I just completed 4 hours of SEO industry research, and I am marvelling at how this SEO business is inverted when compared to other industries. In the tech and manufacturing worlds, the mantra is “better faster cheaper“. Over time, what is available to us is better, we can do things faster, and we pay less for what we get. Not so for SEO. It gets harder and costs more over time, largely because it takes more work to achieve the required quality and quantity of results. And if you signed a fixed term contract, I am willing to bet your SEO is getting worse over time, not better.

SEO is very competitive, so it makes sense that over time, any particular market will become more expensive for marketing successfully. It is harder to get attention in a more crowded room. But that is also true for tech and manufacturing, yet they still enjoy better-faster-cheaper. We don’t.

I just “hit the web” for some updating and spent over 4 hours “catching up” on my SEO / marketing skills, since it’s been a week since I last “studied up” like that. I come from a background in health care and research, where Continuing Education is the norm and a requirement. Let me tell you, Nurses, Doctors, and Clinicians have it EASY compared to search marketers. If someone gave CEU credits for the SEO research we have to do just to stay current, I’d probbaly log 300 CEUs per year compared to nurses in New York State, who are required to complete 4 CEUs every 4 years. And I just chatted with a handful of my peers over at the SMX Advanced Search Marketing Conference in Seattle, where I confirmed that I am quite certainly competitive as an SEO and search consultant.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this “seo is changing fast and it is very costly to keep up” scenario is that more and more SEO “firms” are requiring yearly contract commitments, which clients are signing. I can tell you that my four hours of research tonight confirmed for me that 3 of the methods we have been deploying for SEO success during the past year are no longer profitable. Subsequently I am taking action to remove those from our arsenal, since they are no longer cost effective for our clients. Are those “SEO firms” taking similar actions? Of course not. I doubt many of them are even aware of the changes, and of those that are, many are simply going to stop putting in the time yet with those term contracts, still collect the fees. I’m willing to bet it is that slippage that fuels some of their profit margins. That is how they are able to offer low rates…

In our office (soon to be known as UpperLeftPlacement) We have a queue of potential SEO activities which we consider “hot prospects”. It comes our of our own research, across our own network of sites in various markets. It’s a very dynamic list, and represents our entrepreneurial SEO brain trust. What might work, what someone else suggested works or might work, what we see working on our sites, or what we see working from our testing — it is all on that list. Tonight I confirmed that 2 of those are indeed more effective than available alternatives, and safe, and so they are being added to the operational toolbox. For some clients, those tactics will be at work as soon as tonight. Other clients require some discussion and a more formal approach, which will be added to the agenda for the next meeting or conference call.

Which brings me back to the point of this post. Better/Faster/Cheaper is not the case for SEO, largely because of the management of change, as opposed to the change itself. The more time we have to spend explaining the new ideas, demonstrating effectiveness, and estimating time requirements, the more expensive it is to act. And the more expensive it becomes to act, the harder it becomes to compete. Our “overhead” is the time we spend not on SEO… and as that increases, the SEO cost effectiveness is challenged. In a business driven by bottom line success metrics, that’s an important fact. SEO success, by its very definition, is threatened by the very change that necessitates the deployment of the SEO.

See the problem? This industry is broken, and it won’t fix itself. The visible solution to the conundrum of SEO costing more over time, for lesser results, is churn. As clients address “failure” by moving away from the SEO who apparently failed them, they seek another SEO because, well, they know very well that they need SEO services. The new contract includes what they really need (now), but typically has a fixed one year term as well. What will happen in 8 months?

The SEO consultant model is the only one that works for real search marketing, which is expensive and time consuming. There are many tasks associated with execution for which firms and agencies and service providers are very useful.. even necessary n some cases, but the SEO functions cannot be clearly specified over a term contract. If you can negotiate time commitments from good people, it can work, but if you’re contracting for services, I just don’t see how it’s going to end well.

Update Tip: By the way, if you’re using a DOM script to highlight the existence of nofollow on web pages, it might be time to update your script. I’ve been seeing more and more sites using the “external nofollow” attribute pair for anchor tags, which will be overlooked by DOM scripts set to filter strictly for “nofollow” (including some of the more popular ones). Best not get too comfortable in the reliability of your toolset, eh?

Topical Tags:SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:28 am and is filed under SEO, Competitive Webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.