How many times has an SEO been hired to help with a website’s search engine visibility only to find the entire site designed in Flash or, even worse, the entire site is just a series of pretty .jpg images? Often the people who hire the SEO are the same ones that made the choice to go with a design inconsiderate of SEO factors. If one is an agency SEO, it’s easy enough to make recommendations and leave. But the Inhouse SEO not only has to work with the decision-makers, he often reports to them.
Here’s the dilemma: PPC is a controlled environment – there is a budget, a price and a measurable “cost per conversion”. The ROI is can be seen from many angles, complete with charts, graphs and spreadsheets. As one of my Inhouse colleagues pointed out about SEO recently, “there is no ‘I’ in ROI when it comes to SEO”. Because of it’s somewhat esoteric and “black magic” reputation, organic SEO efforts often confuse the check-writers and often receive pennies to every PPC dollar spent.
A high level executive recently told me that site usability does not really apply to SEO. And that highlights some of the industry confusion. Clean coding, rich content delivery and accessibility are fundamental to SEO as well as usability. SEO is not a dash of salt added to an otherwise bland dish. SEO is the cookbook.
