About Findability

Why You Should Care About Little Findability?

Despite its invaluable benefits to our work as web professionals, findability is tragically misunderstood, or worse—overlooked entirely. Perhaps we get so caught up in our respective disciplines that it’s simply lost in the shuffle. Maybe findability is on our radar but carries a negative stigma because it’s perceived as search engine duping SEO. Either way it seems that findability is left in the cold because we don’t understand it and don’t see where it fits into our process.

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.

Findability is a multifaceted subject that touches every sub-discipline of our industry. Because each member of a web production team has a part to play in making a website more findable—including project managers, information architects, copywriters, designers, developers, and usability experts—it can’t be put off to the end of a project and it can’t be pawned off on uncle SEO, who will micro-focus on search. To do so is a waste of time and money. There’s more bang for your buck in educating everyone on your team about the boons of findability, and their role in achieving its goals.

Speaking of bucks, there’s money to be made by finding a place for findability in your project life-cycle. The more findable your content is, the more likely it will be the commercial success you’d hoped. Any client that has hired you or your agency to create a website that will connect them with their audience will appreciate the integration of findability strategies into your services. It could be what separates you from the other guys, and helps you win projects at higher bids because of the value it adds.

Bottom-line benefits make findability an easy sell to a production team and clients alike. They can be summed up with a simple equation:

findable content = increased profits

What’s not to like about that? But in order for findability to be effective, it needs to be understood and embraced by all who plan, design, and build the web.