VCCP Media founder Paul Mead: Search engine marketing is dead

So what happened? Well Google killed off SEO of course, with a combination of updates designed to penalise poor link building activities and weak content. And, in paid search, brands started pulling back on competitive generics and all of a sudden everyone could deliver the clever techniques that used to be the preserve of a specialist.

So, now that I’ve properly optimised my article for click-through rate, what’s really going on in the world of search in 2013? Well, firstly, I have actually heard all the above points in conversation over the last year or so. There is a belief in some quarters that search has lost its ‘sexiness’. So what’s going on?

It’s no longer search, its search ‘plus’

It’s hard to find a ‘search specialist’ these days. Very few of the larger independent agencies regard themselves as search specialists any longer. There’s been a natural evolution from search to ‘search plus’ in agency business models which reflects the rapidly developing marketplace. How can you operate these days in paid search but not in display to some degree? How can you offer organic search without social and the capability to produce engaging content?

And so SEO agencies have become ‘content marketing’ agencies. We’re seeing a huge merger of PR, social media and SEO silos.

Even creative agencies with their established credentials in the production and delivery of ideas are seeing the opportunity. Paid search specialists have followed Google into display and evolved their biddable media offerings, setting up trading desks and plugging into DMPs and DSPs.

In the new world, keywords are simply a proxy for audiences and whether you reach your audience through keywords or through cookies, contextually or behaviourally, paid search marketers are successfully applying their skillset to the wider world of real-time programmatic media buying. In both SEO and PPC the view of the search marketer has widened significantly. We’re on a road from search engine optimisation to media optimisation.

Greater complexity = greater opportunity

Advertisers are wrestling with ever greater complexity in a world of connected devices.

‘Big data’ may be a meaningless buzzword but the market will be defined by those brands and agencies able to disseminate their data and do something with it. More devices, more ad formats, more ad extensions, more targeting options demands better technology and the people to drive it.

Beyond direct response, YouTube is connecting search marketers with brand budgets, either organically through the co-creation of content with ‘talent’ or through paid media with the pre-roll equivalent of the TV spot. This requires new approaches and new metrics but still ultimately a connection with business value through good measurement.

Search marketers are in the front line in the battle to find opportunities from this new purchase cycle and are well equipped to separate the signal from the noise.

The price versus value challenge

The biggest challenge in the world of search has been the commoditisation of services. Driven by network agencies able to amortise fees across media and by an oversupply of agencies competing for business on price, we have created a world where the skills which should have the highest value often have the lowest.

Search teams are forced to deliver over-sold objectives with minimal or inexperienced resource. It leads to demotivated people and wasted talent leaving the industry – or not being attracted in the first place. It creates a situation where the majority of paid search campaigns are not actively managed at all. They’re on autopilot, sometimes up, sometimes down.

In SEO it becomes a box ticking exercise and in both cases the client is paying for account management and reporting instead of the expertise to move the dial on performance. There is a hidden cost to ‘the low fee, no results’ model.

So on one level perhaps ‘search marketing’ is dead simply because the name no longer reflects the breadth of the role and the evolution into ‘media optimisation’.

But anyone who believes that search marketing is less ‘sexy’ or less relevant than it used to be simply doesn’t understand how the core skillsets are being applied around the expanding interface between Google and the consumer. CMOs of the future will look for paid search skills to drive their acquisition and SEO thinking to be baked into their brand.

There are challenges to address but it’s time we inspired a new generation of people into digital marketing. And search is still by far the best place to start.