The problem with Online Marketing

September 1st, 2006

I like many other Online/Search Engine Marketing professionals use facilities such as blog readers and alerts to nofify and inform me of goings on in the industry, Danny Sullivan’s departure from SES & SEW being one such example.

However following the articles from these alerts does highlight other aspects of the Online Marketing profession and Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as a whole.

During the last couple of days, I have had a number of meetings with clients looking at maximising the return from the Online services, primarily website. However one thing that has always struck me from the clients perspective is not the requirement for more traffic, it is the requirement for higher conversions, something many SEO’s and Online Marketing professionals lose focus of (I have generalised slightly with that comment).

However out of five articles sampled on the release 31st August two were PR in nature, and the other three purely focussed on the technicalities of SEO, focussing on how to SEO, ie the usual stuff - use unique title tags, dont use hidden divs, follow Google guidelines, White Hat is best.

To most companies this is a sideline of what they want. Yes they want to know to a certain degree how you are going to do it (more to the point can you do it), but most will focus on other aspects such Will they increase my ROI . The amount of times I have come across sites well (maybe overly) optimised, however the focus has significantly shifted away from usability and presentation to pure optimisation. Whilst they may generate significant traffic, I doubt many of these convert the vast majority of the incoming traffic.

Many people have recently discussed how we could make SEO and Online Marketing more mainstream. Personally until the SEM industry as a whole can start presenting itself as professional (focussing not only on traffic but on conversions, sales and the like), it will be difficult to build on the foundations laid by the “Industry Leaders” such as Danny Sullivan, Ammon Johns and the like.

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