Why selling SEO is cheating

What percentage of business websites actually look to the greater consumer public or multi-national markets for their business and how effective is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing for them?

Lets have a look why businesses have a website:
< The peacock – look at my lovely feathers; an online, accessible, marketing brochure for new business contacts, the company will supply them with the URL
< The Octopus - A business and client wide area intranet for business critical processes
< The Elephant - A presence to impress and educate existing clients in the complete business offering
< The Sheep – everyone has a web-presence today
< The Venus-Fly-Trap - A marketing tool to develop additional business through online marketing
Only in the final case (The Venus-Fly-Trap) will it be necessary for potential clients to ‘find’ a site on the Internet, as the alternatives will locate the site through other means, which brings us to the second question; how effective is SEO for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME)?

In my opinion, “Most companies do not need exposure to a global or even a national audience”, and as such do not necessarily need to be well located in the major search engines. I will go into the discrepancies of this statement below.

Meanwhile lets have a look at the logic behind the statement that in essence states that spending marketing cash on the large search engines is a not an efficient usage of resources and does not give a reasonable return on investment (ROI).

The reality of business is that most companies in the world are Small or Medium Enterprises (SMEs). In fact across every business sector most businesses fit within the SME sector. In addition, in the USA only 10% of businesses even trade outside of their immediate resident state.

SMEs need to be divided for marketing purposes in to Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B), as there are very clear differences in the way they need to market. In the discussions below I am not entering in to the Internet advertising sphere, as this is a separate argument.

B2B
Firstly, a clear majority of small businesses are focused on B2B markets and are not looking to attract large numbers of Internet users but small, specialized groups of potential clients to their ‘Venus-Fly Trap”. The Internet allows them to gain an additional channel to new clients in targeted additional markets, only in this case of attracting additional clients from new markets, is the Internet relevant as a low-cost marketing tool. A great placement, if it was possible, in a major search engine may aid, or even, hinder this process.

The most cost-efficient and effective means for these companies to market on the Internet is to ensure that they rank well in the sector-relevant trade directories. These can be commercial, associations, journals or even trade exhibitions, each sector offers numerous sources and most allow improvement of a ranking for a price. A secondary advantage of this methodology is that the more links, and the importance of the links, the better placement a site will obtain in Google. To find and ensure listing in these sites is a hard-slog but rewarding, I should know it is my area of specialty.

B2C
B2C companies include the retail sector and many service companies, law firms, plumbers etc. These SMEs in the B2C sector are looking to the wider public for business but then, by the very nature that they are small or medium, almost invariably within a restricted geographic area. If they want to try to market product to larger markets then eBay and similar ‘Online Shopping Malls’ will suite them just as well, at lower costs but only if they build a fulfillment channel.

Service orientated offerings are even more restricted geographically, I cannot see anything better, as regards ROI, than to ensure listings in localized service directories or respected trade associations, with links to well-positioned websites that ensure the client fully understands the professionalism and scope of a service.

Believing in SEO
A fundamental problem all businesses now have is a belief barrier in SEO. Every web-marketing company seems to claim to be able to, ‘Get you to the top of a search-engine’ and to be, ‘the best SEO practitioners on the planet”. There must be 500 who claim the title just in the UK. This is patently untrue as the numbers just do not stack-up and in my opinion many businesses can understand the fragility of the pitch and will increasingly shy away from the whole Internet marketing sector as a result.

To Conclude
It is my belief that in many cases the selling of SEO services to many businesses is dishonest, and worse, leaves the whole web-building and marketing industry, the good and the bad, open to distrust and ultimately real damage. It is totally necessary to complete some Internet marketing for every business website, but rather than take the easy and lazy option, every marketing campaign must suite the real target market of a client and be individualized to their targets. As someone who has been deeply involved in technology for many years, I know there is no technological solution but ONLY experience and hard work.

As an industry we have to get our act together and behave in an honest and honorable manner. Selling SEO services to a small manufacturer of ball bearings in Birmingham is close to fraudulent and trading on his ignorance and gullibility. Selling a service that will expose a client’s website to his real potential market is much more difficult, particularly as it is extremely difficult to show the real results quickly.

An Internet site is somewhere between PR and brochure marketing and should be explained to clients as such. Neither will necessarily bring direct sales but is designed to aid in the branding and positioning of a company to its potential customer base. Lets get real, get honest and treat our customers with the respect they deserve and stop the SEO.

Joel

Ok, I quit.

Joel,

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, and I have no idea why you posed that rant on a Google Optimization board, but your post seems uninformed and ill-targeted to the audiance.

To say that SEO is not a good investment for every company, while true, is a basically meaningless comment. NO form of marketing is a good investment for every company. That doesn't mean I should produce a commercial explaining that television advertising isn't effective for every business.

Any businessman (or woman) who pays for ANY type of marketing without doing an ROI analysis to project its effectiveness is unfit to run a business. But that lesson belongs in business school, business and marketing books, etc. Not on an SEO forum.
If I just completely missed your point, please do clarify for me.

This article is very interesting and on the whole I agree - most websites are local and for many (particularly B2B it is a case of have a look at our website, here is the URL. No need for SEO to any great degree.


Or so it maybe argued. What of the missed oportunties and point scoring by being visible. If I want a plumber I may do a search including my local town name and call someone on that basis and give them the work for my new boiler (a true case scenario were the plumbing firm got a £1 500 order they may never have received). Or I am a corporate or local government buyer and want to check the competition for a contract for say 3 pallets of copier paper twice monthly and do a web search - I may find the first company in my search is someone I had not contacted and give them a call or enquire online and receive a favourable quote. their web prescence was crucial and 6 tons of paper a month is a juicy little order.

You also missed the WB2C - the web only retailer, I do not believe that ebay can really be everyones buying choice. I have a successful web retailing business selling worldwide. 85% of orders are UK, 10 % the rest of Europe, and 5% rest of the world. I reach these customers by a mixture of good SEO and adwords.

Ebay is hard work if every item has to be "submitted", the display or picture capabilities are excellent for an online auction but limited for selling online (unless you spend a lot per item on multiple images). WB2C cannot be sustained past a certain level on Ebay, and yes 20 000 people worldwide make their living via Ebay. A big chunk of their profit is going to Ebay.

The most successful online business in the UK will have a turnover of £100 million by 2008.

To conclude, a SME with a website could have the attitude - we'll tell our customers our URL or we'll find our customers then point them to the web, no need for SEO. Or they could have the attitude that the web is a potential salesperson, that could be an important part of the sales team and process, leading customers to their door and increasing their profile and business, that SEO is an imortant part of a modern company that wants to go places. Which company do you think will be the multinational of tomorrow?

IMHO

No Dout that every Concept of marketing having it's own marits and demarits, SEO Is New Concept as compare to the others, and for every new concept it will take time for the peoples to Understand and use it as a tool which help him in many ways.

How many forums are you planning on posting this identical post?

mountainmad, totally agree with you on that.
It is a little small-minded to think that just because a company 'gives' out their web address to potential customers from their brick and morter business, does not mean that they should completely ignore the 'extra' business they may get from being totally accessable and easy to find in search engines also.

I have just been having this same argument with my other directors... they wanted a corporate site built and argued that in order to have their 'pretty graphics' that they would be quite happy to totally ignore SE's as they will simply be passing out the URL.
We agreed to a compromise and being listed in the SE's has brought in comparison to existing leads, an extra 40% of leads than their sales efforts offline.
IN other words they ate crow big time....
Alot of the leads may be dreamers and not convert to sales, but its always better to have a few more nibbles, you just never know how big the fish is on the end of the line....

You gotta be seen, otherwise you're simply not taking advantage of the tools that you have been given.

Although my initial response was to the last sentence in the article, I believe Joel has a problem with SEOers SELLING SEO to others. This means that:

1. I don't have to quit after all
2. This should be posted in the SEO Pros forum
3. Joel has prob. had a bad experience, either with a particular SEO pro, or with a competitor ranking highly because of professional SEO on their site.

I totally agree with brandall's marketing analogy. Every type of marketing and advertising is meant to LURE people to buy products and services, at the cost of the competitors. It is called capitalism, and it's been around for a couple of years So even if it were all true (including the harsh words like "fraudulent"?), I believe Joel should wake up and smell the decaf.

The internet is the largest market on earth. Having a top search engine placement is like having a shop on London's Bond Street. Having no listing on search engines is like having a shop in the fields behind the village of Wetwang.

Oh, true - the shop near Wetwang will sell - if it has a reasonable product or service to sell.

But let's face it, if you can get quality trading space at the heart of London's shopping district, are you really going to say no if you can afford the investment?

Fully agree with the last post. End of the day the people claiming to be the no 1 SEO on the planet, will be judged by their results. Of course they are going to claim to be the best, I dont think the service would be half as marketable, if they were to say - reasonable SEO, might get no1 position, might not take your chances.

Christ
I did'nt know I was such a bad lad! I'll close down all the site later today then. Anyone know where I can get a 100k a year job now?

I get the impression that SEO has gotten the reputation of being like the used car saleman of the internet.

I didn't bother reading that till the end :sleep

I hate to say it and will probably be inundated with abuse, but the answer is it probably is. For all the good SEO's out there who do a sterling job and do the job well, there are hundreds more trying to beat the system, and a lack of regulation means that a lot of them get away with it.

However like the used car salesman, these may work short term, but well done, legitimate SEO will nearly always return better results in the long term.

We are a web design company and do SEM on the side as a way to add value to our sites (we want to see our sites profitable). For many clients we are a full service ad agency and work with many different ad media. While SEO is not perfect for many of our local businesses it out performs many other media such as a $3,400/mo half page yellow page add, or $0.40-$0.70/piece direct mail.

I was just in NYC with a client at a trade show that we did the creative for. They spent around $40,000 on the show and commented how they get many more real customers from search. (OK their website was $40,000 but that was last year's budget. They spend less than $500 on organic and PPP search)

A few more examples:
We have a Dallas flight school that returned a positive ROI in one week from one customer who selected the company based on the site design. They would not have been found without the SEM work we did for them. The owner estimates they will make over 6 figures from their new site and search engine marketing. In fact they are now the largest flight school in the country (based on flight training test kits sold) after 1 year of explosive growth in part due to the site and SEM.

We have a car dealer, they spend $500 a month on SEO, yet estimate they sell 2 more cars a month at an avg. profit of $4,000 (with service work over the course of the warranty). Their search ROI is considerably higher then their print and TV/radio channels.

We have a local roofer (one time charge of $1500 for SEO) that only gets 5 good leads a week and estimates they sell $5000 worth of new and re-roof projects from it.

We have a personnel company that has made several key hirer from web traffic (may good candidates search for companies on the web)

Yes, these sites could product a positive ROI if they just told customers. What we have found though is that many SME owners are too busy to use PR buzz. It has been two years and the roofer still has not added the website URL to their yard signs, business cards, or yellow page ads. The flight school has over 25 instructors, they should be training them a 30 second personnel commercial including the website but they don't (or better yet they should pay us to train them).

We try to educate our clients about the value of word of mouth PR. They agree but rarely do anything about it. In the end, often SEM is the only way WE (e.g. the channel we have full control of) can make our clients sites successful. Search is not optimal for everybody (about 50% of our sites we recommend they spend less than $1000 on search), but if used properly can be a very high ROI channel.