The SEO Lemon

I don’t often blog just to say read what someone else has posted, but occasionally I see something that’s so thought provoking that it’s worth remembering the login to Wordpress and crank out a few sentences. John Andrews post about A “Market for Lemons”, a Nobel Prize, and Snake Oil SEO is one of those occasions.

John’s been doing some reading. Academic economics to be exact. The paper he cites theorizes that through pricing, the used car industry created a “Market for Lemons” by pricing low-quality autos where quality autos should be priced, and overpricing the real quality cars. John shows us how that applies to the search engine marketing industry.

I like this analogy. I’m not so sure we’re there yet, though. Crack a joke about a used car salesman, and everyone gets it. Crack a joke about a SEO, and unless you’re in an after hours Pubcon Vegas party, you get blank stares. It is an apocolyptic prophecy of the industry, but he could be right.

The reason I’m not convinced that SEOs will end up in the same jokes with used car salesmen and personal injury lawyers is that I’m not convinced that search engine marketing will remain a stand-alone industry. I don’t think it’s going away. Not at all. But, I think it’s going to be more and more integrated into the existing marketing industry. More companies will have an in-house SEO and less will outsource.

But then, even that may play more into John’s vision, as the smaller companies who can’t afford to have an in-house SEO will still outsource. And, the smaller the company, the more price-conscious they’ll be, and thus the more likely to hire the boileroom SEO service. caveat emptor