Nothing is so obscure that it isn't written in somebody's blog, somewhere.

Any Profit Rank client knows that a critical and oft-overlooked step in Organic Search Marketing is promotion: getting out there and telling folks about your useful new content. We're no exception to the rule... generally, for every hour we spend creating content for the Profit Rank website, we spend at least another hour hunting around the web, looking for a place to talk about it.

This process leads us to all kinds of odd corners, and this evening, while searching for conversations on the meaning of Usability Optimization, I ran across a somewhat bitter 2004 blog post complaining about the difficulty of selling Usability Optimization services to government websites.

Now, as a highly trained observer of markets, I instantly understood why that must be. Recall that the whole point of Usability Optimization is to maximize a site's conversion rate: the percentage of visitors who buy the product, join the club, or perform whatever activity constitutes success in the website's context. Most website operators pick this activity above all others because it constitutes a clear and powerful economic motivator to them.

So, what activity motivates a government website? At the very least, one could observe that very few government websites sell products, so the traditional basis of conversion—the sale—rarely applies. In fact, in many cases the most compelling motivation for a government agency to have a website at all is to spend down the annual budget, thus ensuring a slightly larger budget for next year. Having the website—and expending lots of resources on it—is very important. Using it effectively comes in a distant second.

So, a little circumstantial evidence for the economic value of Usability Optimization: government website operators don't like it. If one accepts that these folks won't like anything with a clearly positive value proposition, then, well, what other conclusion could one draw?

Usability Optimization must be found money!