Your product or service is the best-kept secret on the planet. Your brand-new website uses the latest technology available, yet your business is getting disappointing sales results. Rest assured, you are not alone.
Discoverability is the solution for making your offer known to your target audience. By increasing your discoverability score, you can expect to see your sales grow and your brand shine brighter in the digital world.
The Origins of Discoverability
No need to worry if you are not familiar with the term "discoverability" in a digital marketing context. It is a relatively recent concept. The French equivalent, "decouvabilite," was officially added to Quebec's Grand Dictionnaire terminologique (Office quebecois de la langue francaise) in 2016.
The Office quebecois de la langue francaise (OQLF) defines discoverability as:
"The potential for a piece of content, a product, or a service to capture an internet user's attention in a way that leads them to discover other content."
The English word "discoverability" is actually over 150 years old. It was originally used in a specialized legal context. Its modern digital meaning emerged about a decade ago, alongside the rise of web search engine optimization techniques.
Ursa Marketing expands on this definition by adding the dimension of the specific user you want to reach. Your offer must achieve the highest possible discoverability score among your target audience. It needs to cross the path of users who are actively searching for your product or service. Strong discoverability is the result of a well-orchestrated strategy designed to plan and create that perfect moment when your offer meets your potential customer.
Now that you know what discoverability means, you need to do everything in your power to maximize the discoverability of your offer. That is where your sales success ultimately lives. Your discoverability is, in a sense, your lifeline. On one hand, your website and its content need to be structured so they work in harmony with search engines. On the other, you need to identify how your target customers are actually searching for you. Getting a handle on all these variables simplifies the equation and sets you on a path to reliably optimizing your discoverability and your success.
The Discoverability Score
The richer and more detailed the information describing a piece of content, the greater its potential to be linked to other content and, therefore, to be discovered. Documenting (or indexing) content, much like doing SEO for web pages, means normalizing and organizing how that content is represented online. It actively contributes to the continuous improvement of search engine applications and algorithms. But it is also a necessary step toward learning how to leverage your own data, ultimately helping you build your own discovery, recommendation, and attribution tools for everything that went into creating your offer.
"Those who control search engines have become content providers, and they favor themselves through secret algorithms that no one knows anything about."
- Destiny Tchehouali, President of the Internet Society Quebec (ISOC Quebec)
In other words, a search engine like Google sets the discoverability score based on many parameters, some of which remain secret to this day. That said, website content and site structure are two major factors that positively influence discoverability.
One of the key challenges is ensuring that content gets indexed and suggested to internet users. Major online platforms have become essential distribution channels for content. This gives them an increased role and responsibility in promoting your products and services. The goal is to establish a discoverability score that reveals what types of content are being searched for, where, and by whom.
Boosting your discoverability score is like a treasure hunt aligned with search algorithms. The winner is whoever finds the treasure first by applying the best strategies to get their content in front of their target audience.
How to Improve Your Discoverability
Traditional promotion and marketing techniques are no longer as effective as they once were. Print newspapers are disappearing and consumer habits are evolving alongside the growing accessibility of digital platforms. Entrepreneurs and digital marketing strategists need to collaborate to find new distribution strategies and improve discoverability for consumers.
Data is only valuable when it leads to a deeper understanding of the customer. Beyond the numbers, it is essential to remain empathetic, authentic, and respectful. To improve discoverability, you first need to discover your consumers: their habits, their choices, their preferences, and above all, what motivates them. You must be worthy of the trust they place in you. In that sense, artificial intelligence (AI) is simply an additional tool in our pursuit of building more authentic relationships.
Measurement is at the heart of discoverability. You have to try, fail, and try again. If you never fail, you are not pushing hard enough. The key is to make smart, well-defined bets. You learn and you get better. Measurement (data) is essential for reaching the top, and facts are non-negotiable.
The challenge is to make online content easy to find and recommend through search engines to potential audiences. It is by creating appropriate, interconnected data and metadata from various sources that your offer can be discovered. While some search algorithms remain somewhat mysterious, several platforms now provide guidelines and tools to encourage the production of structured data.
It is also possible to produce metadata to describe content on a web page without having deep knowledge of metadata models. Some tools can indicate what information should appear on a content presentation page. Far too many web pages lack the minimum amount of information that would allow search engines to link them to other content across the web.
In the era of Big Data, it is possible to improve our understanding of how digital algorithms work. We can also measure their prescriptive effects on the presence and visibility of different types of products or content, using data mining and extraction operations on the catalogs of new digital distribution platforms.
Discoverability Shifts with Habits
Discoverability is a never-ending journey. Just when you reach a strong discoverability score, new platforms and trends emerge. Your customers adopt new habits, and gradually your offer stops crossing their path. That signal needs to be captured and analyzed. A strategy to maintain that hard-earned score must be developed to preserve your competitive edge. We strongly recommend tracking your performance indicators closely and adjusting your strategy in line with your users' evolving consumption habits.