What don't you trust about SEO (search engine optimization)? ... and why?
SEO is a fundamental aspect of making your website relevant to your visitors and prospects. The major search engines have SEO consultants on staff because it is so critical to effective paid placement. Yet, there are many examples of genuine disdain being expressed for SEO on LinkedIn as though it is a false promise rather than a business tool. Why?
Clarification added June 23, 2008:
Optimization is essential to an effective paid placement (SEM) campaign because of the importance of relevance. If your SEM matrix is not properly relevant (you are bidding on the phrase "Toyota" when you are selling "Ford") you will pay more for a click. This CAN be optimized, but not easily. A proper optimization WILL reduce the CPC and the major search engines encourage this practice and will even help you do it.
Answers (42)
John C
Web Strategist. Social Media Writer & Book Author. SNCR Fellow.
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Great question. Maybe a lack of understanding of what SEO is really all about, and how search engines work. Not sure about your reference to paid placement though, can you clarify?
Michael S
Marketing Turnaround Specialist
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Gary -
I've been doing SEO for about five years. The problem is that many SEOs are not honest about the results customers can expect to get. The result is overpromise/underdeliver. It does not help that every year many web designers and programmers turn to SEO for a quick buck without understanding what they are doing. The result: many people will toss you under the buss with the opportunists, despite your track record and integrity.
I've not seen the "genuine disdain" but here's my best guess as to why SEO is not popular.
1. It's hard to understand, there are a lot of variables in play, and the rules are continually changing. Hence the need for SEO Consultants.
2. It is hard to get the coveted top placement - you actually have to do real work to get it, like relevant content.
3. Sometimes the content creators are different than the web managers, yet the web managers are measured on SEO.
4. You know how you measure up against competitors and sometimes the truth hurts, creating animosity towards the messenger.
5. Change for the better can take time, and executives have no patience.
Overall it can fall on the side of too much information. Which statistics do you pay attention to? Which ones will really impact your business? If that's not well defined, SEO options become overwhelming and paralyzing.
These are just some guesses. Personally, I see SEO as a benchmark for moving upwards, easily assessing possibilities and having real visibility.
I learned Search Engine Optimization When I owned an online store in 1995. We where so happy when Google came out for two reasons, many of them where customers and we came up on the first page of nearly every relevant search.
Now SEO is an aspect of our Advertising Agency.
Manny times I hear a web designer say "I do can do SEO" And I think to myself, I can sing, but nobody is going to pay to here me sing, as a matter a fact they may pay me to stop. Maybe people should pay him not to mess up there site.
We just won an account that had spent $18,000 with one of the top 5 SEO firms in the world. After we took over they went from the 6th page of google to the first in 6 weeks. That top firm had made many small mistakes.
Since that top firm made so many mistakes we had to guarantee our results. Now that I have seen so many bad SEO people I think the only right thing to do is guarantee results. We charge a small up front fee with a heavy bonus structure.
The way I look at it is, If you take top dollar for mediocre work you are nothing more than a common thief. So if you are good you should guarantee you work.
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Its a hidden practice, it suggests that there is more (or more appropriately less) going on than you are actually doing for the client. Think how web developers have been tarred with the same brush.
Lack of understanding of the process and mistrust of guarded practices..
Mohammed Hussain K
Head - Content & Client Servicing at K WEBMAKER™
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SEO trustworthiness is not an issue. Issue is the hype it has created. actually many people tend to give and follow up false clicks and leads of thier customers. thats y.
Frank M
Professional IT Software Architect. LION|TopLinked|Invites Wecolme|15K+
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Hello Gary
I believe that SEO could be regarded with some disdain or mistrust is the following. Firstly the SEO service is often oversold: "Use me and you will be no. 1 on google no matter what". Secondly SEO is not an exact science and the result changes over time. Finally the result is not guarantied and is not verifiable.
Kind Regards,
Frank Mandix [LION,4000+]
Let's connect!
I think part of the problem is that a lot of company managers don't understand that an SEO plan functions best if it is part of an overall strategy. My company manages online communities, and clients are often surprised when I tell them I want to talk to their SEO consultant. By tailoring some of the communities content to match the SEO consultants work we can enhance our intelligent search response, drive more traffic to the site, and build activity on the community. We all look a lot smarter when we realize we aren't a magic pill, but just one piece of a complex and variegated puzzle.
Hi Gary,
I think results are not instantaneous. It’s a continuous process, and marketers can’t maximize the ROI before two to three months after commencing the campaign.
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I don t think so, SEO is really important for companies who wants to appear in search engines. But sometimes people may not want to believe it because it takes so much time.
Optimization in SEM is really another thing.
I think both SEM and SEO is very critical things for companies.
Karl M
Online Advertising/Marketing Consultant
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All good points here but I wanted to add a little extra...
I have dealt with people in the past who wanted to appear "top of google" - they had nothing to sell as such, or their business was not able to benefit from being positioned in first place. As a result if/when they appeared high in the rankings they didn't instantly become "rich".
I believe many people have believed that appearing top would guarantee instant success, however SEO is only a route of delivering qualified leads, the real success factors depend upon other factors; website design, funnel visualisation and usability to name a few.
Looking back I know that some companies have requested that they appear top for their brand names, which is not going to achieve NEW business, but merely assist previous customers to find them slightly easier. When ploughing resources and time into promoting a brand which is not well recognised, less time and focus was placed on product specific keywords. End result - no new business from search engines, unhappy clients.
I have found that by educating people on the benefits helps, as is explaining the "long-term" investment required for SEO vs PPC. When people truly understand how it works in the total marketing mix then they are open to using it.
SEO, search engine optimization is the work of increasing the quantity and the quality of the peoples visit your web site from search engine like Google, Yahoo!, msn, altavista, dmoz, LYCOS, and directory via voluntarily search result.
The clients that get the best results are the ones who view the SEO campaign as a partnership,adding exclusive content as a marketing strategy in the web site to improve relevance and traffic.
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I believe the real truth of why SEO is given lower priority by many 'decision makers' is the inability to measure or forecast ROI accurately.
It is easy to throw another £10k per month at your PPC and have a reasonably accurate idea of your return.
With SEO however, it is difficult for an SEO expert to say 'Your £10k investment in us will result in £50k return'. Yes, ultimately you should end up with the perfect 'search engine friendly' pages and a good linking strategy. But there are thousands of other companies just like yours who are also being pro-active in this respect and there are only 10 results on the first page of Google SERPs (except AdWords) for each keyword/phrase.
Nobody can predict the results of your SEO work and I would love to hear from anyone who can tell me otherwise.
Look at the facts:
- your competitors are also optimising to the same terms
- there are only 10 results on the first page of Google SERPs (except sponsored links)
- results are unpredictable: any company who says they can promise you a certain position for a certain keyword in organic search results are lying to you.
- index is growing daily: there are new websites being indexed every minute of every day that are similar to yours.
I'll answer with a quote I literally heard from a marketing VP:
"We can hire the best consultants and work like dogs to get top SEO results. Then Google will realise they're getting less from adwords.
For technical reasons, they will then tweak their black box search parameters. And then we can start again."
This is why many mistrust SEO.
You always have a sword of Damocles hanging above your head.
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As has been said, it's a bit of a dark art that is difficult to explain to most marketing managers, let alone the senior executives who hold the purse strings. The time lag is also a problem - it is difficult to secure commitment and budget to a process that takes more than six months to even begin to bear fruit.
No respectable SEO will ever guarantee results - in fact there have been prosecutions in the U.S. for SEO companies who aggressively make these kind of unsustainable claims (see link below). This means that SEO requires a "leap of faith" that many find difficult to deal with.
I think that one of the key issues is around SEO's reputation for spam and dubious business practice. There are a number of exploitative cowboys out there who attempt to trade on peoples’ ignorance - as a marketing manager I receive several approaches a month from people claiming that our corporate sites are “not listed properly on major search engines”.
This situation is improving, as "black hat" activities are being progressively marginalised and SEO is becoming more respectable, but the damage has been done. The "smoke and mirrors" aspect of SEO is not appealing.
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Hello all,
Now this really depends on the reasons why a customer actually wants to do SEO of a website in the first place. The more vague his objectives are the more disappointed he is likely to be in the end.
SEO is not all you need to build a good and efficient online presence.
It sounds so simple but in our very particular case (aren't they all?) we try to drive creation of rich and relevant content as an objective in itself. From a marketing perspective we actually want people to read what we write in our websites.
We can then put a lot of effort into tracking and optimising this content for SEO. The trouble is that since even very good results are never eternal I expect we would have seen a lot of frustration about all the work put into writing content had it only be for SEO purposes.
A second frustration in a SEO customer company typically arises when there is little follow-up on what happens during visits created through SEO. In other words companies put a lot of effort and money into driving trafic but they are not aware (and very often are not told by their SEO provider) of the importance of optimising landing pages and making sure that visitors find what they want once inside your website. To make sure that the investment you have made on driving trafic transforms into business contacts or similar. Too many web managers stop at just creating trafic.
What I don't trust is the consultants. I am that web developer who turned to SEO to help my clients get real viable traffic at no extra charge. SEO is a joke. Consultants - change your title tags and keywords - push a couple of reciprocal links your way - then they "cross fingers" harder than you! One day google might wake up and change algorithms. Then all SEO false promises are just that. The truth is - Google - is looking for something real. Tell your clients to place truthful, factual, unbiased content on his/her site and google will let you know if you are for real. Google is sexy and fickle - so keep your content changing.
Jacob L suggests this expert on this topic:
Paul F
Owner, Paul Flood Marketing, Small business profit growth expert at www.paulfloodmarketing.com
I don't look at it as a matter of trust or a false promise. It is a business tool if it is a component of an integrated marketing strategy. Otherwise, it's just another shot in the dark marketing tactic. I think the part of the "false promise" perception exists due to the number of companies that pay for SEO but have no clue about what they want the visitor to do once they are at the site.
They have no revenue model, no follow up, no strategy to capture names or ways to create a relationship with the visitor to the site, no offers. They end up with visitors but no revenue. It's akin to running an offline ad for a retail store that has no inventory or sales people. Customers show but no sales are made. They then say I paid for SEO but it was a waste of money.
This comment deviates a bit from the fundamental question but I believe it is relevant to the perception issue raised with a good question.
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For myself... I've always had a major issue with SEO.
Seems to me that every SEO consultant I have ever spoken to makes a recommendation that is basically an All-or-Nothing proposal. For example, they bring in 150 keyword phrases, want me to modify the title tags, the H1 tags, redo the site map, put alt text on graphics, do javascript redirects in various places, submit to directories, build link exchanges, and about a dozen other things.
Many of the suggestions are actually harmful to human user interface, so the question naturally is, "Can I do 70% of these recommendations and get 70% of the results?"
The answer invariably is, "Well... maybe, maybe not, we have no idea."
I have never had a consultant try to sell me a load of BS: "I can make you #1 on Google!" Rather, it's the other way around. "Do all of these things and maybe, MAYBE, you'll move up a couple of ranks, but we really don't know, because SEO is so complicated and no one actually knows." Well, that's just fantastic then, ain't it?
The biggest problem, frankly, is that the SEO industry is lacking any real research into effectiveness. At this point in the game, seems to me that someone somewhere ought to have figured out the effectiveness of one particular tactic as part of the whole -- but no one has, to my knowledge.
For example, if I don't want to implement text headers on my website (for whatever UI or aesthetic reason), then I'd like the expert consultant to tell me that the likely impact is 15-20% of total lift over control based on research into the last 50,000 SEO implementations across major search engines. But no one can tell me that. No one can tell me that by doing 10 of the 15 recommendations, what the likely (not guaranteed, but likely) impact is going to be.
So all SEO engagements turn out to be expensive recommendations that are all-or-nothing, but even with all that, no results even predicted. It is hardly scientfic, and when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake in development costs, labor, and other efforts, it's not exactly heartwarming to a marketer to have to justify that.
That may be just me, but all you SEO guys might want to think about that.
-rsh
I'll be writing a full blog post about this soon, but here's why I don't trust SEO: organic search is Google's biggest competitor - every organic term cuts into their profits for paid-search campaigns. From a marketing perspective I don't think Google is going to let a bunch of businesses who are paying big money for high paid search rankings get a free lunch with organic search. It may work for niche terms or complex phrases, but for big-name items like "diagramming software" I don't think it will hold much water for companies like ours.
The #1 reason why people don't trust SEO is that scammers have a better and simpler sales pitch then legit operators. "We guarantee a #1 ranking for keyword x".
Honest practitioners often have to redirect customer expectations. "We can get you more business, but ranking #1 for the only keyword that has occurred to you shouldn't be the goal."
Excellent question, Gary - in my experience, there isn't a full grasp of what SEO is and how to fully utilize PPC campaigns.
Ryan A also suggests these experts on this topic:
I believe the value of SEO can easily be measured based on the bottom line result of this type of marketing activity. We took a client who was spending $1000 per lead to spending $66 per lead in 4 weeks, which helped them gain more business leads and in result net profit to their bottom line.
SEO gets a bad wrap since the web is like the Wild Wild West in my opinion. There is a lot of misinformation and outlandish promises out there, building a backlash to the uninformed layman.
The best idea when attempting to perform SEO for your company or approaching a company to perform SEO services is to educate and inform, and make sure you back up your information with facts.
Best!
Stephan
Correct SEO includes sometimes extensive keyword research, proper optimization of a site without negatively impacting the user interface, and careful link building. All of this takes time and thoughtful strategy. When implemented properly, algorithm changes will not knock a site back significantly.
Unfortunately, too many "SEO experts" make promises of quick results, use shortcuts that are harmful in the long term, blame failures on algorithm changes, then take the money and run. At the same time clients are impatient, want instant rankings for top tier keywords, and resist recommended site improvements that will help their site rank higher.
I also agree with Paul Flood's comment about web sites that have no revenue model, follow up, or strategy.
Robert Hahn said...."The biggest problem, frankly, is that the SEO industry is lacking any real research into effectiveness. At this point in the game, seems to me that someone somewhere ought to have figured out the effectiveness of one particular tactic as part of the whole -- but no one has, to my knowledge."
Robert, I don't work for SEOmoz but I definitely recommend them to many people I talk to and to the people on my team. That part of your remark that caught my eye was the part about no one having figured out the effectiveness...... and so on.
The link included below is an article written by experts in the industry that list and gives the opinions of those experts of the various parts of an SEO strategy and their effectiveness.
I hope this helps.
Links:
Wallace J
Multimedia Producer and i3D Programmer for Acrobat 3D PDF, JavaFX, Mobile & Virtual Worlds
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Nothing wrong with SEO. It has helped us get millions of eyeballs that we otherwise would not have had. As a content creator, knowledge of how SEO works is invaluable. We are doing it for our clients now, as part of the overall contract. Lack of knowledge about how SEO works might cause some animosity in publishers without an adequate level of programming and content design knowledge that would be needed to properly assimilate and optimize Search Engine Related (rank related) Tasks..
Walls. MindTaffyLLC@Yahoo.com
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Nate C suggests this expert on this topic:
Here is my two cents:
Search Engine Optimization is hard, takes time, discipline and there are no rules. There are no guarantees, no matter what people say, and it takes time. SEO "experts" are over-promising. Check past performance of your vendor.
You asked, "Why disdain?"
The simple answer is a lack of knowledge about the SEO industry.
Additional factors
1 - Tactics that once worked, no longer work. If your SEO firm follows old tactics, you lose and they look foolish. (example: link farms)
2 - Practitioners don't absolutely control "what works" as much as some believe or promise. ( Only Google, who controls the algorithm, can make promises about Google )
3 - The competition increases daily. Relative effectiveness changes. (don't expect your blog to rank for "camera" today)
4 - There remains a "Gold Rush", "Get Rich Quick" mentality among some businesses as they come up to speed on Internet Marketing. There are folks prepared to serve this market, selling pipe dreams. ( perform at least a few hours of due diligence before making an SEO hiring decision)
5 - The SEO industry is still young. Standards, training and accrediting organizations are still forming. There is not one stand out authority to turn to in most people's eyes.
These and many other factors will change over time making the hiring and offering of SEO services a more satisfactory experience for all.
Seeing this dialog is certainly a step in the right direction.
Jim Spencer
