Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore
- Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
There's a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are chaning their
practices and titles from "SEO" to "online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or
earned media marketing." Where did this shift originate from, and where is it
taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today's game,
or are we missing the bigger picture?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from "SEO" to
"inbound marketing" and what the future holds for our industry at large.
Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments
below!
Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore - 20130422 - Rand
For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in this
week's video:
Video Transcription
"Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I want to address an elephant in the room. It's a topic that I've talked
about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know
it's a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org
to lots of blogs and news sites. It's: Why is it that there's this movement from
some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices,
from saying, "We do SEO," to saying, "We do inbound marketing," or, "We do
online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing"?
I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some
really good reasons that I think we're seeing this shift happen, and I'm
actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I
used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I've
revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and
I've become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I'm seeing this bigger picture,
and I want to try to share that picture that I'm seeing with you.
The first one is I can't argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define
or have defined SEO for the last decade. That's not really true of the 2010 to
2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late '90s
into the late 2000, the "aughts." What I mean is there are these old-school
tactics. "Oh, you're going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my
content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your
markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done.
You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don't try to tell me that it's more than that."
This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who's
trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, "But wait a minute. This only
works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data,
domain data, and topic analysis." Now, we have a lot more ranking factors,
right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They're definitely looking at
brand signals. They're looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are
patent applications, thinking about offline data. They're looking at social
graph signals.
What's an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I've got to be able to work
on everything that's marketing. That's everything from social media to community
building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the
content. What am I going to do if I'm tasked with SEO, but I'm only given
responsibility over these things? It's just not going to work. In order to
influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up
rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have
to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past.
It's an untenable kind of situation.
Thus, what we'd really like to do and what we've been working hard at as an
industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you
one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding
and working really hard to not have the word "SEO" be associated with scumminess
and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so
hard to change. It's been established for such a long time now, and the small
efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have
not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside
that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO
and get marketing, it's true.
I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that
world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you've felt
the same pain that I'm talking about. People say, "Oh, SEO. So you're a spammer.
You manipulate things. You're unethical. You're breaking the search engine's
rules. What does Google think of you?"
These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it's pretty clear
to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary
and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It's comment spam
on their blogs. It's a spammy, scummy email that's trying to get them to sign up
for something. It's someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It's a
forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, "Oh, are you
wondering why this malware happened? That's the SEOs doing that." That's why all
these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs.
To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself
included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I'm not
innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don't
think we're winning. That's another reason why I think it's really hard to do
SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you
change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, "I do web
marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that
leads to more conversions on their site." They're like, "Oh, okay. I get it. Web
marketing. Understood." SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels,
but one of the channels they focus on.
The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, "I'm an SEO,"
your boss, your client, your management says, "Why are you meddling with our
design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?" You
are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can't do great even at
just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above.
By the way, we're selling ourselves short even more than just this, because
when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels,
that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of
traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR
efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service
practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things
that influence SEO that we're trying to move the needle on to get better
results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that
traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who
are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on
search. Yet, we're not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were
responsible for it. Again, we're selling ourselves short.
But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is
something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there's anything that
SEOs can be assured of, it's that things will change tomorrow, that things will
change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This
kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices
don't mature. I'm clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You
can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of
field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there's massive shift or a new
industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage.
I think the stage for us is deciding: Do we want to keep committing to a brand
that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will
always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we
want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good
branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something
different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in
order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too.
An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred
dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture,
or something like that, and you're talking about a thousand plus dollars an
hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way,
the more you can effect change and have a positive influence.
I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I'm sure there will be good
comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to
reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We'll see you again
next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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