Our best sites were getting 40% of their unique visits from Google – and with great search optimization observed during the curation process – the net number of unique visits had gone through the roof. Unfortunately, and this is where Google becomes your worst enemy if you aren’t curating properly: the depth of visit dropped from around 7 pages per visit, to just over 2 pages. Not good. In our case, we knew about good story curation but were limited by our publishing tools. Our users were clearly leaving Google open in another browser window and going back to their search results to explore the topic after they had read our poorly enriched story.

Tools permitting – and I’m not convinced the tools are out there yet – I think good curation is about the only way that digital publishers can successfully address the threat posed by Google and the like. To me, its about converting searchers to explorers. Curators of good stories can create the opportunity for exploration – taking the user by the hand and leading them through a topic, rather than sending them back to Google. This is something we began to measure and I can safely say that our stories that showed the user avenues to explore a topic dramatically outperformed our poorly curated efforts.

From the perspective of a site manager responsible for overall site profitability I can safely say that a focus on curation is the best way to convert a searcher to an explorer, which is critical to monetizing content.