How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Ignore SEO Snake Oil
Andy Beal over at the excellent Marketing Pilgrim blog wrote on Friday about the CEO of an online audio books from who has stated that no business should invest in SEO because of the
deadly dangers they allow their online businesses to be subjected to by search optimisation techniques
The CEO (whose name and company I won’t mention as I really feel that he should be starved of the publicity he so obviously craves) either knows very little about SEO (as his comments are full of errors), or knows a lot about it, and is trying to do a Calacanis and belittle SEO in order to gain links (which he won’t be getting from us).
Andy wonders whether he should have given the ’story’ any attention. To which the simple answer is no.
I have a personalised section set up on Google News to show me stories which mention SEO. And almost without fail they are online press releases, breathlessly announcing some new breakthrough in SEO (only available from the author needless to say), or slamming the whole industry as a sham. The audio book story was first issued as a release last week when I saw it & chose to ignore it.
The interesting thing here is that all of these releases proclaiming the dangers of SEO, or of being ignorant of SEO, all play on a complete lack of understanding of what SEO is or should do. In my Google News feed today is a release from someone who, quite proudly proclaims that he
is neither a SEO professional nor a part of the SEO industry.
and then goes on to explain why this is exactly the reason that people should give him their money so that he can teach them about SEO. Wow - I wonder if he’s not a medical professional as well, because if so I might get him to take a look at my back which has been hurting recently.
He also claims that the biggest problem most businesses face is
The air of mystery and secrecy that the search engine optimization industry and its professionals knowingly surround the inner workings, information and operations of search engine optimization with on a daily bases.
In fact, you would be hard pushed to find a sector more open about what it does and why, than SEO. We for instance take great pains to explain the reasons for any of our actions in a way that will be comprehensible to almost anyone, regardless of technical knowledge. And you only have to read blogs such as SEOmoz to find that this is the rule in our industry, not the exception.
What all this goes to show is that if one could quite easily spend 24 hours a day decrying the people who are trying to grab a bit of publicity for their own products & businesses by slamming SEO. But in fact, by denying them the oxygen of publicity it is unlikely that any of them will ever do much more than slip under the surface of Google News, leaving us to get on with educating our clients and the business word in general.
NOTE: I refuse to link to any of the ridiculous stories I’ve mentioned, but if you want a laugh, just have a look at this SEO section on Google News. Some of it is valid, most of it isn’t worth the paper it isn’t written on.
I work professionally in the “SEO” business and I must say I’m not sure what way to stand on this, companies that rely heavily on google etc for there busines and sales are at the mercy of an algo update. For this they need an SEO prfessional close by in case anything goes wrong. But this also sets up a business to be attacked by there competitors if sneaky enough to use anti seo techniques which are being discovered more and more nowadays. If a business is to survive in this modern age it has to use every channel available to generate sales and increase brand awareness. It’s a matter of when to stop pushing on a sales channel that belittles SEO and other online channels.
Hi Colin,
Obviously SEO should only be used as part of a fully worked out online marketing strategy. With regards to anti-SEO; again, this strikes me as being a pretty minor activity at the moment, but one which generates more publicity than it probably deserves. And a business is at the mercy of such practices no matter what their own activities are in SEO.
At the end of the day, I think it’s important to educate clients, both actual & potential, on the benefits of an integrated marketing mix, and to ignore most of the garbage that people put out in the hopes of generating a bit of publicity.
Yes Ciaran,
I agree with what your saying, but it was us “SEO” guys that coined terms such as “Link Baiting” to clients. This created a service that are now causing CEO’s etc to come out and say anything to Shock You, Offend You or make you cry. Similiar to the terms of engagment when creating a viral marketing campaign. As people in the industry like to cloak there activities it makes SEO an easy target for companies to say that there’s nothing really to SEO other than following simply procedures and rules. In terms of the said CEO, he might have been jumping on the Direct Line insurance bandwagon, when they stopped using comparison sites everyone stood up and watched. Is SEO the next “short term” marketing solution? Is the 12 month plan condidered “short term” by large companies?
This is a blog explaining most of the Direct Line move away from comparison sites
http://justmarketing.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/direct-line-tv-affiliates-and-
lies/
Interestingly, one of our team covered the Direct Line issue on his personal blog.
I disagree with you in terms of “people in the industry like to cloak their activities” - some people do, yes. But many more don’t.
Some people in advertising talk complete rubbish, but that doesn’t mean the whole industry is a sham.
And in terms of link-bait, you’re right - it does give people like this CEO ideas. And my main point above, was that we should rise above such shock tatics so that they don’t work.
Your probably right about my comment “people in the industry like to cloak their activities”
My team certainly operate in an honest fashion although every client we talk to expects to wheel in an SEO guy called Mike that unearths the SEO secrets from the deep unknown. Some clients get what SEO is about some don’t, that’s where the art of education comes in to play.