SEO

On-line search ad-spend fell by 8% year-on-year in the US in Q4 2008 according to Efficient Frontier.

A lot of money has been wasted on SEO and organisations should be looking at the money they spend. Wasted not because SEO is a misplaced discipline but because the methodology has been crude and fails to place a brand in the search results that it really needs to be in.

The first issue is that few SEO specialists (or brands) seem to know how consumer’s search. A recent example was for a company involved with pets. They had a wonderful web-site whose architecture clearly mirrored core category drivers and the needs of their consumers. But they came nowhere in natural search despite the fact that they had used SEO. Reason? Their SEO clearly didn’t match the way that consumers were searching for pet topics on the web.

The problem with SEOs is that they peddle a methodology that is all about how to include the right nifty content to get results but they don’t start with the way that consumers think and then search. Result? The site can get good natural search results…but on the wrong pages.

Another problem is that brands want to own some esoteric brand equity. In this instance someone has told them that they should own ‘pet care’, so they build their SEO around that. The problem is that few consumers search for pet care or anything like that.
So the downturn in SEO expenditure might lead to the necessary re-evaluation as to how what money left is spent.