Search Engine Optimization

Depending on who you are asking this question to, you would get two very different answers, which will reflect the current state of the market.

If you are an online marketer, a website owner or even better a SEO consultant, i would highly suspect you would reply with as strong and clear yes. Fair enough! SEO has been around for a while. Back in the 90’s some sort of SEO emerge and is now a recognised online pratice.

Well that is true if you are in the industry, but there is still a strong misunderstanding or even worst a strong lack of knowledge among traditional business owners and marketing managers. Many Australian banks, Credit Card companies and Mortgage companies (to quote only this part of the iceberg) do not have their websites in the first search engine results pages…
If you are approaching them with a nice SEO proposal, they will probably look at a you and say. Well that is really interesting, but we are doing paid search, we are on top of search engines results page and it brings us good results. They will then look at your proposal which talk about on-page factors optimisation and link building, and then look at the price and will say probably say, let’s talk about this next year we do not have the budget. Some others will even tell you, ‘That is great but, what do you mean by SEO ?

SEO is not mainstream because online marketing companies fail to communicate this online practice in ‘traditional business terms’. The whole jargon associated with it create a real technological gap. On the other hand, traditional business owners and manager are so used to the ‘traditional way of doing business’ that they fail to open their mind to this alternative.

SEO has a huge potential in Australia. When you look at the number of companies spending a huge amount of money on paid search to gain market share, SEO could bring the same results at a fraction of the cost . Online marketing companies really need to educate their customers by using a simple language and a concrete result based approach.

The potential is there and capturing this huge market lies in the online marketing companies ability to close the knowledge gap with traditional businesses.