Image via Wikipedia
Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages.
A pretty weak argument, considering that the same can be applied to nearly any domain. Web Development is dead. Why? Well all the frameworks are changing so fast and big companies are figuring out how to use out-of-the-box frameworks without using web developers. Television advertising is dead. Why? Well consumers are using technologies to circumvent ads, like DVRs, and consumers are getting smart about what they really want to buy.
Concerning market demand for SEO, let's just look in Google Trends where its clear SEO has risen year after year with no sign of decline. (See attached figure). But apparently Scoble doesn't need data to back his argument, just take his word for it.
Secondly, its beyond absurd to claim that Google looks for "real businesses that deserve to be on pages." I guess Scoble really didn't do his homework on SEO, since anyone worth their muster knows this isn't Google's problem in search is to look not for businesses but rather "pages" alone to include in their SERPs. Page is the unit of trust and relevancy, fueled by contextual links. Concerning businesses and their relevancy to Google, only the inverse is true; that is, Google does look for sites or businesses that distribute malware, conduct phishing, try to hijack the browser's back button to keep a user on the site, or any other nasty tricks. Just see their guidelines for webmasters. Sad will be the day that you can't rank in Google because you don't work for some major media outlet.
For the records, "the stuff" is called verticals. Very informative. Good SEOs of course recommend a holistic approach to online marketing that includes verticals and other aspects that are starting to appear more and more on the SERPs. Many are already talking a lot about verticals. The idea that creating great content to get into a vertical is a stretch. Let's take maps, for example. I can have a site with very with little or no good content, but if there's a page for my local Pizza Burger restaurant in Atlanta with an address and listing, and there's little no competition, you damn well bet that a search for "Pizza Burger Restaurant Atlanta" will pop up in the map vertical. With competition, though, the unfortunate reality is that good content (good to humans, that is) doesn't preempt well-linked content. Better content can't fall below others in the SERPs if it isn't well promoted and referenced throughout the web (from trusted and relevant sites). This is all part of any good SEO strategy: developing quality content AND implementing a non-spammy link-building strategy through available PR channels on the web, including (ahem) things like Twitter and Facebook.With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.
Can someone explain this paragraph to me? Google Analytics isn't controlled by Page Rank? Ummm yeah, okay, I'll agree with you there. Seriously, I'm trying to figure out if Scoble is trying to imply that SEO is all about page rank, or something. Maybe I can't read well, or something, but this guy just comes across as really, really dumb.But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have
Scoble tries to swoon us at the end of the article with revelations of the next big thing:
Dude, you are really out of touch. There's already even a word (and acronym) for this "new breed" of marketing you've just pretended to invent: Social Media Optimization (SMO).... the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
While I don't have predictions for 2010 (the popular thing to blog about these days), I can only hope that sometime in 2010 Google figures out how to analyze blog entries and figure out which ones are total bullshit, and then maybe display a nice icon next to its text link on the SERP - like a steaming cow patty of something. In closing, I won't be reading anymore Scoble in 2010 - that's a fact, not a prediction.
