The Expert’s Guide to Online Marketing

Part 1: What is “Traditional SEO,” and does

it still work?

The Guide

• For almost a year, we at exploreB2B researched the connections between SEO, social business strategies, and content marketing.

• We conducted many interviews with international experts and drew our own conclusions

• This report is our wrap up – a complete summary on what we have learned from our own experience and from the experts.

The Experts

• Lee Odden, Top Rank Marketing• Kevin Cain, Director of Content Strategy,

OpenView Venture Partners• Adam Torkildson, VP of Operations, Customer

Hook • Jonathan Gebauer, CEO & co- founder of ‐

exploreB2B • Gisele Navarro Mendez, freelance social SEO

consultant and blogger

Lee Odden on the Past of SEO

“Those were the days of the Yahoo! Directory, Excite, Lycos, HotBot, Alta Vista and later, paid inclusion to Inktomi.

SEO tactics at the time focused on adding keywords to web pages, title tags, meta and description tags.

We created landing pages for each major search engine, modifying content and page formats to increase the

chances of ranking on specific keywords for specific search engines.

Submitting (and re- submitting) web sites to directories ‐and getting them included on ‘What’s New’ review lists

attracted traffic and buyers.”

Lee Odden on the Start of Google

For Lee Odden, who has a long-time SEO career, this was the rise of the SEO business. He was

around for the first, big shift in search that came with the introduction of Google’s search engine.

“Google came on the scene and SEO focused a lot more on links.”

exploreB2B’s Comment

SEO is something that has been constantly changing since its rise in the nineties. The focus

on links, which is very often viewed now as “traditional SEO,” was the first evolution of

original SEO.

Kevin Cain

“SEO has evolved from being a somewhat formulaic process into an art and a science.

Because of updates like Penguin and Panda, the rules of the game are in a continual state of flux. As a result, you can’t rest your laurels and expect

to get results. You’ve really got to evolve your strategy as

Google continues to change.“

exploreB2B’s Comment

Google keeps refining their algorithms for better results for the person performing the search

every once in a while evolution leaps forward and marketers are able to adapt to this change Kevin notes that these changes are something

SEOs must live and come to terms with to adapt their strategies.

Adam Torkildson

“Every new algorithm change, all the new mobile initiatives, the localization and

personalization, and the tightening of referring data in analytics all lead me to believe that

Google is actively trying to put SEOs out of a job, and turn their search results into something

impossible to influence in any way.“

Jonathan Gebauer

“The thing about SEO strategy is that it can work in ‘the now’ but backfire in the future.

This is not just due to Google’s algorithm updates, but also from over optimizing content. ‐Content might be good for search, but hard on

readers’ eyes and brains.”

Jonathan Gebauer

„SEO still is valid when used in conjunction with the production of high- quality ‐

content and as a technique to improve other marketing efforts.

What is currently dying is SEO as a sole technique for driving traffic and profit.“

Gisele Navarro Mendez

“As long as SEOs keep seeing themselves as detached from the bigger marketing picture,

they will keep falling into sketchy methods that might bring them short term results, but won’t ‐

contribute to their clients’ successes.”

Jonathan Gebauer

„A good friend of mine once put it this way: ‚Good SEO is no SEO.’ I would rephrase that:

‚Good SEO is natural SEO.’ Recent developments at Google make me

believe that they might actually be of the same opinion.“

exploreB2B’s Conclusion

Search engines are built to give their users quality content that matches their search terms – the main goal of SEO is to attract more traffic

from searches. After all, was there ever a possibility of these two coexisting in the long run if they did not

focus on the same aspect of giving search engine users the high- quality content they were ‐

looking for?

More to come …

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Expert’s Guide to Online Marketing where we will talk about

2. The Recent Rise of Content Marketing