Is SEO table stakes? (Hint: No!)

Any­one know why the idea that SEO is no longer a spe­cial­ized prac­tice and has turned into table stakes has tak­en hold? Bueller?

Back in late 2006, the top­ic of the day was “Is SEO rock­et sci­ence?” It wasn’t of course, unless you were refer­ring to boost­ing your organ­ic traf­fic to a rock­et-like tra­jec­to­ry or try­ing to impress some­one by spout­ing off the math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion for PageRank.

As a nascent indus­try, it did seem to some at the time that search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) was a dark art, or at the very least, some­thing the layper­son could not eas­i­ly comprehend.

Flash for­ward 12 years, and the pre­vail­ing feel­ing among many SEO’s has changed rad­i­cal­ly. Now, I’m hear­ing not only do they feel SEO is not rock­et sci­ence, but it’s gone to the oth­er extreme and has become table stakes, a basic prac­tice every­one con­nect­ed to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing should know.

In some com­pa­nies, SEO has become so gen­er­al­ized, top man­age­ment feel there’s no longer any need for spe­cial exper­tise and are elim­i­nat­ing ded­i­cat­ed SEO teams as they cut edi­to­r­i­al and con­tent staff.

I have seen some of this dis­mis­sive atti­tude first hand. In 2015 a pre­vi­ous employ­er elim­i­nat­ed the SEO team and traf­fic dropped close to 30 per­cent soon after. The rea­son giv­en for the elim­i­na­tion? SEO is table stakes.

Why has the idea that SEO is no longer a spe­cial­ized prac­tice and has turned into table stakes tak­en hold?

SEO is sporting gray hair

SEO has been around since the mid-1990’s and has matured. Once thought of as a cot­tage indus­try, SEO firms have grown and col­lec­tive­ly the indus­try has become a pow­er­ful enti­ty with solo prac­ti­tion­ers and pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies work­ing side by side.

SEO as a dis­ci­pline has been woven into tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing strate­gies, most medi­um- and large-sized com­pa­nies have an in-house SEO expert or use agen­cies to han­dle their work. SEO has become a com­mon mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and a ubiq­ui­tous part of the company.

Not fast enough

Search engine opti­miza­tion is not the only chan­nel dri­ving traf­fic, nor is it the only one you should pay atten­tion to, there are oth­ers such as paid search, social net­works, email and affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing. What all four have in com­mon that SEO does not is speed of result.

SEO lacks imme­di­ate results, a change you make today may not show the full results for sev­er­al months, or until Google makes the next core update. Where­as with paid search efforts, social or email mar­ket­ing, results can be seen and the ROI deter­mined fair­ly quick­ly. This slow response lessens the appeal of SEO.

Knowledge of the basics

Any in-house SEO worth their salt has insti­tut­ed a train­ing pro­gram with­in their com­pa­ny to ensure every­one is SEO trained so they can effec­tive­ly per­form their jobs.

This means the dev team will know about tech­ni­cal SEO so they can imple­ment tech­ni­cal rec­om­men­da­tions, the con­tent teams will be trained on edi­to­r­i­al SEO, and oth­er teams will know enough to be able to deter­mine when they need to reach out to the SEO team for advice.

Because of this, you’ll have folks who are “doing SEO”, but aren’t explic­it­ly SEOs. Fol­low­ing the 80/20 rule, these peo­ple will be able to do 80 per­cent of the SEO, con­tent, key­word research, meta tags and inter­nal link­ing work. That is great until some­thing goes wrong and you need some­one around who can do the hard­er 20 percent.

A lot of com­pa­nies elim­i­nat­ing mul­ti­ple SEO posi­tions do not under­stand the need for a per­son who can “do the hard part” since they see the 80 per­cent ade­quate­ly working.

Anoth­er issue is Google. Google is con­stant­ly mak­ing changes to its algo­rithm, many are minor and unno­ticed, but then there are those which impact many. Some are spe­cif­ic to cer­tain indus­tries, some to types of search­es, oth­ers address rel­e­van­cy and qual­i­ty issues. Even with an in-house team, recov­ery from major Google updates may be chal­leng­ing since any change made will only be seen once Google updates. But with­out a ded­i­cat­ed SEO on the team, chances are the com­pa­ny will wait even longer since bring­ing in out­side agency help to “fix” things requires more time.

With a ded­i­cat­ed SEO on staff, there is a high prob­a­bil­i­ty Google’s updates won’t affect a site since it’s being main­tained and kept up to date on cur­rent practices.

Experience and connections

A ded­i­cat­ed in-house SEO should be well versed in mod­ern best prac­tices, have an idea of the future direc­tion of search, and be on top of algo­rith­mic changes as they occur. They should have good con­nec­tions with­in the indus­try and with peers they can reach out to for mutu­al help and brain­storm­ing. Prob­lem is, as the indus­try grows and matures, your net­work of peers begins to shrink as peo­ple retire, are pro­mot­ed or change career paths. This less­en­ing of core spe­cial­ists has an impact on indus­try growth as new prac­ti­tion­ers com­ing in don’t have the ben­e­fit of expe­ri­ence and turn to “fast” tac­tics such as paid search and social net­works to see results.

The expres­sion “a lit­tle knowl­edge is a dan­ger­ous thing” absolute­ly applies to SEO espe­cial­ly new­er prac­ti­tion­ers. It’s easy to get caught up in doing fast, easy and cheap tac­tics but if they go against Google’s terms of ser­vice and harm the site, bring­ing in experts and tools to fix the issue requires much more than pay­ing a ded­i­cat­ed SEO to main­tain the site.

Pay me now or pay me later.

So I ask, do you still think SEO is table stakes? If you’ve read this far, then it’s pret­ty obvi­ous what this author’s opin­ion is, but to reiterate:

• SEO is still an impor­tant traf­fic driver.
• SEO can atro­phy if you don’t keep up to date.
• Every­one should know SEO, but you need some­one expe­ri­enced and ded­i­cat­ed to lead it.

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