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The Changing Facets of the SEO Business
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
March 22 2006
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The word “change” has over a dozen definitions, at least according
to my electronic source at Princeton
University. Aside from the various
nouns describing what is literally cold and hard cash, my preferred use
of the word is as a verb. The following definition caught my eye this
morning. It applies itself quite well to a situation facing most, if not
all, established
SEO shops.
(v) change, alter, modify (cause to change; make different; cause a transformation) "The
advent of the automobile may have altered the growth pattern of the city"
As the automobile became the primary mode of transportation in modern urban
environments, it caused great change in the way cities were built and the
way we live together as a society. An invention, the car, prompted innovation,
wider roads and distant suburbs. The metaphor provides a historic marker
for market-forces forcing evolution within the SEO sector.
Over the past twelve months, the word change has been a mantra in the research
section of StepForth’s business. We have structured our staff in such
a way as to provide our team with a diversity of viewpoints from my “bird’s
eye view” to our Senior SEO, Scott’s, “reality of the
trenches”, and all points between. When those varying viewpoints intersect,
as they often do, we know we are thinking on the right track. Similarly,
we learn a lot from sharing with others in the SEO and SEM industry.
Two key topics that tend to dominate the R&D portion of our formal
staff meetings and many informal discussions amongst staff members are usability
and consultation. Not surprisingly, they also tend to be discussed frequently
on various SEO or SEM related forums.
The first factor is website, document, or file usability. Usability is
a big word that covers many aspects of design and development. From an SEO
perspective, the concept of usability covers three distinct areas, search
engine friendly site architecture, human-friendly layout, and well-written,
optimized site content.
Most of the websites, files or documents that pass across our monitors
do not meet any of the three basic criteria mentioned above. As search engines
become more sophisticated and the competition for Top10 placements gets
harder every day, usability concerns are a growing problem for us. While
many of the sites we see might look good, the reality is they are not properly
structured for search engine spiders or for intuitive human navigation.
In order to meet the obvious need for search engine friendly site design
and human-friendly layout, without losing focus on the SEO work we do best,
StepForth has created a new division of the company, Pure
Ignition, dedicated
to search-ready design and user-intuitive layout.
The addition of a search focused web design firm to our corporate family
allows us to bring our services to another, much needed level without sacrificing
or threatening our core SEO competencies.
Headed by Senior Web Developer, Mark Johnstone, Pure Ignition is our way
of trying to bridge a “quality gap” in site design. Mark has
worked with StepForth Placement for about three years, starting as an assistant
SEO and eventually rising to be VP of Operations in the management of the
firm. He had been a site designer for several years before taking a position
with StepForth.
Having helped manage our business through the past eighteen months
of growth and industry upheaval, Mark has seen and experienced all
facets of the operation. Most importantly to the development of Pure
Ignition, Mark served as the chair, or facilitator, at many of the
staff meetings held at StepForth where he heard and/or dealt with issues
presented by the other staff. He is well versed in what the SEO staff
needs to see included in a file, document or website.
“I see the biggest challenge in balancing architecture, content and
accessibility,” Mark said over a coffee break yesterday. “I
like the idea of separating SEO from site construction or reconstruction
because I think any designer or SEO that pretends to be everything for everyone
is basing their services on their egos. The work-load is just too big now.”
In that spirit, we believe that by building a hand-tooled Design and SEO
assembly line of sorts, we will be better able to meet the needs of a broader
range of clients. By integrating services between the search marketing division
and the new search-focused design division of our company, we expect to
deliver a far greater volume of work at relatively lower costs to the involvement
of third party developers.
Before Pure Ignition was formed, our SEO staff had limited options. Our
clients would have to rework their websites or we would have to do it ourselves.
Neither option is particularly attractive and both present added costs to
clients, often resulting in third party fees. Needless to say, the curative
prescription our SEO or sales staff would offer was often too expensive
for many to pursue. Hopefully, we can ratchet those added costs down while
providing more speed, inter-office communication and over-all efficiency.
Another reason the firm has generated a design division is because we simply
don’t like to turn away good business. It runs contrary to the most
sensible sides of our selves as successful persons of business. Since the
autumn of 2004, we have had to turn away so many potential clients due to
irreconcilable site design issues it is almost tragically funny.
Almost… We are a business after all. So are the sites we had to turn
away. We’ve been around the block as a company and as individuals
and, like all businesses, have seen and experienced our share of economic
brutality. It’s ugly eh? Lot’s of good people get ripped off
and by the time they come to us for search engine optimization, there’s
little we can do to help them. Life is very real, even in the virtual world.
We strive to offer our clients some form of security in the design, and
promotion loop. That’s the greater purpose to Pure Ignition.
That brings us to the second key change we see in our business of running
a boutique SEO/SEM firm. We are doing a lot more consultation than we ever
have before.
The commercial Internet has been here for more than a decade. Most businesses
have established and evolved IT departments or they have an outsourced vendor
for IT services. Now that search engines have become so important to their
business and to their competitors, they have positions dedicated to online
marketing. They love to learn and strategize, and by happy coincidence,
we love to strategize and make suggestions.
The market for SEO consultation has gotten so busy that our CEO, Ross Dunn
now focuses over a third of his time providing direct consultation services.
One of the things that makes consultation different from hands-on SEO is
that your suggestions are being applied and worked on by other people. Using
an array of website analytics, a good SEO consultant should be able to provide
a working map of suggested changes and offer solid reasons for making the
suggestions.
In some ways, it is also like taking a leap of faith. Really experienced
SEOs talk about a feeling they get when they know they have the right balance
on a page. Jill Whalen once described it as the SEO
Zen Factor. When you
have the right mix on a page or document, you simply know you’ve got
it.
The business of search engine optimization has changed a lot over last
four years with the greatest changes seen in the last six months. We know
the environment is only going to be changing faster in the near future so
we too are making some significant changes in preparation as well as in
reaction to market forces. Pure Ignition is now open for business, putting
the entire firm in a far better placement moving into the future.
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