Has your small business been forced to tackle a “must-do” project like Y2K or ISO9000 where the only result was a big bill and lots of wasted time? After watching dozens of clients invest in search engine optimization (SEO) and reviewing my own experience, I am coming to believe much of SEO is electronic snake oil. Let me explain.

Defining SEO
Search engine optimization is supposed to elevate your website’s Google and Yahoo rankings by fooling their programs into believing your site is the best answer to key words. The pitch of SEO is that you can “beat the system” by adding special phrases, formats and styles to your website, so it will be “seen” by the web spiders and crawlers who will “tell” the search engines to rank it higher. Doesn’t this remind you of gambling in Las Vegas? Only in a casino would you spend your money trying to beat the odds against those who set the rules. And as soon as they catch someone “beating their system” like counting cards, they make up new rules that keep the odds in their favor.

But isn’t SEO the same thing? As business owners we bet our money on SEO firms to beat the Google “system” but we can’t even bluff Google since they see all our “cards” as soon as our SEO “expert” puts them on our site. So actually we are subsidizing Google’s R&D efforts every time we “bet” with our SEO secrets which Google immediately can and does learn from! But armed with fancy graphs and charts, SEO experts promise us “get noticed quick” schemes that will place our firm on the first page and ahead of all the other firms that aren’t smart enough to invest in SEO.

What’s a Business Owner to do?
Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

1. Basic SEO is good business.
   Tell the truth. The key words that truly describe your firm’s Best and Highest Use should already and always be throughout your website. For example if you install home theatre, your company name, website name, and website content should of course contain the words home entertainment and listing some key words is sensible.
2. Buying your way onto page one is not a shortcut for success.
   Think how you feel when someone says, “I sell insurance, cars or legal services.” I immediately assume the worst as they have commoditized themselves by refusing to narrow their focus, sharpen their offer or state what they do in terms that are special to me. The internet is no different and to expect to own a generic category such as public relations services online is per se evidence of a lazy, sloppy and probably incompetent business. If a business takes the time to focus and understand its best and highest use, the needs of a specific target market and to resolve specific kinds of pain or opportunity your message sends to the marketplace and the compelling way in which it will be received will not only impress prospects and clients but SEO engines. Therefore, the very activities that a small business needs to undertake are the very ones that need to benefit its online marketing.
3. If a business has been carefully targeted and positioned as discussed, then what is the real role of SEO?
   I’m not sure there is one. Before spending thousands of dollars to optimize my site, Birol Growth Consulting was on page one of Google and Yahoo. Today it is there as well. Why? Because by staying focused on a given message based on a best and highest use and pointed out a specific target market, there is no doubt of what I do and whom I do it. The key to me is to add content continuously, examples and links that continually pay off on the narrow positioning and target marketing you defined in the first place.

Conclusion
My experience with SEO is the same as it is with Las Vegas. It’s okay to dabble and gamble a bit, if you do so for the entertainment and the short term thrill you may get. But banking on either in lieu of focusing on your day job of narrowing your focus and pointing it at exactly who needs it is irresponsible.

Focus on developing content and proof that your expertise helps your target market and leave SEO to the pretenders and who have more money than brains.

I’m back from a twenty day cruise on the Holland America Line’s Rotterdam (HAL) where my family sailed by Antarctic glaciers, explorer’s outposts and penguin colonies. Besides the hazardous grandeurs deftly navigated by our ice pilot, I saw a fascinating contradiction. The crew and staff of HAL worked nonstop to create a consistent onboard experience while the Antarctic researchers we saw spent all their time adapting to survive as they studied how the climate, nature and animals themselves are adapting. In watching this, it occurred to me how often we entrepreneurs struggle with these same conflicting forces of the need for consistency vs. the need to adapt.

First let’s look at Antarctica versus our ship. Despite its inhospitable and dangerous climate, Antarctica has drawn explorers, heroes and fools to its shores for centuries. Ernest Shackleton, the most famous, survived over 130 days under a rowboat eating blubber ultimately only to earn a $20,000 fee for the film rights. After Shackleton, thousands of explorers have adapted their lives, dreams, and studies to explore and learn about Antarctica. Their success demonstrates the very human spirit to innovate and adapt as much to survive and learn.

Compare this to the centuries old tradition-bound Holland America Cruise Lines whose consistency and standardization are keys to their success. As the oldest premium brand, HAL appeals mostly to the 60+ market offering a consistent experience delivered over seventeen ships. From the centralization of decision and policy making to the tight allocation of human resources, HAL runs cost centers with legendary attention to detail and tradition. My only big beef is the lack of contemporary music or other progressive entertainment for the still-rocking crowd. Still it seemed bizarre to watch the ship’s Hotel Manager chastise our waiter for a crooked place setting while we passed the spot where another cruise ship sank last month!

So as an entrepreneur, how do you reconciling consistency with the need to adapt? Unlike the explorers or the cruise ships, you really don’t have the luxury of choosing one.

One of my close colleagues, and a national manufacturing expert, Becky Morgan, helped me with this.  She, along with Carmella Calta, CEO of multiple process-driven companies, pointed out that without first creating consistency in your business, progress cannot be made let alone innovation.

For both consistency and innovation to work, my colleagues recommended that autonomous employees must take responsibility for creating and embracing process. Only with clear standards in place, can innovation turn into practical results. The challenge of a company adapting to progressive innovation and demonstrating “out of the box thinking” relates more to business strategy. To create strategic change, leaders of organizations must define themselves as innovative by allowing “out of the box thinking”. Most companies don’t gamble on their proven successes despite indications that their marketplace is moving and changing. As Becky says, “If you don’t move with your customer base and change your business strategy your operations strategy and what you measure in the form of standardization won’t change either.”

In Shackleton’s case, his ability to adapt and survive led him on to be refinanced for future expeditions to both Antarctica and elsewhere in the world.

And Holland America has the choice of reinforcing its traditional appeal to its aging customer base or innovating more to appeal to its younger, non-retired clientele like me. Only time will tell which is the right bet as with increasing life spans and sellout cruise ships, Holland’s core market shows no signs of declining.

Here are some key guidelines for managing your way to consistency and adaptation.

1. Don’t use innovation or anything else as an excuse not to create consistency and standardization.
2. Empower your employees throughout your firm to create better ways to get work done and hold them responsible for results.
3. Don’t use standardization and consistency as an excuse for not creating a clear business strategy that recognizes shifts in your marketplace and their preferences.
What does this mean for your business?

Unanticipated demand, aging infrastructure, competing jurisdictions, and inadequate funding!  These descriptions best describe our country’s highway bridges. But for those of us who live to travel, we roll our eyes at infuriated amateurs who blame highway workers for delayed trips.  Yet how many of us blame the symptoms rather than root causes of business technology problems.  After thirty years of watching marketing dreams meet technical reality, here are some observations of why it is so hard to translate marketing programs through technology.

Today’s typical scenario
• A goal-driven entrepreneur or marketing manager defines a program they wish to implement using technology
• Next a project manager is assigned to translate these needs into a project work plan and
• Finally, a programmer is assigned to write the code and connect it to the needed databases and communication/delivery systems to bring the project to fruition. 

If it’s so simple, why doesn’t this work?  Here’s why. 
• The entrepreneur/marketing manager has been promised that in this day and age anything is possible and all they have to do is ask. 
• The project manager, especially if he/she is billing the client for their time, eagerly attacks a complicated project arriving at an enormous work plan and budget accommodating every need and want they heard. 
• The programmer, formerly a $100 an hour domestic worker, and now often a $20 an hour third world programmer, is presented with a giant work plan hopefully leveraging his or her ability to generate accurate code at break neck speed. 

Inherent in this virtual relay race are missed handoffs. 

• The marketer assumes the project manager understands his or her business. 
• The project manager quickly realizes the marketer doesn’t understand or care about the complexity of what they are requesting or the sophistication of the technology that it will take.
• Similarly, the project manager faces translation challenges on the coding level with a volume-driven technician who increasingly has to overcome a language and cultural barrier. 
Isn’t it a miracle that programs are ever completed satisfactorily or to return to our highway bridge metaphor, most don’t collapse? 

Looking forward

After decades of watching capabilities increase, costs drop and expectations soar, successful marketing through technology is as tough as ever.  Here are a few lessons I’ve learned the hard way.
1. Entrepreneurs and marketers need to understand when and why their requests are easy, hard, time-consuming and unreasonable.
2. Project managers need to understand how and why the marketing manager and his/her program is successful
3. The programmer needs to understand what the project really has to accomplish.

In summary

There is more pressure than ever on all parties to communicate, understand and translate what they are trying to do into what someone else is depending on being done.  Like “smart” bridges that absorb, convert and transfer weight, seismic shifts and weather, successful entrepreneurs, marketers, project managers and programmers have to be as good as handling similar “shocks” as they are at doing their specific jobs.