The Ideal SEO Client

There was excellent thread on Search Engine Watch Forums started by the Moderator Nacho. The opening thread was " What do you say are our Search Engine Marketing industry BIGGEST growing pains? Why? ".

This might be inside baseball if your not in the SEO industry but I highly recommend reading this thread for the progression of ideas and thoughtfulness of many of the posts.

I particularly liked and related with a few posts.

1. The first 27 posts covered a lot of ground and Nacho provided an SEM Industry Biggest Growing Pains Executive Summary here.
2. This one by an independent SEO named ephricon who posted about the disadvantages and advantages of doing SEO for larger corporations.
3. And this one by Stacy Williams, a search engine marketing specialist and president of an SEO company called Prominent Placement. Stacy remarked on the Lack of experienced SEO talent & training and how it's quite a task to keep everyone up to date with the rapidly changing SEO business, while at the same time attending to customers and projecting herself as an active member of the SEO community. I can relate with her and I really respect her willingness to put that out there.

After reading every post I felt the need to put in my two cents. I started thinking about everything that was said and came to the realization that SEOs tend to be looked upon as vendors that should be relegated to specific areas of the company's online strategy. A major pain is that we can really do a lot more if our clients perceive and work with us as partners. We have some clients who do work with us in this way and it really works for them.

I feel like internet marketing is at another tipping point and this time it’s about the evolution of SEO/M towards enterprise integration. The major growing pain I see is that a comprehensive SEO/M strategy needs to permeate a company’s overall business, marketing and communications strategy. An SEO can make a big difference for a client if we educate them how to harness the killer apps of the web (search, email, online public relations, blogs & forums, rss and more) to advance company objectives.

The Ideal SEO Client

In the ideal world, the SEO client would say something like “We want you to meet with our board and provide us with your best guidance on how Search Engine Marketing and optimization techniques can support our company objectives. We’re ready to provide you with whatever you need in terms of support and manpower to get the job done. Don’t worry; Frank down in IT is totally behind you guys. We know you’re going to need his support so we’ve provided you with some dedicated access over next few months. The copywriters and product managers want your team to come in and give them a tutorial on how to write better copy for our website. We have clients in South America, Europe and Asia so recommend your best options for international, multi language search. Our PR agency has been advised to run all our press releases by you before they go out on the wires. They also want you to be in on some of our PR strategy meetings so you can advise on how SEO, and online communities research tactics can leverage what they are trying to do. Oh this is cool too, our CEO is an amazing writer and he has lots of interesting things to say about our industry. Can you help us setup a corporate blogging strategy that not only supports his position as a thought leader but also provides us with a way to get closer to our customers? CEO is willing to carve out an hour a day to blog. Will that be enough? He’s also designated a few passionate people from our products department to post to the blog as well. One more thing, let's make sure our website is doing it best to convert those visitors into leads and we're tracking everything.”

Reality for Both Sides, SEO and Client, Requires Investment

In the real world this approach requires a lot more investment; work, coordination, internal selling and political maneuvering compared with the old fashioned optimize the site for relevant keywords strategy. It also requires a greater commitment and involvement from client. Most clients are not ready take this on all at once but I think many of these elements could and should be part of SEO. Some would call this a pain. Who you kidding -- it is pain. But, it's also thrilling because I see SEO/M types as the bridge between traditional marketing / communications and the future of marketing (notice how i did not say Internet Marketing, just marketing). Maybe a lot of SEO firms are not setup to work this way but I think the SEO’s of the future will need to be able to effectively influence aspects beyond the traditional SEO realm (getting into customer service, crisis communications, spokesman's statements to the press).

To Stacy’s point, We're probably not going to find a ton of people who are trained in SEO so we're just going to have to cultivate it from within. Yea, that's going to be a pain but it also means that an SEO's value is still on its way up (quite a way to go IMHO).

Don't sell yet!