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Why SEO Sucks and How We Should Respond

First published on Apr 16, 2010 by Simon Foust

Within a few minutes of posting a tweet in which I mention the acronym “SEO” I had several new followers with names like “imaymoneyfree” and “FastMoneyBiz”. I promptly block these losers. But it goes to show that even mentioning SEO immediately attracts bullshit. That’s why I’m not surprised that SEO has a negative connotation for many people. After all:

People have been burned in the past.

I have a client right now that has been burned in the past. He paid some “SEO gurus” to “seo his site”. Guess what? His rankings in organic searches did not improve, and his sales did not increase. In fact, it’s pretty questionable whether or not these douchebaggettes actually “did” anything of value to his site. Basically they simply added some meta tags to his pages and suggested that he blog more often. And this is all too common, in part because:

SEO is a relatively new concept, so it is ripe for abuse by scumbags.

For every person out there trying to make a difference in the world for good, you can easily stumble upon some jerk who cares only about making money as quickly as possible. Hopefully the ratio is better than 50/50, but you get my point. SEO is a relatively new concept, and professionals in the industry haven’t proven to the public that it’s a legit industry — there’s a lack of great education about what, exactly, it is. The scumbags have worked harder than the real professionals. So the scumbags are able to say, “Oh, SEO, yeah it’s this cool new thing that you can have done rather easily and then your website will make tons of greenback$.” The result is that:

A flawed understanding of SEO attracts opportunism

It’s not just some of those offering “SEO services” that are in it opportunistically; it’s also the patrons of those scumbags. Look, if you’re simply looking to drop-ship something because you found a supplier who doesn’t care what your markup is, and you don’t give a crap about the product or the people buying the product, and you figure with some tricky SEO then maybe you can rank well, get some traffic, and make a few bucks while the gettin’s good.. if that’s you, then buzz off. I’m not interested in the least. Which leads me to the next part of this article:

Increasing The Credibility of SEO

Frame SEO in the proper context

So we know that SEO has a bad rap, and that’s due in part to the opportunism on both sides of the aisle and a general misunderstanding of the concept of SEO. So one thing I always stress to my clients is that SEO is not a shortcut to success, and that it’s not something you simply “do” to a website — it’s not an add-on for a website, like leather interior for a car. It’s simply one small part of a fully fledged marketing campaign.

If you have a great product, service or idea that you want to get into the hands of a group of people, great! Guess what? It’s going to take a prolonged effort. Don’t buy into the idea that if you just “SEO your furniture site” then you’re suddenly going to appear in the top 10 Google search results for “furniture” and then sales will explode by 1000%.

Instead, you have to realize that optimizing the content on your website is just a part of refining your company’s story. It’s about organizing your content in a way that makes it easy for someone to understand your story and then react to it. But you have to have a story in the first place.

WHAT’S MORE:

Earlier I said that SEO is a relatively new concept, and in the grand scheme it is. But really it’s just an extension of old ideas. Just because you’re doing business on the web, and just because we have these new concepts like SEO, doesn’t mean that creating a product, telling a story, and reaching an audience is fundamentally different than how you did it 50-years ago. There is no magic shortcut.

That’s why I wholeheartedly believe that “SEO services” should never be sold separately from a fully fledged marketing campaign. You have to know what you’re optimizing FOR -before- you optimize. And simply asking, “So, what do you sell?” obviously isn’t enough.

In order to properly conduct a successful marketing campaign, you have to have more than just a product to sell. You have to have a great story to tell an audience that is looking for that specific story – even if they don’t yet know they’re looking for it. Well, how do I.. get.. that? Great question. I’ll tell you this much, SEO isn’t going to help you there. And anyone looking to bypass the hard work of ongoing marketing efforts in favor of “having their site SEO’d” probably isn’t running a business so much as trying to build an opportunistic website. Which is why you must:

Choose your clients carefully

Ask yourself – what kind of prospective client is interested in faking Google pagerank? What kind of person wants to be in the top 10 results of a Google search for a term that’s not really related to how they’re making money? If we help these kinds of people, if even if we allow them to be associated in any way with legitimate marketing and SEO efforts, then SEO will continue to have a negative connotation for many people.

We need to help people who are intrinsically motivated, rather than those motivated purely by money. I want clients who are motivated by the desire to provide a great product to people who will benefit from that product. These are the kinds of examples that will resonate with people, and we can show how we used our skills in marketing and SEO for good. How can we show them?

Document really great success stories.

If we want to increase credibility in the industry as a whole, then we need to have really great success stories and we need to tell them to people.

Having worked as a front-end developer for many years, I felt the effects of the recent world-wide economic struggles. I started studying marketing intensely about a year ago so I could learn how to better market myself.

Turns out it’s one of the most fascinating topics I’ve ever considered, and so this February I began offering my own Internet Marketing service. So I am brand-spanking-new to marketing and SEO as a service, and I’m working on my first great success story right now. In the coming weeks, I’m going to publish the journey of one of my first Internet Marketing clients. By providing an inside look at a specific, fully fledged marketing campaign, we can increase credibility in a very unique way.

Conclusion

Wrapping it all up, SEO sucks in the minds of many people. Some think this way because they’ve been burned by scumbags. Many misunderstand what SEO actually is. Those of us in the industry have let the scumbags work harder than us. But we can begin to restore the credibility of SEO as a concept and as a service if we frame it in the proper context. We need to help people understand what it is. And the most important part of that effort is to understand why it’s simply a part of a larger effort in running a business. And we show that by offering it only as part of a fully-fledged marketing campaign. Lastly, we need to choose our clients carefully, and document and publish our really great success stories so that people can see the good work we do for the good clients we have.

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