Does SEO Make You Sick?
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A shocking survey has yielded the following results:
one in ten Americans considered HTML to be a sexually transmitted disease.
This sounds funny, doesn’t it? Now consider one of the other survey questions.
It also asked what SEO means. Here are the actual responses:
- Safe Energy Optimisation – 41%
- Standard Engine Output – 36%
- Search Engine Optimisation – 23%
A whopping “77% of respondents could not identify what SEO means.” the Sun Sentinel wrote.
You could now argue that Americans are stupid or uneducated as some popular prejudice goes.
Some have questioned the survey itself too. I can assure you: it’s true.
I have seen similar surveys already at least twice and the results were almost as bad. How?
Those studies also showed that more than two thirds of people had no clue what SEO means.
Who’s to blame for SEO?
To be honest it’s a failure of the SEO industry as a whole.
No wonder over years many people try to jump ship and to “retire their SEO”.
How? They would rebrand themselves as some kind of marketers usually following the latest hype.
As far as I know the term Search Engine Optimization – which later would be more commonly used as the acronym SEO – has been coined by Adam Audette in 1997.
Some people disagree about it but I’m not here today to decide whether it’s true or not.
I do not want to blame Mr. Audette here! He’s one of the most respected individuals in the industry even after so many years.
HTML is even a more clumsy acronym if you ask me!
So no wonder average people think it’s contagious.
Yet, HTML is so popular by now that almost 80% know what it means.
One of the reasons why my push to reform SEO as a “2.0” version of it never got far is simply that almost nobody even knows what the first version is about.
DPO, KGO and OC/DC
By now we witness at least once per year a serious attempt to rename SEO itself.
How? Using an even more cryptic acronym! No kidding!
Usually some new and “better” acronym is hailed as the new SEO.
Just during the week I wrote this piece here originally there were three new acronyms coined and suggested to replace SEO:
No, it wasn’t DPA, KGB and AC/DC!
It wasn’t even OAO (Over And Out!) like a year earlier.
The list could go on forever. Just invent your own LOL!
LOL is the new SEO!
You see I have dealt with the question of “SEO is dead” numerous times!
Also I wondered how to replace it with a new acronym for a while now.
And I can assure it’s a fruitless endeavor. You are not Elon Musk!
You can’t just replace a common brand or name with a single or a few characters!
True, some of the articles announcing the death or renaming of SEO weren’t as far off as other ones.
There is a growing distaste even within the SEO industry itself with the acronym!
Yet people rather loath the seemingly never ending reputation problem of search engine optimization.
I think we can agree that the SEO acronym is not a good name for what we do by now.
It also rather muddles the water instead of giving the public a clear message about our trade.
In 1997 it was probably the perfect thing to come up with the term Search Engine Optimization and later to abbreviate it with SEO.
Otherwise it wouldn’t have spread that wide until today.
More than 20 years later the term and the acronym are like a straitjacket.
Whenever we use the acronym we obstruct ourselves and others view us accordingly as raving maniacs. What can we do about it then?
Fortunately there is already a solution for our problems and there is no need to come up with ridiculous acronyms nobody can explain let alone memorize.
Findability and Optimization
In 2005 and 2008 two distinguished authors sought to establish a different term!
They were describing the things we deal with in SEO!
Yet they also spoke of adjacent disciplines by calling it findability.
The industry quickly repelled this “attack” in 2008 when the time seemed to be about right to get
- information architects
- usability experts
- web developers
on board by connecting SEO with these other disciplines and redefining it.
It was the perfect opportunity to broaden our horizons and become ripe for the mass market.
In recent years I have seen whole private and public sectors embrace the term findability.
The SEO industry was not one of them of course. Our colleagues were busy rebranding themselves as
- inbound
- content
- digital
marketers and even as so-called growth hackers. Now THAT sounds awful!
Who wants his website hacked? Who wants to be a hack?
This step is understandable but pretty short-sighted.
As a marketer you effectively disappear in a fuzzy mass of millions of other marketers.
Optimization is not “just” marketing either. It’s much more than that.
In fact marketing is just a small subset of optimization.
You simply don’t always optimize things to sell them.
You can optimize, improve and fix almost everything but you can’t market, advertise and sell all of it.
Learn from the Poles
You may know that I have a Polish background. I was born in Warsaw, the capital of Poland.
I have been partly raised in Poland during the late years of the crumbling “communist” dictatorship.
I still speak Polish somewhat fluently and am pretty fond of the Polish language and culture.
In Poland you don’t say SEO like yo say in the US, UK or even Germany.
In Poland you just say “optymalizacja i pozycjonowanie” or translated literally optimization and positioning.
Both words mean SEO and you can use them almost interchangeably.
Usually you say both connecting them with an “and” so that everybody knows what you are talking about.
That’s also why one of my former blogging clients, a SEO software maker from Poland is called Positionly (now Unamo).
Polish language has been warped quite a few times during its more recent history but in the case the poles got it right.
They use comparatively simple terms that are more or less self-explanatory too.
Findability is even better than optimization or positioning you have to admit though.
- You intuitively grasp the meaning even without having to know what SEO is all about.
- You don’t have to confuse or scare your audience with your severe case of acronymia.
- There is no black hat findability of course either.
Why would someone become unethical in the process of making something findable? To hide it?
Impossible. Findability is virtuous by definition.
Does SEO make you sick? It’s not lethal!
I understand that SEO makes you sick. It sometimes make me sick too.
Over the years I have also been bashed a lot for calling me an SEO.
Some people have treated me as if I’d had the plague!
I even had difficulties to get office space because of my trade.
Luckily SEO is not contagious!
SEO has also nothing to do with death despite all the articles claiming “SEO is dead”.
Don’t talk shop in public
Nonetheless I strongly advise you to use the word findability when dealing with general public.
Don’t try to impress people with insider lingo only experts understand. Most
- librarians
- educators
- government officials
use the term already just like the aforementioned web developers, user experience designers and information architects.
Findability is luckily not just a synonym for SEO!
It also encompasses all kinds of other techniques to get found online be it via search or not.
So there is no reason not to embrace the term finally and for good!
Let’s do it before all others do it and the SEO industry will be the last one to follow suit.
Please face the facts and acknowledge the reality of the Web:
use words people understand no just a few nerds like me and you.
Don’t talk shop, make some sense in public.
Keep the acronyms for your next meeting with your colleagues.
* Image courtesy of Dina Davis
What you will say about “WPM – Website Promotion and Marketing” as a replacement of SEO?
Don’t it justify what we do?
See Search engine optimization may sound like optimizing a search engine !!!! But in fact we are optimizing a website not a Search engine..
Another suggestions :
WOP : Website optimization and promotion
IMP : Internet Marketing and promotion
Sigh. Have you actually read the post? I thought I was clear enough in saying that any new acronym is a bad idea.
Yes i did, i was sharing my view…
OK, then I have to say it again: it doesn’t make sense to come up with a new even more cryptic acronym when the problem with the last one was the acronym itself to a large part. Why use a term nobody understands when there is a simple word for it?
In France they call it “referencement naturel” meaning “natural referencing/indexation” which is much more clear.
If you look at Google trends, the term SEO is definitely popular so I guess people are talking about it, but I agree that it can be misleading and people often have no idea what it’s about.
Thanks for this Tad!
I’m in agreement that the world does not need “new acronyms coined and suggested to replace SEO.”
In that spirit I introduced the term “digital presence optimization” – DPO – (in the piece to which you linked) not as a replacement for “SEO,” but as a way of describing those cross-disciplinary optimization tasks that not exclusively attached to search, social, advertising or analytics.
Hey Aaron! Thank you for coming by. I have to admit that your acronym is the best one of the four above but even in case it’s not meant to replace SEO it won’t succeed. Acronyms only lead to confusion. Why not say findability?
As much as I agree with what your saying I’m not sure I want to end up with a job title like Findability Manager, that sounds a faddy as Growth Hacker.
Hey Paul! Have you seen my latest follow up on this topic? It also mentions the issue with “findability” in job titles:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/explaining-seo-to-mere-mortals-with-common-words
[…] Studies from the US show that more than two thirds of average citizens do not even know what the acronym SEO means. Some even considered HTML to be a sexually transmitted disease. […]