Beware the snake oil, stick to the content

I just had a pretty funny encounter on the phone with a guy prospecting for business. His company does search engine marketing, and in his first sentence he observed that my company wasn't coming up in the first page of search results in Google. Sacré bleu! How have we flourished for 10 years without this!

OK, all sarcasm aside, here's where I'm at on this.

For starters, let's just get over the hysteria on just how important search engine 'placement' is for a professional services firm in the first place. iMarc is at best medium sized at 17 people among interactive agencies. There's plenty of folks smaller, probably less that are larger. That said, we don't need, nor could we handle, another 100 customers in addition to the 100 or so that we currently serve. We're past the point of taking every project we come across, in part because we don't have to and in part because we want to reserve our capacity for projects we can be very successful with.

From a marketing perspective, our own web site is not so much the point of our spear, it's more like the shaft. That is to say, we don't expect it to be the primary way we make first contact with a prospective client, but once we do make contact with the right prospects, the site acts as the delivery mechanism for the most relevant and up to date content and information we can put together about us, our experience and qualifications, and how to find out more about doing business with us. And like so many other professional services firms, we find that our new customers arrive at our site from a variety of referrals, mostly from our own direct marketing activities, quite a few from referrals from existing clients, some from seeing our work on awards sites, and yes, even a few from more or less 'blind' searches at Google. Would I turn down more qualified, relevant new business prospects from Google? Certainly not. But even without a lot of lead generation generated from the search engines, our site is still the single most critical ingredient in helping prospective customers to judge us capable and professional and qualified. And that's because of the good content that we serve on it, and the strategy that shaped it.

But back to the fun :-). This poor unsuspecting guy that called today fumbled his way through his telemarketing script, expressing his concern that I wasn't on page 1. Leaving aside the fact that he never did say what search term he was searching on, or qualifying my interest in being found by him on that particular search term, as soon as I heard him pause for a breath, I asked him,

"What is it your company does?".

"Page 1 search engine placement on Google and Yahoo" was his reply.

"And what is your company's name?", I asked.

"<foo>", he told me.

"OK, let's see where <foo> shows up in Google's search results when I search for what you do, as you describe it in your own words".

Of course there would be no punchline if he was anywhere in sight of the first three pages, and indeed, he was not. And in this case, I didn't even bother to ask him to take me off his calling list, because I'm pretty sure he's not calling back :-).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Search Engine Marketing, nor would I downplay the importance of SEM (including natural search optimization, which this guy was peddling) for consumer facing web sites, or for companies trying to reach a wide audience. And that includes a few of our customers. We spend a fair amount of time and energy building our sites carefully, with strictly valid code, machine-readable content, and we limit the use of javascript to create links to other content, all in an effort to facilitate indexing by the search engines. We create tools that let clients manage the meta tags and insert keywords into the urls. And we help clients with keyword analysis to understand what phrases potential site visitors are using at the search engines that would be relevant to their web sites.

But I personally believe that the importance of this effort is a distant second to the importance of developing and maintaining useful, relevant content, updating it frequently, and perhaps most importantly, employing a user-centered approach to site strategy and design so that the right audience will find the site useful, informative, and relevant. In the long run this is the best path to ROI for any web site, and any site building effort that doesn't include a commitment to developing and maintaining good content is destined to underachieve.