Why SEO Can’t Be Regulated.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about regulation in the SEO industry. It seems every time the New York Times or some other old media runs an SEO related story twitter starts buzzing about regulation. One group calls on the need for SEO certification and regulation. The other group says “no fucking way” and a third group goes off on paranoia rants. Let’s clear all that right now.

You can forget about SEO regulation. It will never happen.

Dont’ believe me? Let’s look at how we would regulate the SEO industry.

First, who would get to regulate it?
Google? Bing? Yahoo? No way. Why would they want to get into that business? I can see the lawsuits starting now. Besides, what would they regulate? Their guidelines say create good content, write good HTML, and tell people about it. They won’t go above and beyond that because it’s not in their interests.

The government? do we really want government regulation? Plus, the govt usually only gets involved when dealing with legalities. We’ll cover that in the next section.

Other SEOs? Right. Let’s put a group of people in charge of determining whether or not their own competitors can be certified. Nothing can go wrong here. Just look at what happened when SEOs took all of the DMOZ editor positions. Not to mention the fact that many prominent SEOs still believe some pretty crazy shit. Just look at how many conference speakers continued to sell and preach page rank sculpting with nofollow even though it never worked to begin with. And what would even qualify somebody to be a regulator? There’s no better way to turn our profession into even more of a hand job network than it already is.

What exactly would you regulate anyway?
Thinking about it further, what is there to regulate? From Google’s point of view they already have set of best practices. Do you really need Google to say “this person knows our best practices and promised he’d follow them?” What value does that provide to anybody?

Do we really want to say “here’s a list of what you must do and how you must do it when optimizing your website?” There’d be no competitive advantage. Well, actually there would be. The un-certified people would dominate everybody else in the results.

Here’s a video about SEO regulation:

By the way, let’s drop this whole black hat white hat stuff too
Every time we talk about SEO certification or regulation somebody brings up black hat SEO and protecting clients. Clients need to ask what their SEO is doing, and SEOs need to tell them. That’s it. If you pay somebody to do something and don’t care enough to find out what exactly they’re doing that’s on you – not them. SEO services in Thailand were the best I’ve tried so far. Do SEOs need to stop selling their services as if they’re some magic dust? Yes. But there’s no need for regulation.

Come to think of it, what does Black Hat actually mean? Contrary to how some act, most black hat SEO is NOT illegal. There’s nothing illegal about paid links, cloaking, hidden text, comment spamming, etc. These are just techniques that Google and Bing don’t like. That doesn’t mean they don’t work (some of them still do) or that you shouldn’t do them. There’s tons of valid reasons one might want to buy links or cloak a website. I’ve done things in the past that have purposely hurt the SEO value of pages (in Google’s eyes) – because I knew what I was doing and the business value for doing it outweighed the SEO value. Would that cost me certification?

Too often we like to lump in hacking, cookie stuffing and other techniques with “black hat SEO” – but these things aren’t SEO.

When it comes to SEO regulation we only need to look at things and judge whether or not they are legal or illegal and be honest with clients about the services we sell. That’s a key staple of any business and it doesn’t require regulation or certification at all.

1 comment June 26th, 2011

The Difference Between Keywords and Queries

I was talking with a co-worker this week about how to better integrate paid and natural search when she brought up a good point: you can’t even begin to achieve SEO/SEM synergy until all parties understand the basic difference between search keywords and search queries.

If you’re like most SEOs, you probably use these words hundreds of times per week – but do you actually know what they mean? One of my pet peeves is when people use them interchangeably – and it can cause great confusion both internally and with clients.

When I think of keywords and queries here’s what I think of:

A query is what a user actually types into a search box.

A keyword is something you are bidding on or optimizing for.

That second part is key. As SEOs we tend to think of the word keyword as what the user typed in, but that only causes confusion when talking to paid search teams and clients (who no doubt receive various definitions from various other teams. Let’s not even talk about on-site-search.)

This may not be a problem for smaller SEO firms, but anybody whose agency/company offers full scale services can easily see how referring to natural search, paid search, on-site search, and catalog search all as search from various departments who interchange keyword and query can cause tremendous confusion.

So why does it matter?

One of my initiatives at work is to un-silo paid search, natural search, and on-site search. I have a report I call the rebidulator (revised bid calculator) as well as various dashboards that attempt to look at search as a whole. We also recently upgraded our web reporting software with https://www.inetsoft.com/company/web_reporting_software/ and have been delighted with the results, so definitely have a look into that if you offer web-based reporting. Shortly in to the project I realized that “keyword” means very different things to very different departments.

ok great, different terms. got it. Now what?

The next step is to evaluate what you’re looking at. If you’re doing paid search, are you looking at keyword performance or query performance? If you’re only looking at keyword performance (the words you bid on) and not the actual words your customers typed, you could be leaving a lot on the table.

Here’s a made-up example that relates to my work with Ford. Suppose you have a broad match on the word mercury. With something like 20% of all queries typed into google being “virgin queries” (never having been seen by Google before) it only makes sense.

Now, you want to compare your natural search data and paid search data at the keyword level. Adwords/Dart/whatever you use most likely shows performance by keyword not query – so it’s easier to pull. But now you’ve got problems. Natural search is way out-performing paid search for the keyword mercury. Especially when it comes to bounce rate. Why?

Well, with the Mercury car brand being shut down, the top searches by volume in google are things like “mercury mercrusier” and “mercury outboard motor.” Both of these are boat terms that Ford probably isn’t interested in bidding on (and we don’t bid on thanks to negative match, but I’m making up this example so bear with me.)

If you only looked at keywords and not queries you might not alert yourself to this. And that’s just one example.

If you only look at keyword performance, you’ll never find out which queries are dragging down your numbers (or which queries are propping up your numbers.)

Don’t compare apples to oranges

It doesn’t make sense to compare actual queries from SEO to keywords from paid search, yet I see countless companies do it. If you truly want to achieve paid and natural search synergy you’ve got to make sure your metrics enable you to collect and compare the right data.

Are you integrating paid and natural search at your company? If so, how? Hopefully I can discuss some better integration techniques in a later post.

June 26th, 2011