Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You might be able to slightly influence that level through publicity, but generally marketers all fight over the same piece of the pie in their industry.

(Shigeru Miyamoto holding a Nintendo Wiimote, photo from Sklathill)

But what if you could grow the pie instead? The Nintendo Wii is one of the most famous case studies for this very idea. Miyamoto-san looked outside of the current market and connected with a non-traditional audience. Now more people are playing games than ever before.

How can you visualize that latent potential?

(Graph from Sha at Stamen)

Let’s use a parallel situation. NYC saw an exponential growth in mass transit in the 1990s, beginning to approach the all-time records set in the 40s. Why is that? The population of NYC has only grown by about 400,000 since the 50s. Mass transit is a cheaper alternative to owning your own car, yet the economy has been far better recently than it was during the doldrums of the 70s.

Malcolm Gladwell writes in The Tipping Point about falling crime as one reason to explain increased ridership. People certainly don’t want to take the subway if they don’t feel safe. However, another equally important change was simply connecting the dots.

As I mentioned earlier, the JFK Express failed because there was no connecting AirTrain service to the airport. The importance of connections becomes apparent when you look at this excellent historical map of NYC subway ridership over the past century. The full interactive version is fascinating, but I’ve composited two years into the same graphic to prove a point.

(Composite map derived from work by Sha at Stamen)

In the graphic above, you can see how extending a line for just two more stops made a monumental difference in traffic. The J/Z line ended at 121 St in 1987. Less than two years after opening the terminal at Jamaica Center, almost 20x more people were getting on the same train. Why? People could now easily transfer to the E train or Long Island Railroad (LIRR). The tipping point was convenience.

That’s really what SEO is about. You probably already have a ton of content on your website. You may even be getting a fair share of traffic already. What possible impact can a few small changes make?

A substantial difference. You have to make your website convenient for search engine spiders to find your content and search engine algorithms to rank everything appropriately. It is not until you connect everything together properly with optimized links, sitemaps, and a coherent strategy to surpass the tipping point that you can really unleash the true potential of your website.