number of real Web users will even habitually search for “Facebook” or “Facebook login,” rather than type in a URL or use a bookmark.
• And many users will discover brands by serendipity—for example, when searching for the type of product they want to buy.
All this makes it imperative for businesses to focus on search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO FAQs For CIOs
At its simplest, good SEO gets your website to the top of the search results that your customers look at.
The problem is that this apparently-simple concept is made up of a number of different activities. It’s a diffuse, detailed, frequently inexact science. You need to customize it to the particular needs of your business.
But, without successful SEO, your business will fail. So how can CIOs help? Performance!
When I speak about search, one of the most frequent questions is this:
“What’s the one thing a company absolutely must do to help its ranking in search?”
This is just the kind of question that SEO companies hate!
SEO work is detailed, and dependent upon many factors such as product, channel, audience, tone, social media, content creation strategy, keywords, semantics, incoming links, and sales cycle length.
It’s governed by dozens of steps, each requiring its own decision. That’s why it’s so difficult to single out the “one” thing a company should be doing to give its SEO an automatic boost.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Why Should A CIO Care? Speed Matters!
As early as 2010—ancient history in Internet time—Google’s Matt Cutts was warning us about the importance of page speed as a ranking factor:
As user expectations grow, website speed becomes ever more important: A decrease in website loading speed by as little as one second can lead to as much as a 7% drop in revenues.
Sites that are slow to load also cause a drop in visitor satisfaction—it’s this that Google wants to avoid. End-user satisfaction has been a Google goal ever since its co-founders first invented its ranking mechanism. The search giant clearly illustrated this when it launched Google Instant, a way of speeding up searches:
People type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page.
When improvements to the online experience are measured in fractions of a second, a one-second increase in website loading speed is hugely significant for Google.
In fact, performance as a ranking factor is even more relevant today than it was four years ago, when Cutts made that video: The rise of mobile devices has turned performance and stability into crucial quality criteria. Search engines love websites that invest in quality, because they assume site owners will also pay attention to creating a positive end-user experience.
And that’s where cloud and flash come in...
1. Cloud Hosting Speeds Up Websites
Hosting is the foundation of a website. And hosting your site in a cloud offers some specific advantages.
Crucially, those advantages include ones that can drive improved search ranking: Consistent speed and super-high uptime.
By the way, I’m using “cloud” in its true sense here—I’m describing more than a simple, single-location hosting service. True cloud hosting uses virtual servers, backed up by distributed computing, to deliver instant improvements in speed and uptime. And the elasticity of a true cloud service allows your response times to stay consistent, even during peak times, such as Black Friday.
2. Flash Storage Speeds Up Websites, Too
Better storage performance can transform your website. Faster access to page templates, assets and databases will improve your site’s responsiveness—and, as we’ve seen, your search ranking.
And don’t get suckered into believing that SSDs or flash storage are expensive: Yes, from a simplistic perspective of price-per-GB, traditional hard drives are less expensive than flash storage. But when performance is important, it turns out that flash is 100 times cheaper than disk.
The Bottom Line
The quick-fix, one-two solution of flash and cloud gives an instant SEO boost that no CIO should ignore.
All else being equal, 100% uptime and improved, consistent performance are advantages your company can use for a real marketing edge. Cloud and flash get you there.
What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and connect with David Amerland (Google+) | @DavidAmerland (Twitter).
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