SEOs have no secrets!
August 12th, 2005SEOs (search engine optimizers) are all the rage these days as site operators seek a competitive edge in natural search result rankings. I have always been skeptical of these businesses for a number of reasons: they can’t help you when your competition uses them too, they don’t have any secrets, and they don’t know nearly as much about your business as you do.
First off, hiring an SEO is in a way a game theory response. You know your competitors use SEOs so you feel you need to use them just to keep up. But what if you hired the same SEO as your competitor (say you’re CampMor and your competitor is REI). Who wins then? Many SEOs guarantee top ranking for certain keywords but this can get sticky when your SEO is also helping your competitor. Your SEO will probably use the same tricks on both sites and you’ll both end up poorer and in the same positions relative to one another.
But let’s say you actually have different SEO vendors and both claim the ability to get you top ranking for your keyword(s). All SEO vendors claim to improve your natural search rankings but clearly someone’s SEO has to be second (REI or CampMor). So does this mean that the loser’s SEO is unable to back up its claims? You betcha - so don’t fall for guarantees of top rankings.
SEOs also each claim to have perfected proprietary techniques for improving your natural search rankings, but in the end, no one has any secrets. The big search engines work very hard to improve the accuracy of search results and any “secret” that can be exploited will not last for very long, if at all. The big secrets to search engine optimization, lots of topical content, descriptive title tags, and tons of incoming links, are pretty basic and any reasonable web operator already works to address these factors. So what are you wasting your money on when you’re the one who has to do all the work anyway?
Finally, I’ve also heard complaints from internet marketing managers that often SEOs are unable to make helpful suggestions for sites due to SEOs’ lack of specialized knowledge. For example, how many SEOs know the difference between an internal and external frame backpack or a goose-down sleeping bag and a synthetic bag? The fact is that you know more about your website topic than any SEO and you can probably easily list and focus on 20 descriptive words to concentrate on to maximize your search engine presence. SEOs will give you words like “tent,” “sleeping bag,” and maybe “backpack” if you’re lucky, but is this what your users are really searching for?
Unfortunately the answer isn’t as simple as firing your SEO at this point, however. In order to keep up with the competition, it might be a good idea to hedge your bets by sticking to your SEO efforts, despite the problems I’ve outlined. Just be prepared to do alot of the legwork yourself!
