Tynan's Anger

Image via Wikipedia

A former colleague of mine with much more experience in offline marketing than I'll ever have posited this question to me awhile back:

I am noticing that...people who know SEO do not understand PR and the value of reported stories....

But maybe my universe is too small. Do you think it would be fair to say that in general, sports like you excepted, SEO experts just have no clue about the 4^th estate?

I dashed out a quick response, but in hindsight I actually was very happy with how it came out:

Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far. I don't know the statistics of it exactly, but I do know there are a significant portion of people, myself included, who became interested in SEO after a larger interest in the media and journalism. I think anyone who writes for a website, even if their job description is purely editorial, has to know about SEO. So I will say there is a general interest in the media.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if just as many or more people came into SEO after doing marketing for years. SEO is a form of PR, but it's only one side of publicity, and most people who do it now are utterly oblivious to pre-computer marketing tactics. In general, I think the value of persuasive and quality writing is underrated even when taking SEO into consideration—SEOers love to say "content is king," but when I've heard SEO-minded people saying that, they're definition of good content is websites with correct site architecture, keyword usage, and lots of backlinks.

While the former two make up the relatively easy part of SEO, the last part, getting quality backlinks, is the most volatile and misunderstood part of SEO. Getting listed in a bunch of directories or random blogs with PageRanks of 3 is nice, but if you really want to rake it, you need much bigger sites with much higher authority—and those are still dominated by strictly editorial-minded sites that more than likely have some basis in the old media world (newspaper websites, academic websites). Even the "newer generation" of sites that give the highest-stature backlinks, such as the Gawker Media Blogs, Yahoo Blogs, etc., are still dominated in editorial policy by older conventions, even if the format and style is drastically different. That's something most people who develop websites don't understand, and when they're told this, they usually dismiss it since everything's "long tail" and all it takes is one big link...

But in hindsight, a few questions came out of this that I'd like to pose to SEO'ers:
1) Was your pre-SEO background based in editorial, or marketing
2) Do you place any greater SEO value on a website with established editorial clout in the offline world?
3) What do you think the defines "good content," be it marketing or editorial content, in the SEO age?

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Labels: Backlink, editorial writing, google, link building, public relations, Search engine marketing, seo, Web Design and Development

Image via WikipediaYesterday, the folks at findingDulcinea released SweetSearch, which combines Google algorithmic rankings with quality reviews by actual human beings. When playing around with it, I noticed that when you search for a specific business type in a specific location, rather than getting the results of any individual firm or company, your results are almost exclusively a listing of directories for that business type.

What interests me about this is what it says for the future of SEO: Jeff Jarvis and others have argued that when personalized and semantic search become more powerful, the SEO industry may cease to exist. I never really gave all that much credit to that argument, but after using Sweet Search I saw how that could eventually come to pass.

The reason the end of SEO as we know it today is a possibility, however remote, is the differences in priorities between the searcher (Google's customers) and the people working towards being found on search engines. On the one hand, a listing of a directory of businesses, rather than one or two individual businesses that happened to have gamed Google (or hired someone who has) is more useful to the searcher. While gaming the system is not inherently illegal or unethical, it does probably end up hurting the product for the searcher, even if everything is kept White Hat. On the other hand, the field of SEO is booming—it's one of the few tech fields that is still seeing growth, and the fact that Sweet Search produces search results that are all but useless for hired SEOs is a potentially devastating and portentous sign for anyone who makes their living in the industry. It's still unclear what exact mechanisms Sweet Search uses to get its results, but it may be the closest indication we currently have to what Google is striving for in the long run in terms of their search product.

Note that even if SEO were to decline as a result of this discrepancy, it would NOT mean the end of the SEM industry by any means. There's still a lot that can be accomplished by marketing through search engines without strictly looking to improve organic rankings, even if getting a high ranking is a much sexier and more noteworthy goal. Regardless of what happens to SEO with contextualized and semantic search, here are the two main conclusions I can draw from the future Sweet Search depicts:

1. SEO'ers should focus more extensively on directories—and for reasons other than backlinks alone. While backlinks are nice things to have for traffic and crucial for SEO, directories can also provide companies with clients without those clients even touching Google. If the categories are sufficiently specific, potential customers would be likely to convert at a higher rate through a directory rather than a general organic search. Of course, while most directories SEO marketers use now are independent of Google, and many exist purely for providing links, it's inevitable that Google will look to get a larger pie of the online directory business. This is why directory search marketing Google Local, which is already a rapidly growing priority for SEOers (especially for businesses that mainly operate locally), may become an expanded and someday even predmoniant form of search marketing.
2. Paid SEM like PPC, while not as immediately cost-effective in the short term, may have more endurance in the long term. I would never tell anyone to stop building skills and experience with SEO simply out of a general fear for where the industry is going. I'd be stupid to do it myself. But no matter what happens to SEO over the next 5 years or so, it's inevitable that industry standards will go through major changes rather frequently over this time. Volatility in SEO conventions means volatility in its usefulness, and hence, volatility in its potential to earn money. While PPC, AdWords, and other paid methods of search marketing may cost more and produce smaller ROI, paid search marketing has much more stable standards, and probably won't face all that many significant changes over the next 5 years, especially when compared to SEO. Hence, PPC and paid SEM are probably a more reliable bet in the long term. For yet another disclaimer, remember that the risks of SEO may be overrated. Of course, that's what they were saying about real estate derivatives 3 years ago, so one should keep in mind all the dangers that come with a higher risk/higher reward form of marketing, even if the risk is only slightly higher.

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Labels: AdWords, art versus business, findingDulcinea, google, jeff jarvis, Pay per click, Search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, seo, Sweet Search