I’m starting to think all of those “SEO is bullshit” articles may actually have a point. Take a look at some of the headlines I saw being spewed across my twitter stream today by several well-known SEOs. Here they are, paraphrased based on the articles they linked to:
SEO & Paid Search should be separate – by the CEO of a company who only does paid search
Top 10 WordPress themes that I could find affiliate links for – by an affiliate marketer
Mobile & Desktop websites should be different experiences – by the CEO of a company specializing in creating separate mobile websites.
Top 10 SEO agencies according to company who charges SEO agencies to be in their listings
You can’t measure the ROI of social media – by company who can’t show positive ROI
Every company needs to buy facebook ads – by president of company that does facebook advertising
Sensing a pattern here? I am. Other than a few select posts by a few select authors, I can’t remember the last time I read something on an SEO blog that wasn’t financially motivated. Very few people are sharing information in order to teach or inform, and hardly anything is done without some sort of financial motivation behind it anymore. Maybe that’s always been the case, but I like to think it wasn’t.
Ever wonder why SEO has such a bad reputation? It’s because a vast majority of our industry will say or endorse anything if they can make a few bucks off of it.
Don’t believe me? Look at the ads on your favorite industry blog. I bet you see paid link services and TopSEOs don’t you? Hover over them. Those aren’t adsense, those are direct placement. See what I mean? Even our best publications and conferences will accept any advertiser, sponsor, or exhibitor willing to pay the fee on time. Sure they’ve got bills to pay and all, and they are businesses who owe it to their stakeholders to turn a profit, but that’s just one symptom of the problem.
Every industry has their own trade journals, professional organizations, industry publications, conferences, and what not. I think we’ve actually got too many, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that people in the SEO industry quickly realized they could make more money selling bullshit to aspiring SEOs than they could by actually doing SEO. SEO used to be quite easy. It used to be about reverse engineering the algorithm and doing the little things that others weren’t to set your site apart. Then, more people started doing SEO, search algorithms improved, and SEO got a lot harder. People realized how important SEO was, but it was hard to do and an entire new generation of people looking for quick SEO fixes sprang up. Suddenly, it was much easier to market to SEOs that it was to actually do SEO.
We became unable to separate the marketing from the marketer. Our professional publications and events have become just one more channel to market to. For many, SEO has been dead for years. It died due to neglect and was reincarnated as something we’ll call SEOM – search engine optimization marketing. Almost ironically, practitioners of SEOM actually do a very good job of performing real SEO on their sites selling bullshit SEO, but they’re not blogging or speaking about that.
Maybe it’s an inherent problem within growth agencies like internet marketing, carpet baggers and what not, but it seems to be getting out of control lately. When’s the last time you saw an SEO blog recommend something that didn’t have an affiliate program? Have you read an article recently by a CEO who wasn’t just re-affirming that his company can solve problems you didn’t know you had? Ever seen a guest blog post where the article wasn’t carefully crafted around the links it was meant to include?
We constantly debate questions like Should we rename SEO? (this @mattcutts video being from literally 10 minutes ago) but the SEO moniker isn’t the problem. We’re the problem. Sure a new name would offer a fresh canvas (to put it quite existentially) but does anyone honestly believe we wouldn’t quickly paint over that new name’s canvas with the first thing somebody paid us to paint?
We’re marketers; it’s hard to stop thinking like marketers – I get that. For the sake of our industry though, whatever we decide to name it, we need to { stop shitting where we eat | separate our milkplates from our meat }
I’m not speaking for the whole industry here, there’s a lot of quality SEOs and marketers out there – you just won’t find them on any “top” list. For every good marketer though, there’s a lot more willing to take the first dollar that comes their way regardless of what that requires. A name change won’t get rid of them. It’s going to take a lot more, but we can start by not giving them our money, time, audience, or ad inventory.