I once fancied myself an SEO expert and marketed my skills to a variety of companies in Israel. Of course Israeli companies do not want to invest too much and at the same time they want guaranteed results. It was not too hard to sell projects and achieve very good results but it was not satisfying enough to me to send my clients lists of keywords as their ranking moved their way up into the search engine results. If everything else in their online business did not support my efforts, the ranking could be meaningless. And most clients had a hard time grasping that.

Yet still, many companies think ranking in the search engines is enough. Some are even naive enough to thinking ranking for a handful of keywords could make their business a success. That’s why you will notice when you do your own searches, many times you choose one of the top results only to land on a page that does not hold your attention for longer than the time it takes you to click your way off the site. What is even more puzzling is when this happens with PPC – someone was willing to pay for my click, but not willing to invest to ensure i have a positive user experience on their site. Remember that – user experience — we’ll talk about it later, but you better be thinking about it now! But I digress . . .

Despite having moved beyond SEO consulting in the last few years, the WebWhile site still ranks #12 for “SEO Israel” (actually, as of 12/28/09, we are #6 – I did 15 minutes of tweaking a few weeks ago). I find it funny. And even when until a few months ago we were #7 for “SEO Israel”, I’ll let you in on a secret – I am not sure if we got any clients from that fact. That probably has something to do with me telling the callers that we are not an SEO company and trying to explain to them why they may not need an SEO company just yet – but go try to tell an Israeli Marcom that she has to tell her CEO that he is wrong.

Anyway, if we wanted to rank in the top 5, I am sure we would with some additional efforts — but the point is, that is not going to be bring me relevant traffic at this point in time, so why not spend time on what will?

What amazes me is that we rank above the hundreds of SEO consultants in Israel who actually want to get SEO outsourcing jobs. I found this out while running an initial search for a US client. We want to hire an SEO expert that we will manage. I just have a hard time with the idea of hiring someone who can’t get ranked for their own business.

The SEO industry is transitioning – I am not sure if the SEO agencies in Israel have caught up with the transition yet, but they should. It does not make sense for a marketing manager to simply outsource his “SEO” needs and wait for results. Seach Engine Optimization needs to be an integral part of marketing plans on all levels. For this particular client — a doctor in Los Angeles — we’ve been working on SEO for him since the day we first met him and he did not even have a concept defined for the medical Institute he was building. So while I am looking for someone who can handle the SEO professionally, that person will be fortunate enough to inherit a back office built for SEO, with all the on-page SEO elements he could dream about. He just needs to get out there and get his hands dirty in all the annoying, boring off-site optimization tasks. And while he brings us the relevant traffic – we will be busy continuing to maximize the conversions, strengthen the positioning and ensure the site’s visibility among all target markets.