I’ve noticed an alarming trend recently:

You’ve picked an industry. You want a website. But you have no meaningful value to add.

Problem 1: The Same Old Concept.

The obvious signs of no-added-value sites appear when the site gets specced out:

Developer: “What should we do about X?”
Client: “Copy successful site Y.”

Repeat 40 times, and I wonder if he has any real plans. Copying a working model makes sense, especially when trying to make a site usable, or as a resolution for vague specs. Why invent the basic behavior of a shopping cart when Amazon and Newegg wrote the book on them already?

However, when the entire summary of your site is a competitor’s with a new header, did you give anyone– Google or a person– a reason to show up?

Problem 2: The Same Offers.

Even with no fresh thoughts on design, a good site can do good business. In such a world, you’re making the website’s mechanism a sideshow, not the main draw. For many areas– consumer commerce, for example, such a minor weight can be a fair goal. Nobody goes to a store for the unique way you shop, but a familiar process will help to keep focus on the special products and offers which make the page appealing.

However, when you’re drawing primarily on the site’s offers, you really need a big pull. A lot of “I’m in the X business” people run dry here. Many small sellers are enamored with drop shipped goods, for example. While it gets you moving in a hurry and cheaply, all your wares are sold by a hundred other firms. All you can do is under-sell everyone else.

Another weak offer: selling leads off to a third-party company. You lose control of prices and selections available, and your informational offers are usually narrow. It’s not possible to do instant quotes, for example, when the third-party may not honor your price. With such problems, there’s nothing about your offer more compelling than a direct visit to the third party.

Problem 3: No new information being packaged.

A big focus for many sites comes in selling corporate knowledge, not goods. Your value comes from combining and refining loose data. At first view, the site’s model is an easy sale: A single site replaces a hundred searches, or provides a wide presence for local brands in an industry lacking major ones.

However, the combiner site has a huge risk: selling. While the site looks good on paper, they collapse if a simple question cannot be answered: Why will people pay for a link on a major page instead of working for rankings on their own?

New combiners have the hardest time– as power varies with size. A listing showing 1 plumber in a town of 2,000,000? Nobody wants such a weak resource, either as a visitor or an advertiser.

Also hazardous is being second in the market. Now you have to answer “Why appear on your page, not the site who’s been online since 1997 and has PageRank 8?”

In sum, combiner-based models face a double version of “where’s added value?”– visitors and advertisers are both asking.

Web success goes beyond SEO and design and code. A billion-dollar SEO and design job will fail when your site’s plan includes no new value for Google or a user.