About
About this blog
I’ve been working on search engine marketing (SEM) as part of my e-commerce consultancy for several years now. I’ve always adopted a pretty rigorous and systematic approach and the results have been good. There has, however, always been part of me that feels uncomfortable with the whole SEM process. I’m a scientist! I trained as a scientist, worked as a scientist and think like a scientist. Even when I changed professions and became a designer (see below), I was a structured, evidence-based kind of designer, rather than a sketch-and-render kind of designer.
My frustrations with SEM, therefore, arise out of the lack of reliable data and the absence of proof about the effectiveness of SEM processes. It is just not evidence-based enough for me. This isn’t the fault of the SEM professionals, whom I admire immensely. It is the inevitable consequence of trying to second guess the behaviour of a secret process - how web content and paid adverts are processed and presented on search engine results pages.
It was this thought that made me suddenly realise, a few months ago, that I might have something a bit different to offer the SEM community. The science I studied and practised was ethology - the study of behaviour in the ‘field’, in contrast to laboratory-based psychology. This was all about observing, measuring and statistically analysing the response of people or animals to different situations. The aim was to work out the ’secret’ processes that determined what they did, when and why. The proof of my science was to be able to predict from my insights into these processes what would happen in a new situation. However, because ethology was all about the natural (as opposed to laboratory-based) behaviour there were significant limits on the nature of the experiments that could be done - putting the subject in a laboratory and controlling for everything but one experimental variable gives limited insights into natural responses to natural environments. So ethology, I realised, provides a great training ground for the scientific study of complex processes using observations of limited inputs and outputs and with no opportunity for rigorously controlled experiments - just like search engine optimisation!
So, this blog is my voyage of discovery into scientific search engine analytics - an exploration of whether the impact of SEM activities can be predicted on the basis of prior, evidence-based deductions.
About Mike Baxter
A PhD, Chartered Designer, former Professor and now a consultant. My consultancy practice is Sales Logiq (recent clients Google, Shure, RBI) and I am co-owner of the best-ever hosted e-commerce platform - Moneyspyder! I am also the author of the UK’s Online Retail User Experience Benchmark reports published by E-Consultancy (2004, 2006 & 2007).
About the River
I live and work on a houseboat on the River Thames in London - when the conditions are right, a couple of hours after sunrise, my whole office fills with the flickering, dancing light of sunshine reflecting off the river. It is a very special place to be able to call home! The kingfisher is my neighbour, often using ropes or rails on the boat to fish from.
About the Photos
All photos on this site have been taken within a few hundred yards of my houseboat by Harry Rankin, a brilliant professional photographer whose main work is fashion, hair and beauty assignments.
