Is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Industry Slowing?

Categories: Search StrategyPosted on January 24th, 2007

For many corporate web teams, there’s a document that exists to help web production teams or CMS systems deliver proper metadata for webpages so it can be easily crawled, sorted and found by Search Engines such as Google or Yahoo.

This article by Dave Pasternack is in the heat of some controversy as he suggests in his article Troubled Times for SEO Firms that SEO industry is heading towards a slump and that many companies are pulling these skills in house.

In his article, he makes three points that enrage the SEO industry:

1) Marketers Are Discovering That SEO Isn’t Rocket Science
2) Marketers Are Realizing That SEO is a “Fix-it-Once” Task, not an Ongoing Service
3) Marketers Are Wary of Pushing the SEO Envelope

A Debate Raged
Apparently not everyone agreed with Dave, pleased read Shoemoney, A Fish Bowl, and Bullshit. Dave’s partner Kevin Lee provides some additional analysis. It’s not that simple proclaims David Wallace. There’s a timeline of a majority of the discussion, or you can use Technorati to find more juicy bits.

Dave’s Recap
Today, I read this interview with Dave looking back at the whole debate, be sure to read his points

SEO can be expensive
I’ve spoken to some of the top Search Marketing folks, and I know that some starting prices can range for $300-$500 per hour for the top SEO folks to come do an assessment and assist with your site search strategy.

Questions to answer:
What is your company doing about SEO, are you going to pull this in house?
Will it be a part time or full time role?
Is this something done once, or is it an ongoing strategy?
Does SEO matter to your corporation?
How does Social Media impact SEO?

Share This Post:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 6:45 am and is filed under Search Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Honestly, this is nothing but a way for Did-it to get back in the public eye. They’ve not had this much attention in years, and I think they’re keeping the conversation on life-support, so they can keep in the spotlight.

Trust me, I know all about the tricks for getting attention.

Posted by Andy Beal on January 24th, 2007 at 7:46 am

Well it seems to be working for them.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 24th, 2007 at 8:52 am

[...] Jan 24, 2007 in Online, Web2.0, Ideas I’ve always had my doubts about SEO, mainly that it ain’t that difficult to do. Jeremiah Owyang commented on this in his latest post, where he links an article by Dave Pasternack: In his article, he makes three points that enrage the SEO industry: [...]

Posted by SEO is really not all it’s cut out to be « Uno se Blog on January 24th, 2007 at 10:27 am

[...] What’s interesting is that there’s already some additional posts about this contest, so I’ll do everyone a favor by adding links to the posts here: Dave Pasternack Stirs SEO Pot Dave Pasternack SEO humor Is the SEO Industry Slowing? Dave Pasternack SEO Contest [...]

Posted by » Dave Pasternack - Light of Reason on January 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am

It isn’t always a “Fix-it-Once” type thing, a few companies got banned by Google for bad practices. You need to be very aware of the possible things that can nuke your site. Its also good not to leave all your eggs in one basket, but at the same time not having the same content across ten different domain names.

Posted by Dude Dean on January 25th, 2007 at 1:54 am

[...] A) Search Engine Optimization (SEM) Many web groups at large corporations have a document, a process, or even a dedicated resource who’s goal is to make sure web content is easily found, indexed, managed and correctly served in search results. There’s been some recent discussion the state of the SEO industry. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » The Many Forms of Web Marketing for the 2007 Web Strategist on February 5th, 2007 at 6:37 pm

As a guy who works for the company that holds the #1 spot in Google for ‘internet marketing agency’ (with or without quotes), and the #1 spot for seattle internet marketing, here are my answers:

What is your company doing about SEO, are you going to pull this in house?

Some clients do SEO on their own; rare is the client who could do as good a job as we could. But, SEO is not always the top priority for a client, so it can make sense to do it in house for some people.

Will it be a part time or full time role?

The 2 jobs for the SEO person, whether they work for an agency or in-house, are to educate people on how to do SEO-friendly code and content, and to optimize what is already there. This could be a full time role depending on the size of the firm.

Is this something done once, or is it an ongoing strategy?

SEO is ALWAYS ongoing. Always. Some times, a client will want a one-time SEO review, but that review will talk about the kinds of changes they should be making over a long period of time. I know I am not impartial as we sell SEO services, but know that for all of the clients who we get top rankings for, it is never the result of a one-time campaign. Never. It is the result of months and years of steady progress.

Does SEO matter to your corporation?

I have not met a client who could say “SEO does not matter to me.” It is a question of priorities. SEO may be less important than site design, community marketing, pay-per-click ads, and smoothing out your warehouse integration. But it still matters. Don’t you want to be able to tell clients that you are #1 for whatever your industry is? If you say you are the best industrial solvent manufacturer in the world, but you are not on the first page of Google, some people are going to wonder.

How does Social Media impact SEO?

Google loves blogs. Not for the social media reasons as such, but because they are frequently updated keyword rich content. So blogging is good for SEO, when you blog smart (using relevant titles, using blog applications that put your title in the URL, etc).

Also, because of links in terms of social media, you need to pay more attention to how you think about your link strategy. Who do you want linking to you? Why? If you have a company blog, how often should you talk about your company, vs. the industry in general?

Example: our CEO has a blog, which rarely mentions the company, because blogging about yourself and how cool you are can be a turnoff to bloggers. In my blog, however, I often talk about what we do and why and how cool we are, in a “here is what we did and why we did it and how you can do it too” kind of tone. I do it for the social media aspects (building community with my clients), and a pleasant side effect is high rankings for terms like “make something go viral”.

So SEO and Social Media need to influence each other, and the details of how that works depend on your company and your position in your industry.

And to answer the post title, I do not see the SEO industry slowing or growing. It remains a critical component of web strategy, and will for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Brian Keith on February 7th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

[...] content is easily found, indexed, managed and correctly served in search results. There?s been some recent discussion the state of the SEO [...]

Posted by Trivial Pursuits » Blog Archive » The Many Forms of Web Marketing on July 18th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

Ha! Let everyone believe Dave. Then the SEO market will see a downturn, it will become easier to optimize better than all of the in-house SEOs, sites will lose rankings, and then the market will shift back into outsourcing SEO.

If a company brings SEO in house they would have to hire an SEO person for at least $60k/year (for a cheap person). Compare that to a typical 12 month SEO campaign at $4000/month, or $48k/year, from a firm with a brain trust of many people to utilize for your campaign. In-house SEO is not typically a good solution, unless you can justify paying a good staff to do it, not just one person.