Ask the SEO Guru

Solid SEO Starts With A Solid Business Model

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death.

As humans beings, we all fear death to one extent or another. Faith is tested in all men as we face the unknown. But fear it as we may, death comes. It’s a reality that we all have the choice to accept or to deny but either choice you make, you’re still going to have to deal with it one day.

The cycle of life is inevitable and except for that fear thing, it’s not that bad. Such is the case with SEO.

Like it or not, we are all witnessing the metamorphosis of an industry that for that last decade +, we have all pretty much resigned ourselves to calling SEO. We have called it that for the lack of a better term to describe a complicated, multi-faceted process of generating targeted traffic from the organic results of major search engines.

It has been argued that the term SEO also includes things like market research, metrics analysis, copywriting, PPC marketing, split testing of ads, and a host of other processes that require a wide range of skills sets and no small degree of business management acumen. Hence new terms being offered from time to time in an attempt to better describe actions that are related, but detached, from the rather unsophisticated processes of attempting to manipulate search engine algorithms to give oneself a competitive advantage by virtue of a popular misconception that organic SEO is free. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry for the outburst but that one always makes me laugh!)

But rarely has that term been used to reflect the process of converting that traffic into bank deposits.

SEO Does Not = Bank Deposits

With little more than a glance at many of the more popular SEO hang outs, I believe it is obvious even to the uninitiated, SEO is pretty much focused on traffic generation. Things like conversions, demographics, analytics and increased website revenue generation from upselling take a distant back seat. Were it not so, topics like social media manipulation for the primary purpose of link acquisition and when PR will be updated would not dominate the interactive real estate to the extent that it does.

 In this guru’s opinion, too many opportunities for genuine marketing discussions get reduced to yet one more twittershitter to be dug up and stumbled upon.

Serious discussion about honest to goodness marketing often gets buried by linkbaiting headlines that offer little more than a boost to the ego of the master baiter. Why? Because generating traffic is easy. Making money, online or off, takes education, dedication, focus, and even with those assets in place, it does little more than give one the ability to be right more often than wrong.

Free Doughnuts

At any retail outlet, offline or on, generating traffic takes little more than giving away a free doughnut. The trick now becomes talking the overweight, shirt pocket full of cigarettes, sugar crusty lipped, two doughnut sneaking while avoiding looking you in the eye, tire kicker into becoming a loyal customer and actually paying you something to offset the cost of the time it took to run to the doughnut store.

Far too many in the online marketing community,(not me or you of course. I mean those “other” guys), cling to the term SEO simply because it is vague and non-descriptive. This offers a hiding place for those not willing to put forth the effort to accept that it is NOT about search engine placement or even about search engines. It is about making money.

It doesn’t take a lot of intellectual investment to learn to cloak, put 18 keywords in a 65 character title, spam splogs, spam twitter with the most banal conversation since the birth of human interaction and then brag about being #5 for a search with 5 million results. LOSER!

Learn to do those things AND convert at 4% or above and you will not be able to argue the point any longer. You will quickly admit that yes, organic search traffic generation is easy. It is the converting that is the hard part.

So, if we could accept that MAYBE I'm even a little bit right, where does that leave SEO?

It leaves it finally being able to shed itself of the unsavory, baggage laden misnomer. It finally eliminates the need for the circular debates over hat color. And it finally opens the door to the true value of online marketing as a professional industry ready to grab it's fair share of the 50 BILLION+ dollar online advertising market that is still in it's infancy. Sounds exciting huh?  

It offers incredible opportunities for niches that the business world is just now starting to recognize. It brings about a new understanding of terms like spam, content, trust and just what true marketing really is. That is a paradigm shift.

It's time for an SEO funeral but that is NOT a cause for despair or mourning. It is a time for jubilant celebration at the birth of a new online marketing service industry ---- but only for those who see it.

In my next installment, I'm going to show you how you can prosper from the death of seo without having to learn, read or do anything different than you are doing right now other than how you present the outcome of your efforts.

PEACH Y'ALL

G

Boy! go turn that TV to channel 6. Gunsmoke is comin on