• by Bill Wise , May 8, 2006

If stock prices or the weather change suddenly, if a Cinderella team or an unknown first-round draft pick appears out of nowhere, or if there's a mid-day breakthrough in the fight against bird flu, are you ready to handle the search traffic that ensues? Are you able to leverage it to your benefit?

Here's a quick tip sheet to help you see if unplanned real-world changes are your ally--or your downfall--in search.

Does your search management understand your business? The first step in leveraging the unplanned is figuring out what to look out for. And the better your search management understands your field, the better they'll be at knowing what changes they'll need to watch.

If you're in the financial sector, for instance, your search management needs to know that the stock market is an important factor in your business--and so stock fluctuations might affect search patterns in important ways. If you're running auto traffic reports, your search management needs to know that stock prices are less relevant to you, and that flash floods might be the thing to watch.

If they're really good at learning about what you do, your search management will also be able to dig deeper for more nuanced issues. Maybe NASDAQ fluctuations don't affect your search, but Nikkei changes do. Maybe weekend traffic is more important to watch than weekday traffic.

How does your search management learn about your field? It takes a combination of client services and analytics. Client services means listening to your ideas, and knowing what kinds of questions to ask. Analytics means that your search management can take what you tell them, and refine it, through lots of hard numbers, into a very precise picture.

For the same reason it's important to have search management that listens, it's equally important that your search team is proactive. A proactive search team--one that scours the search landscape for new opportunity--can combine members' understanding of search with your understanding of your business, and scour the search landscape to find opportunities that neither of you nor they could have discovered alone.

While proactivity is important for all of search, it's doubly important in fluctuating areas that are out of your control--in which there are a lot of unknowns, and so there's a lot of hidden opportunity to be used--if you're willing to (and know how to) look for it.

Can your search team work fast? When an unpredicted June snowstorm buries Florida, a lot of related search traffic will ensue--but most of that traffic will be over by the time the snow melts. Which leads me to the question: How well can your search management take advantage of a sudden, short-lived opportunity? Are their technology and operations fast enough? Can they think up creative solutions on the fly?

Have you planned ahead? Let's say your search market reacts one way to upticks in the stock market, and a different way to downturns. On the one hand, you can't know in advance which way the markets will turn--and so you're facing an unpredictable scenario. On the other hand, if you have two ready-made systems--one to react to upticks, the other to respond to downturns--you've reduced the unpredictable to something much more regular. Rather than responding to an entirely unknown situation, you're dealing with a situation you've prepared for in advance (no matter which way the stock market turns).

Of course, setting up systems that react to real events still requires a deep understanding of what's out there. It also requires the speed that lets you react to situations as they happen. But even so, being able to plan things out can make a lot of the unexpected much more manageable.

So those are some of the questions you need to ask, to know if you're ready for events (like stock price or weather changes) that you haven't planned:

Does your search management understand your business?

Is your search management proactive?

Can your search team work fast?

Did your search management plan ahead?

If your answer is "yes" to all of the above, you're in good shape. And if the answer is "no"--and you're working in a field that exists within a fluctuating world? Then you might want to rethink the ways you're managing search. Or, at the very least, you might want to think up a lot more excuses for why you're getting caught unprepared.