June 02, 2005
Stiff-necked specialists
Looking at conference notices and various chat boards. I can't help but notice the business I call "SEO" has split into artificially separated disciplines of "search engine optimization" and "pay per click" management. And I see that these false distinctions are hardening.
You're telling customers that they have to hire two separate companies to outsource traffic generation? You can't put that under one roof? Oh my.
If you don't think this division of labor is silly, have a look at the Google search results for the keywords "PPC agency." Below the sponsored links, the top three ranked pages on mighty Google are (drumroll please):
(1) A forum entry from a potential customer asking "Anyone recommend a good value ppc agency?"
(2) A forum entry from a potential customer saying "Need an agency [PPC], but annual spend is only £10k."
(3) A forum entry from a poster giving tips on how to select a PPC agency.
Sales vacuum anyone? No PPC agency with a web presence could achieve higher Google ranking than some old forum pages. The PPC agencies failed to optimize their search results and begin to appear in the middle of the second page of search engine results.
I guess it's about division of labor. They only do PPC.
Maybe they should hire SEO firms to help them achieve better rankings.
Posted by at June 2, 2005 08:37 AM