SEO’s Perception Gap

Search engine optimization is a newly emerging industry that is still growing everyday. Its close ties to the Internet and Google allows the service to ride the coat-tails of search into an ever-changing upward spiral of relevance and necessity. More and more businesses that have at least realized SEO’s importance in being found online have come to embrace the ‘nerd-meets-geek’ world of online marketing. However, in a recent closed study on SEO, the perception gap between what SEO actually is and what people think happens in a campaign is wider than expected, and hoped for by SEO specialists.

In this very basic survey, 33 respondents were questioned to provide a snapshot of the general public’s understanding of search engine optimization. The participants were tertiary qualified professionals who were asked not to conduct any research before the survey. Quite a few people (30 percent) considered SEO to be performed by the search engines themselves, such as algorithm changes and delivering improve performance and more relevant results. The perception gap here is between the cause and the effect. Google’s change in the algorithm is causing changes in SEO that will effect the rankings of a site. On a lighter note, 42 percent of respondents understood the basic idea of SEO, citing that it involves changes to a website to improve its rankings in the SERPs.

There was also a very large perception gap in the pricing expectations of SEO services. 46 percent of respondents had ‘no idea’ how much SEO costs, where 21 percent expected it to either free (9 percent) or less than $1,000 (12 percent). Others proposed a performance fee structure based on bottom line generated through SEO. The takeaway here is that no one really understood the pricing expectations for SEO services. For SEO to be considered a legitimate and mature professional field, the industry must consider delivering its services as close to a standard as it can. This is to ensure that SEO services will have increasingly added value to the public, and close the perception gap that exists.

The study of discussion was small and statistically insignificant, but presented some perspective for those SEO experts whose oxygen is written in code. It is obvious that a standard definition of SEO needs to be implemented and marketed heavily that would help the general public understand what not only to expect in a SEO campaign, but what will fit their budget as well. SEO standards would help set a minimum standard SEO delivery, which increase the client value perception. Closing the perception gap is a large and looming step in SEO’s future, and those who have legitimate, white hat SEO and SEM firms will be the ones that make the leap and keep on striding.

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