Where to Find Quality in SEO…or Anywhere
About 20 years ago I learned a very important lesson about quality. A mentor of mine sat a bunch of us young execs in a room and asked each one of us to give him our definition of quality. Well, to put it bluntly the “philosophy” was flowing thick and fast that day with all these young Whippersnappers thinking they knew so much more than the boss (who happened to be a highly experienced Harvard Grad). After letting us hang ourselves for a while he defined it in 4 words:
Quality is: conformance to customer requirements
To say we all felt pretty stupid after hearing such a simple four word definition is the understatement of the year, but the lesson never left me and I am very grateful to have been able to work for that old boss of mine and to have learned such a valuable lesson. I have since had the opportunity to put that definition into practice countless times (thanks Andy).
Quite some time ago I had a client come to me and tell me he wanted to be #1 in Google for (no I’m not going to tell you what keyword it was). I knew from my own research that almost no one ever searched using that Keyword phrase and his site traffic would be zero. I respectfully told him that I would be very happy to optimize his site for whatever keyword he wanted, as long as he understood his site would get almost zero traffic for that keyword. He said “that’s fine – just optimize the site for me”. So off I went and his site did end up in the top spot in Google for that phrase.
In this particular case it was a matter of personal pride in his industry to be #1 for that specific phrase. I’ll make one up just as an example. Maybe for Keebler™ or Nabisco™ it would be a matter of pride to be #1 for “chocolate chip cookies” even if the amount of people searching for that term may be minimal. Such was the case with this client.
We don’t always understand the driving force behind what is pushing a client in a specific direction, in SEO or in any business endeavor. Why is a client insisting on doing something a specific way? The reasons behind the requests are where quality can be found and the answers will help you deliver a much better product.
Do you have an interesting story about what quality really is? Please share it by commenting.
Comments feed
Interesting. I think the message isn’t specifically about clients and customers, but rather it’s the audience that defines if you’ve achieved quality. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder sort of thing.
It also implies that a thing could be both quality and not quality depending on who’s judging.
You got it Steve! Years ago I had an engineer working for me and no matter what the customer ordered he always insisted on building what he thought was quality. We eventually had to fire him because he made so many customers angry delivering something different than what they had asked for and then trying to convince them how much better his design was than what they had “ordered”. We as providers have the responsibility to fully inform clients (in writing in some cases depending on liability issues) about what their options are and what the consequences may be of their decisions. After that – it is their hard earned money and they should be allowed to spend it on whatever they want. If they want a purple Cadillac with bright green interior – give it to ‘em. Beauty – and quality – are in the eye of the beholder