Is there really an SEO industry? Options

[bwelford]

SEO or SEM?

Perhaps there never was an SEO industry. However if there is an industry, I think it would be better to call it the SEM industry. What do you think?

[DianeV]

Sure there's an SEO industry, which existed before GoTo.com existed (and later changed its name to Overture). As I recall, the term "search engine marketing" appeared when some SEOs/companies determined to broaden the scope of their services by adding PPC and/or more general Web marketing services. I think it's best to identify an industry by what it does.

The problem is that there was and is a necessity for coining terms for things that did not previously exist; therefore, they aren't understood by the general public. It's only fairly recently that the public began to use the terms "SEO" or "search engine optimization"; it may take a while before they adopt newer terms. There are SEMs who do only PPC and not SEO; to confuse those with SEOs would cause more problems than it is hoped to solve.

[DianeV]

Of course, if what you're talking about is the word "industry" -- take a look at Mirriam-Webster's definition:

a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises

Works for me.

[bwelford]

I find your definitions above, Diane, spot on. You also have a very worthwhile entry in one of your blogs this morning, Seth Godin on the SEO industry again, that is related to this topic.

Yes, Seth Godin was obviously off-track when he said there wasn't a Search Industry and he had to retract that in the subsequent furore. However I was trying to raise a different point. Unfortunately this is a very weighty subject and likely to raise emotions. Sometimes I think it's like those blind men around the elephant. On other occasions, it seems to me that people are sliding around the words as politicians do. So perhaps I can just state how I see it. I'm not trying to convince anyone else. This is just how I see it from my little corner.

1. Sometimes words take on a life of their own. They pick up associations in common usage. The sense they communicate to others may gradually shift.
2. I believe this is what has happened to SEO in the eyes of the majority of Internet inhabitants. Of course the participants of this forum are not typical of the majority of Internet inhabitants. I'm thinking of all those small and mid-sized business owners. They put up their websites. Within a little while they are receiving frequent e-mail messages pointing out that their websites are not visible in Google or Yahoo! Such messages often promise high rankings. However the methods to be used are sometimes very questionable. It is not surprising that SEO has attracted its share of scepticism. Many feel that the SEO practitioners are in conflict with the Search Engines.
3. In any case, that word 'Optimization' has some difficulties. As a mathematician, I understand it when I have a multivariable problem and I'm trying to find the set of values that gives me the highest value of some other variable - like profit, or sales. It even had some meaning when Google was the only game in town and you wanted to maximise your ranking on the Google SERP for your favourite keyword phrase. Now you have Google delivering different results depending on where you're located. You have Local Search: you have Personalized Search. Microsoft Search is coming in with a bang. You have Yahoo!. You even have Ask Jeeves showing it shouldn't be counted out. So there's no simple composite measure of all these Search Engine rankings that could be optimized.
4. What is much more useful is to look at the sales that a website delivers. The SERP (Search Engine Report Page) is only one link in the chain from a niche of people who use a given search engine through to the landing page they arrive on from the SERP and how they then move through the website to convert to a sale. Of course they may be coming from an organic listing or a sponsored listing.
5. This much richer view of what is going on is not well described by that over-simple Optimization word. In any case, as discussed it's picked up a lot of unfortunate baggage during the last few years. I personally believe that SEO will drop out of favour sometime down the road, perhaps 5 years out, perhaps even 2 years out.
6. Thankfully the new associations are promoting Search Engine Marketing. That's what I can buy in to. It even means that the Search Engines and the Search Engine Marketers are working together rather than in conflict. That's a much more sane and long-lasting relationship.
7. Of course we should not lose any good associations that may surround the word Optimization, but we should not put our energies into continuing to promote the term.

So that's how I feel. Does anyone relate to that?

[invader]

Barry,

Great to read this post.
I share your thoughts on the optimization front.
Optimization is just a fraction of the web marketing industy,
but its popularity is probably because the client associates
with it, when talked about SEM.

However, as far the SEM industry is concerned, the industry
to me looks like a big bang sort of a formula. It's sprung up
really quickly, and is now disintegrating with ease, and will
probably mature too early.

It is technically an "industry", but I fear it might end up like
the dot com burst.


-m

[projectphp]

Wher does AdSense fit in this, Barry? It isn't really search. But a lot of the skills translate from PPC managaement over.

I just call myself an Internet Marketer, or IM if I must use and acronym. That encompasses more accurately what I do and offer, and doesn't limit me to search engines, either in an expectation sense, or in a Branding sense, with my fate tied to the latest view of search engines.

I agree that SEM is a better phrase to promote, and i don't think it will be very long before that is the phrase of choice for most.

[DianeV]

Glad you liked my blog post, Barry.

I'm not so sure that Search Engine Marketing will go away, let alone quickly, unless you're just talking about the term itself.

Whatever it may come to be called, from my vantage point, some advertising agencies are catching on with respect to Web marketing; some are even catching on to the SEOing of websites.

As well, I recall that Overture recently made a foray into acquiring ad agency accounts directly (rather than through PPC-management companies) via a new offering designed to teach ad agencies how to handle PPC accounts. I didn't follow this much as it's not my thing, but no doubt this hand-holding of ad agencies with deep-pockets clients will be profitable.

[bwelford]

I think we all seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. I believe SEM (which is part of IM, that is Internet Marketing) is an activity which has a lot going for it and no particular negatives. On the other hand, SEO or Search Engine Optimization, in terms of the real goals of a business is really sub-optimization. OK, it's the better known term, but often it has all the wrong associations. There's no final authority on what these terms mean, but I believe the most common understanding about SEO would say it does not include PPC (Adwords, Overture, etc.).

There's rather an intriguing thread going on at the High Rankings Forum, entitled Bored With SEO, Why Is That? Perhaps that's approaching the same issue from a different direction.

I believe the writing is on the wall for the expression, SEO.

[DianeV]

So, are you hoping that SEOs will just pack up and go away?

I'm not sure what you mean by "sub-optimization"; businesses have many activities leading to their ultimate objective.

[cline]

Even before GoTo you could buy keyword-triggered banners on AltaVista on a CPM basis.

[bwelford]

Here's a definition of sub-optimization. As you see, it's a technical term in systems theory. In layman's terms you could say, "Improving part of something may make the whole object less effective". I did write almost two years ago that "Search Engine Optimization Is Sub-optimization: go for Selling Effectiveness Optimization".

So, are you hoping that SEOs will just pack up and go away?

I'm glad you asked me that, Diane. There's a good solid core of SEO practices that work well and should be applied more widely. Rather I'm taking the 'big picture' view of the whole SE* industry and asking the strategic question of what should we all be focusing on.

I often run into the same strategic question at the company level. My mantra is 'Focus, Focus, Focus'. Decide on your core activity that will give the company its growth. That's the one you feel passionate about and on which the whole energy of the company and its team should be applied.

The tough part of strategy is what you say No to. Suppose there's part of the company that's been there for ever and which is a great 'cash cow'. It may even be what the company is known for. But it won't provide growth for the company and it's not what the company will be known for in 3 years. My advice is to put all the effort into the new direction. This doesn't mean starving the 'cash cow'. However the aim is that everyone in thinking about the company will relate to the future focus rather than the glorious past. Of course if there are skeletons in the historical cupboard, even more reason to take the spotlight off that side of things.

So I'm not saying bury the O. I'm saying trumpet the M, while continuing to milk the O.

[Ron Carnell]

I've already said a few words about Focus in another thread, so let me weigh in here with a few about optimization.

Sub-optimization is the equivalent of turning up the heat on the burner until your steak is burnt. It's not the result of optimization, but the antithesis of optimization, if only because lowering the flame does little to improve the porterhouse.

SEO is exactly the kind of mathematical problem Barry mentioned earlier, "when I have a multivariable problem and I'm trying to find the set of values that gives me the highest value of some other variable - like profit, or sales." We don't generally try to increase profit simply by raising prices, because we all know profit is a function of more than just price. It will also be affected by volume and costs, for example, so we have to work in a multivariable world, just as Barry said, and just as an SEO learns to do. Adding more search engines into the mix, like Yahoo and MSN, complicates that by adding more variables, but it certainly doesn't change it. "I want to increase my sales to teens even if it costs me some sales to seniors" is no different than "I want better rankings in Yahoo even if I move down a notch or two in Google." In both cases, we are considering multiple variables and optimizing the mix rather than each variable. We're not just turning up the flame until something gets burnt.

I don't think SEO is going to disappear or even greatly change in the next four or five years. I do think its place in the greater whole, however, will be perceived somewhat differently.

When I build an 8 by 12 shed in my back yard, it's important I insure my foundation is level and my joints are square. If I build a four-bedroom house next to the shed, a level foundation and square joints don't suddenly become less important just because I brought in an architect. We've all built a lot of Internet sheds in the past eight years, and it's only within the last few years that we've started to build houses. We need more and better architects to do that, but that doesn't mean we need any fewer carpenters and masons.

For most of my time on the Internet, SEO has been the first step in a good marketing plan. We're reaching a point, I think, where it's no longer the first step, and certainly not the final step. That doesn't mean it's not an important step, however, because even the best blueprints by the best architect can result in a crappy house if the foundations and joints are ignored.

As long as search engines exist, there will be a need for people to optimize sites for them.

[DianeV]

Well said, Ron. And along the lines of what I've been saying since the late '90s ... that it's all about marketing, that SEO needs to be "melded" with the marketing/sales stuff in order to be effective. One cannot expect the best results if one is just to apply one discipline strictly as itself to something that should be a package of well-melded disciplines without taking into account those other disciplines and factors.

As to the term "SEM" -- which it seems is part of what we're discussing here -- I give you this: it is used by people who solely do PPC (which is arguably "search engine marketing") and by marketers who do public relations, press releases, appearances and other things designed to get attention (which is arguably not "search engine marketing" or at least is stretching the term beyond recognition).

I can understand this based on what I believe is probably the history of the term, and because some of these folks don't/can't do or never heard of SEO. That doesn't mean their work isn't effective.

It does mean, gentlemen, that the term has been co-opted.

<added> Bottom line, though, is what the term means to the public, at least if you're using it for marketing purposes.