kevin cabral's blog: bits+thesis

I suspect that marketing is broken and the craze for search engine optimization and management is a good example. Search for “SEO” on a job site like TheLadders.com and you’ll find hundreds of positions paying 100-250K for someone to “define and lead a SEM strategy.”

But SEM, search engine management, isn’t strategic. It’s essential but completely tactical. Strategic issues require creative and analytic thinking to synthesize ambiguous data on internal and external factors in a very dynamic game. Intuition, which is developed only through experience, education and diligent practice, is essential to strategy.

But you can learn 95% of what you need to know about SEM from reading two webpages. Or you can pay $200-$1000 for an online seminar from the Sempo Institute. The most valuable source of info is a panel of 37 expert’s aggregated wisdom on the importance of 200+ factors to Google’s results. The study is of 2005 but it’s unlikely to change dramatically. The key factors are:

1. Having the search keyword appear in the Title of the page
2. Having the search keyword appear in the URL of each page
3. Having lots of other popular sites link to your site
4. Having some category-specific sites and communities link to your site

With that set, you need to understand what keywords people are searching most often. Your best sources for this are your own log files/analytics program followed by the search engines themselves, as Yahoo or AdWords will provide estimates of traffic per search. Finally, you can also consult WordTracker.

There is, of course, plenty of work involved in implementing SEM: keywords need to be bought, page titles need to be set-up and so forth. There are very dedicated professionals who excel at doing it as well as software tools which can speed the process. But thinking of SEM as the heart of “online marketing” is misguided. Take some learnings from the leaders. I’ve heard about one company which is likely the world’s #1 search engine advertiser. If anyone has incentives to do things “on the margin” to improve search engine placement it is them. But they hire more product managers annually than all of the folks they have on their entire SEM/SEO team. The reason for their success is that they are in love with their customers, and vice-versa.

This takes us back to why marketing is broken: no amount of advertising can fix a bad product, marketed to the wrong customer who is being served poorly. Worse, SEO/SEM doesn’t even offer the control of advertising. Google controls the search engine and how it ranks you. Your customers and influencers are the ones deciding to promote you and increase your link popularity. Random traffic can’t take you very far and that’s one reason why Amazon will actually show advertisements for competitors to in-bound traffic that comes from Google.

I’ve said that “marketing is broken” but by that, I mean the practice of it. There’s nothing broken about the theory of marketing if you go to a source like Kotler who defines it as the “science and art of finding, retaining and growing profitable customers.” This view of marketing is powerful because it links it to businesses key objective: profits. But the real world often thinks of marketing as “promotion” after all the other P’s have been defined: product, price and placement.

This gives marketing an image problem. One of the best studies of this is provided by Professors Sheth, Sisodia and Barbulescu in the compilation “Does Marketing Need Reform?” They ask colleagues of marketers from other departments like finance and operations to evaluate their performance and the results are indicting: only 38% rate their marketing colleagues as good or excellent and only 34% view marketers as strategic thinkers. To address this, marketing needs to start its reformation by making its objective start with providing benefits to customers. Making SEO central to strategic marketing efforts is probably missing the point of it all.