Examples of why businesses need SEOs

Todd Freisen continues the defence of SEO as a valid and important specialist service for businesses, underlining the points Danny Sullivan made previously that just because a specialist finds their specialist skills easy, doesn’t mean to say everyone else does.

What a lot of people are over-looking, though, is that SEO’s - good SEO’s - are not simply specialists, but all round problem-solvers and web doctors.

Sure, search engines are a primary focus - after all, search engines are the key process for finding information online, and SEO’s are the gatekeepers to help unlock information for them - with a little spin as required.

But as I recently wrote at SEOmoz, SEO’s are increasingly concerned with overall internet marketing problems.

The bottom line is that a good SEO won’t simply be able to help make a site more visible and develop a campaign for links, traffic, and rankings - a good SEO will be able to offer help if required on a slew of webdevelopment and marketing concerns.

For example, here’s a couple of sites I’m aware of with serious problems. And these are problems that SEO’s are most qualified to solve.

1. http://www.theonlineeyedoctor.com

The owner called me last week asking what they could do to help with SEO.

Sure, the Javascripted menu and poor link development are SEO concerns - but there are far deeper issues here.

Firstly, the site looks like shit. Even more so, because the company who designed it - Automated Marketing Machine have simply copied their own site template, slapped it on a client - and then charged £8,000 for it. I kid you not.

The problem here isn’t simply one of search unfriendliness - the site is poorly presented, unlikely to convert well, the site owner isn’t even allowed FTP access, they aren’t allowed to see what keywords their PPC campaign is focused on.

They’ve blown most of their budget and their product expires in just over one year.

This is way bigger than a SEO issue - this requires problem solving on multiple levels.

The bottom line here is that the survival of the company is at stake, and it’s going to require more than just titles and tags to be applied, as the current development company are killing their own client.

No, The Online Eye Doctor are not a client of mine, though I’m writing a report. Question is, how many other business specialists could even begin to correct the multiple problems here?

2. http://www.intertech-storedesign.co.uk/

Intertech are a hidden gem in my old town of Hull - they design stores worldwide for clients such as Harley Davidson and Triumph. You can see their clients are literally all over the globe here:
http://www.intertech-storedesign.co.uk/case_studies.asp

Ah. You’ve noticed already. The entire site is built with Flash.

In fact, possibly the only page with text on is the homepage - and that’s locked behind a Flash splash page.

The entire site is about as search unfriendly as you can get - the nav menus are built in Flash, and text pages are actually constructed from images with no alt text.

That looks bad, but of course there are workarounds. It’s going to be time consuming and laborious to work with.

Point here is that on-site SEO here isn’t going to be a quick and easy job. It’s going to require planning on a new internal linking architecture, and complete rebuild of pages to be search engine friendly.

Sure, maybe that’s a developer’s job - but it’s the developers who created the problem in the first place - that of a global SME having no presence at all on the global internet.

And here’s an additional complication - the UK’s Disabilities Discrimination Act means that the site is potentially illegal on usability issues. Heck, they don’t even list their company registration information, so they’ve also contravened the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations (2002).

Again, this isn’t simply an issue of slipping in keyword tags, but of rebuilding an illegal site to become accessible for human users as well as search engines.

3. http://www.toymaster.co.uk/

Toymaster are a major UK toys supplier, with hundreds of stores across the UK.

And they begin 2007 with no real web presence.

Oh, you can use the site if you are a supplier - I presume - but otherwise, the site is dead for human visitors.

You can’t click through to any products from the homepage, and if you have the misfortune to land on the site’s indexed pages via Google you simply hit error after error.

Again, no this isn’t a client, but they badly need help. I realised this when trying to find an online retailer to buy a specific children’s toy for Christmas, and found what a mess they were in.

The bottom line is that Toymaster’s internet presence is a complete mess: they need all of the dead URLs redirecting, they need the site rebuilding to be properly search engine friendly - and human user friendly.

A simple and easy job? I don’t think so.

Overall - SEO’s don’t simply tag pages. There’s far more work involved even just for on-page SEO - a whole process that requires problem-solving skills, and technical resources to cover specialist webdevelopment fields to boot, and a general ability to think through strategy and planning.

Is SEO stupid and easy? Is SEO bullshit? Only if you don’t know what SEO is and does, and why it can save real businesses.