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The economics of managing relevance

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 15, 2007 in SEO Theory

The theorem of search engine optimization tells us that, as optimization increases within a query space, the natural randomness of search results relevance diminishes.

That might seem like a statement of the obvious but knowing that optimization always diminishes randomness enlightens us in several ways. We now know, for example, that in a natural (unoptimized) query space the search results are less likely to have specific relevance. Think of specific relevance as a measure of relevance on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is the least relevant scoring and 10 is the most relevant scoring.

Search engine optimization raises specific relevance by setting relevance score triggers. We include keywords in titles and page URLs, for example, to improve our relevance scoring for specific phrases, although in doing so we reduce our relevance for many other unspecified expressions. In other words, optimizing for specific relevance is achieved at the cost of losing relevance weighting for untargeted expressions. Extremely high specific relevance is counterbalanced by extremely low natural relevance.

Natural relevance measures how a document would score if no thought were given to search engine optimization. The chances of using a keyword in a title or page URL would be less than the chances of NOT using a keyword in the title or page URL. Your word distribution in what we could call optimization hot points or optimization trigger points (but I’ll use optimization points for brevity) is random, somewhat chaotic, although obviously ordered according to the expression of your ideas.

Now, I’m not just talking about on-page factors. Both natural relevance and specific relevance have finite values and those values are determined by how many on-page and off-page factors your Web document has associated with it. And no two pages are equal. That is, you can place a document with 1,000 randomly chosen words next to another document with 1,000 randomly chosen words and they each have different numbers of optimization point.

Maybe one page has more bolded text than the other. Maybe one page has more inbound links than the other. Maybe one page uses more words in the title. Maybe one page uses more words in the URL. These are assumed to be naturally random, unoptimized pages. They have very low specific relevance. It is impossible, by the way, for a page to have a specific relevance of 0 for any word with which it is associated.

The sum total of a page’s specific relevance scores and its natural relevance equals the page’s relevance potential. Relevance potential changes according to the content (both on-page and off-page) associated with the page. But if we assume that no other links are added, no other words are added, etc., then a page’s relevance potential should remain constant regardless of what changes are made.

So where is all this going?

Let’s talk about the infamous long tail of search. There is an opportunity cost associated with elevating a page’s specific relevance because you do so either at the expense of natural relevance or by throwing more resources (time, money, etc.) at the page. Your strategy has to take these factors into consideration.

You have to have a cutoff point where the optimization stops and that cutoff point should be determined by the potential return on investment. You can measure return on investment in more than one way. For example, in a highly competitive query you may feel compelled to achieve brand visibility (many brand owners do, in fact, find themselevs competing with resellers and their marketing strategies may be brand-driven, thus requiring high brand visibility).

If you don’t need to achieve high brand visibility and your natural relevance reaches a potentially larger audience than any specific relevance, your best choice is not to optimize your content (or, rather, to engage in only moderate optimization).

Optimizaion leaves a very visible footprint and once a competitor finds you optimizing for a query space he assumes there is traffic to be gained from that query (a smart competitor would test that assumption, of course). As more competitors enter the query space the more important optimization becomes and the less important natural relevance becomes. You reach a point where you have to decide whether to engage in building your specific relevance or drop out of the query space.

As long as you can bring more resources into the mix you can increase the number of query spaces for which you optimize, but when you reach the limit of your resources you have to start sacrificing either specific relevance for natural relevance or vice versa.

Hence, the calculation of relevance potential — something we generally do on the intuitive level — is a very valuable asset in our arsenal of search optimization skills. If you can manage your relevance potential wisely you’ll achieve maximum or near-maximum (call it achievable optimal performance) results.

Now here is where the counter-intuitive role of search engine optimization can help you. The better you become at boosting your specific relevance through small incremental steps, the more query spaces you can engage in through natural relevance and subsequent low-level optimization. Optimizing just enough to achieve a small competitive gain in a previously unoptimized query space extends the potential timeframe in which you’ll have that query space all to yourself.

Hyperoptimization, which tends to set in quickly when people share traffic-generating keywords in blogs and forums, is a self-sustaining process. Once it sets in it never stops until the traffic (and money) go away. That’s why you don’t want to start your SEO career by going after major keywords in retail, travel, pornography, real estate, and entertainment. Which is not to say that people don’t start out in those verticals — many people take them on every year. But the people with the most resources have the advantage in highly competitve verticals.

Building achievable, sustainable, long-term success in one query space better equips you to duplicate your results in another. You not only increase your brand value, you increase the resources you have available (unless you compartmentalize your Web properties, which some people do). While your resources grow you have the luxury of building out both specific relevance and natural relevance but once you reach the limit of your resources you have to start making choices.

Optimizing your relevance strategy is as important to search engine optimization as anything else. Once you hit the macro-level of strategic planning you begin to see opportunities you never could have imagined in micro-SEO. You begin to understand why people invest so heavily in certain types of content and why they leave other types of content alone.

If you cannot see the big picture, you’ll never be able to paint more than a small one.