Having worked in the search industry for ten years, I have seen the start and development process of the search engines and the clients in this industry… but also the lack of development from the consultants. Don’t get me wrong – I love what I do and this industry is if ever as exciting as now when we move rapidly and changes of the engines listings are bigger than ever before! But the lack of development among some can be very frustrating.

In 1999 when I first went to a search conference I was one of very few women and only a hand full of us had a marketing degree. The fellow search marketers back then had coding as their biggest interest and the discussion in the bar was all about how to get around the search engines algorithms and how to trick the engine to value what they wanted it to rank. This was of course very interesting to follow but as a marketer I was always thinking; “What about what the users want and need and why isn’t it more important to meet their expectations?“ I never stepped into the mud of spam and I will never ever recommend anyone to do this.

So has the industry now moved on from this? Well, some consultants have, but a lot of them haven’t. The reason is very simple… it’s difficult to change opinion if you are a human being. Suddenly saying you are no longer black hat SEO and now believe in true marketing and following Googles guidelines is the same thing for an SEO consultant as for anyone else who changes their religious view over a night.

The great part in all this is that many of them will have to change if they haven’t done so already. Google, Bing and the other upcoming engines are media companies and they live out of marketing money. They sell advertising and they need to meet the user experience in order to keep their interest. In my view the integration of social media, PR, video etc. means we are not just coding your website to rank anymore -it is all about the shelf space in the result pages. You need to be king in all areas and that is not a traditional SEO consultant’s job. You need to involve your communication and strategy department, your PR consultants, your web agency and you need to be clever about where you put your efforts and how to spend your money wisely.

SEO to me is just a function of the web agency (that unfortunately doesn’t exist) but is really just 1% of what search marketing is all about.

So… Good night SEO consultants and Good day Search marketers!

/Sara

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