We try to be as transparent as possible at Spring Creek Group about what we're good at, what we're great at, and what we believe is better off handled either internally by our clients' own marketing and development teams OR handled externally by other, more qualified and deeply experienced expert agencies or consultancies. One of the areas about which we are asked most often - and it appears the marketplace is most perilous for decision-making - is SEO. And to be clear, the end game isn't SEO for its own purposes, but good and improving natural search engine results for a client's website against the potential available list of search terms and phrases most relevant and aligned with their business / value proposition. When we can, we offer a set of "core principles" regarding website architecture, page code and construction, and linking and content propagation strategies (including SEO / SMO PR and Communications publishing and editorial principles). And I believe we charge fairly -- which is to say "not excessively" - for providing this information to our clients, when they request it and it's pertinent to their marketing goals. However, we are VERY CAREFUL not to over-sell, over-promise, or over-promote our agency's capabilities in the realm of SEO simply because we believe two things:
1) Most SEO "best practices" can be researched, learned, understood, internalized, and taken action upon BEST by the program managers and development managers + teams who are chiefly responsible for the UI / UX and actual website code development for a given domain;
and,
2) Genuinely best practice SEO guidance and principles are available from a pretty short list of deeply knowledgeable, right-on-top-of-the-topic-as-it-develops-given-the-ever-changing-nature-of-the-search-engines-algorithms SEO firms and websites out there. To site a few of the best ones we're aware of, there's SEOMoz, SEOBook, ethical-yet-clever reputation management and search engine result improvement services such as Visible Technologies'TruView service, and some of the resources available via links from the Wikipedia page on SEO (including SEMPO).
And let's not even get into the whole realm of "paid links" practices and firms... which we regularly and firmly denounce, because linking should be a result of company advocates and compelling content doing their thing whenever there is content or information on your site that deserves a mention and link elsewhere on the Web. We DO help clients provide tools to increase the likelihood and velocity of "voluntary linking and sharing" of our clients' sites, via integration of content syndication tools like RSS feeds and integration of Bookmarking, Sharing, and Permalink/Email "one-click" tools such as the very simple and comprehensive ones that AddThis supplies... for free!
Well, the following post came across our RSS Reader today and we thought it merited linking to -- and extending commentary upon -- because the whole topic of SEO is genuinely a growing problem for marketers and their good-hearted efforts to improve their customer acquisition funnel and brand awareness.
We did some research a few months back, and the marketplace research and analysis reports seem to suggest that SEO consulting services represents between $1billion and $1.5billion annually in Web marketing services revenues. And it's growing as rapidly or more rapidly than Web media/advertising fees (usually structured as 15% - 20% of total media buying budget spend, when serviced externally by an agency partner).
The short story - from our perspective, as well as the author of this post's - is that sound SEO practices DO NOT come down to spending exorbitant fees on SEO consultants and "black hat" SEO firms. Instead, they come from doing two things well:
1) Learning and staying knowledgeable internally with a website development and/or product management / product marketing stakeholder about the highest-priority core principles of search engine natural results performance effectiveness,
and,
2) Allocating the focus and resources regularly over a long period of time towards this marketing opportunity, alongside the focus and resources allocated to the other key customer acquisition and brand awareness channels on the Web such as SEM, display and rich media opportunities, Web-optimized PR practices, and social media marketing opportunities.
The author of this post - and countless others like it - is absolutely correct: $350-and-hour SEO consultants not only often aren't worth it on an ROI-basis for your marketing spend, but often they don't know any more about the leading edge thinking and theories regarding SEO best practices than what your talented internal team members could learn at little or no cost (beyond the "cost" of their resource time and attention dedicated to the topic, of course).
We believe we have some knowledge, information, and experience to offer our clients in this realm, just as we do from both a strategic and a tactical standpoint when it comes to performance-marketing advertising campaign management, social media marketing and management strategies and programs, and web analytics methodologies and technology solutions. We're in the business of helping our clients grow their online brand awareness and penetration, and helping turn that into increased flow of potential and returning customers into their website conversion funnel. But we strive to do so using completely ethical and "value-fair" services which neither under NOR over-charge our clients for the actual value of this knowledge, experience, and services to those clients created by our partnership with them in pursuit of their marketing and business growth goals. We deserve to be held totally accountable to this standard. And so does the rest of the SEO industry.
There is real, non-zero value to this knowledge... and most importantly translating it into actionable, impactful strategies and tactics/development for B2C and B2B Web-enabled businesses of all kinds. And it's true that this value increases as the desire, ability, and inclination to gather and act on this knowledge by any given company internally declines. But much like any other marketing investments -- comprised of both actual dollars spent + value of resource time internally and externally spent on the channel -- these SEO investments should be evaluated by the same metrics and standards applied to all other Web marketing activities: "What is my return on spend?" The math is pretty simple here, much like it is for total SEM, display, rich media, promotional, PR, social media, or other marketing spend:
Total Expected Profits from Channel / Total Expected Cost for Channel
If your SEO investments are too low today, look at your overall marketing budget + resources mix and determine if you can improve your profitable return by investing more here. But if you are over-spending, be sure it's not because your cost of acquiring SEO knowledge isn't wildly out of whack in relation to your current and expected future return in real revenue and profit growth from increasing your natural search results "ranking" and domain presence.
And one last point on this topic: The reality is that most businesses have, at best, any luck of hitting the first page of search results for maybe 10 or 20 search terms. Beyond that, if you want to be there, unless you are in the upper 1% of site content optimizers and link-generators, your most cost effective expenditure between SEO and SEM investments to get on to the first page of search results for a given search term or phrase is likely to be cagey, analytics-driven search engine advertising.
Happy SEO researching --- and auditing of your SEO investments/expenditures on behalf of your business. Don't under-spend, but certainly don't over-spend here either. Snakeoil wasn't medicine... it was just something that made you think you would get better. [And often the principle ingredient was alcohol, to divert your attention later from the fact that you had been duped into buying something you didn't need and that wouldn't work the way the salesmen said it would.]
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