The public doesn’t know what SEO is
Posted by Lea
Yesterday I wrote about how Google Local has come to Australia. Michael Gray has been writing a series on local search recently, which has only reinforced for me how important it is. So, its a good thing that Google is finally fully Here, and I’m really happy its happened, but I had the opportunity to revisit how little some people know about what we do.
Having effective local search available will be great - if Google can get a decent quantity of business listings - they are a little short at the moment.
In the spirit of the moment I found the TrueLocal page for submissions and entered my company details. Oddly enough I didn’t get a listing confirmation page, or a status in the email, I got a thank you page with the information that they would phone me presently.
Presently turned out to be the next day, and it was an interesting conversation. After telling the nice man all the details I had already entered so he could enter them in his system (I wonder how the spelling went… oh dear!) and how to pronounce the company name three times (ee-lis-ee-en), we got to the topic of where did I want to be listed.
Me: Internet marketing
Him: Web design?
Me: No, we don’t do that
Him: Oh, you run stats and things for people?
Me: God no! We do Internet Marketing!
Him: … OK, I’ll put you down for that.
So I wonder where we will turn up 
The point being that Joe Public (and this man worked for an internet directory, so $DIETY help the public!) doesn’t know what SEO or SEM or Internet Marketing is. So Danny is correct in “Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason“, the public doesn’t know what we do.
I’d love to offer some hope for the future in closing, but I don’t have any. I don’t know what my mechanic does to my car when he services, I usually don’t know exactly what my doctor is testing for when she sends off some samples… and I shouldn’t have to - that’s their job, and this is mine.
February 10th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
While SEO is something which “some” website owners hold very near and dear to their hearts, it isn’t and never will be a term which the general public will ever hear or for that matter even want to find out about.
As one of the founders of dLook (a true local competitor) I have to (half) defend the guy who rang you in so far as SEO is not a highly populated category and you were probably the first SEO business he has ever dealt with.
That said, dLook made a conscious decision from day one to supply as much SEO info to our listings which had websites in the hope that they would take some advice on board and increase traffic to their site.
Sadly it has been an uphill battle. It has been our experience that most webmasters (and I use the term loosely) are more interested in the look and feel of their respective sites than the visibility of them to the major search engines. We have found that an adword campaign rates as “profound progress” to most Australian webmasters.
We, like you, would dearly like to see the SEO industry flourish in this country and as I stated we are doing our bit to make this happen.
February 10th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Hi Theo - thanks for commenting
Yes, I meant to mention that the guy was obviously just a front-line person and that I didn’t hold it against him personally - thanks for pointing it out
Lea