Is SEO Marketing?

Is SEO Marketing?

  • Total voters
    46
danke

danke

is Burrito Y
Apr 7, 2011
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Many moons ago my introduction to marketing was through a Philip Kotler textbook for MBA level Marketing Management (no aff link [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-MyMarketingLab-Pearson-Package/dp/0132606224/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352909530&sr=8-1&keywords=marketing+management+kotler+14th+edition]Marketing Management Plus New MyMarketingLab with Pearson eText -- Access Card Package (14th Edition): Philip Kotler, Kevin Keller: 9780132606226: Amazon.com: Books[/ame] ) which was something that opened me up to thinking strategically about bringing products to market.

Then I came across advertising as an art and a science and the book that sparked it all for me (no aff link [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352909681&sr=1-1&keywords=ogilvy+on+advertising]Ogilvy on Advertising: David Ogilvy: 9780394729039: Amazon.com: Books[/ame] ). After reading Ogilvy's musings on the subject I was sold.

Then I was introduced to marketing for the scrappy entrepreneur through (no aff link as usual [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Marketing-4th-Inexpensive-Strategies/dp/0618785914/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352909763&sr=1-1&keywords=guerilla+marketing]Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business: Jay Conrad Levinson: 9780618785919: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]).

By this point I was probably one of the savviest 18 year olds around, when it came to marketing. I continued to learn all that I could through copywriting and direct marketing until I discovered the Internet as a sales-force (yes, I did it backwards)

Now... That brings me to my question and hopefully it creates some dialog as well.

How many of you guys think SEO is actually marketing?

I was taught that advertising is a subset of marketing and SEO is a subset of advertising, so calling SEO marketing was a bit short-sighted. It's also why I'm not surprised to hear guys getting slammed by the Penguin and Panda updates talk about how broke they are now. If they knew marketing they would of had multiple fires burning.

IMO marketing is MUCH deeper than SEO and if someone has a deep understanding of it then they'd much wary of investing ALL of their time, money, and knowledge in one traffic source.

What do you guys think? I'd love to hear dissenting arguments on it... and please ignore the horrible grammar. I'm watching Rachel Ray for a little brainstorming and I'm already feeling stupider.
 


I'd call SEO marketing in a sense. SEO is just that. search engine optimization. itll help you advertise your listing. Therefore marketing. I wonder if that made sense.
 
SEO isn't marketing, it's simply one (of many) methods to acquire traffic which can then be marketed to. Most "internet marketers" are nothing more than traffic brokers; they build websites to bring together advertisers and potential customers via adsense. The only guys doing marketing in that scenario are the guys paying for the ads.
 
SEO is just a source of traffic generation, much like every other one out there including PPC.

The key difference is that the ad copy is whatever the search engine in question decides to show the visitor and outside of praying that Google shows your intended title and meta, is less controllable than with paid text ads.
 
SEO is just one part of the whole marketing plan. If you decide to choose SEO for your business over TV, radio, newspaper or other conventional / nonconvential methods that means that you believe SEO is the tool that would give you the best ROI on your investment OR is the only tool you're knowledgeable about, which is bad and if that's the case you shouldn't call yourself a marketer.
SEO is good for starting out and is a good stepping stone, unless you blow the money you get from SEO on hookers and crack, imo.
 
mituozo said:
edit: fuck it, I can't be fucked with debating semantics.
Click to expand...

If you think it's semantics you're the reason I've made this thread.

It's sort of like those people who think a theory is just a hypothesis, except their basing their livelihood on their assumptions.

Sort of like Marketing & Advertising

Marketing vs. Advertising: What's the Difference?

The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie, inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement. Advertising only equals one piece of the pie in the strategy. All of these elements must not only work independently but they also must work together towards the bigger goal. Marketing is a process that takes time and can involve hours of research for a marketing plan to be effective. Think of marketing as everything that an organization does to facilitate an exchange between company and consumer.
Click to expand...
 
seo stands for gaming google.

if you can't see the acronym - game more google.
 
SEO builds a roadway to the market, where you sell people shit.
 
danke said:
If you think it's semantics you're the reason I've made this thread.

It's sort of like those people who think a theory is just a hypothesis, except their basing their livelihood on their assumptions.

Sort of like Marketing & Advertising

Marketing vs. Advertising: What's the Difference?
Click to expand...

Eh? It is semantics.

se·man·tics (s-mntks)
n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
1. Linguistics The study or science of meaning in language.
2. Linguistics The study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent. Also called semasiology.
3. The meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form: We're basically agreed; let's not quibble over semantics.
Click to expand...

You're presenting your case on what you interpret marketing to mean.

mar·ket·ing (märk-tng)
n.
1. The act or process of buying and selling in a market.
2. The commercial functions involved in transferring goods from producer to consumer.
Click to expand...

SEO is part of the process of selling in a market potentially, right? So SEO could be said to be a subset of marketing?

ad·ver·tis·ing (dvr-tzng)
n.
1. The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.
2. The business of designing and writing advertisements.
3. Advertisements considered as a group: This paper takes no advertising.
Click to expand...

It's not technically advertising though by the dictionary definition, so far as you don't "pay" for your position with SEO.

Who cares, though?

Any idiot knows that SEO is only a small subset of marketing.
 
danke said:
How many of you guys think SEO is actually marketing?

I was taught that advertising is a subset of marketing and SEO is a subset of advertising, so calling SEO marketing was a bit short-sighted. It's also why I'm not surprised to hear guys getting slammed by the Penguin and Panda updates talk about how broke they are now. If they knew marketing they would of had multiple fires burning.

IMO marketing is MUCH deeper than SEO and if someone has a deep understanding of it then they'd much wary of investing ALL of their time, money, and knowledge in one traffic source.
Click to expand...
Yes, SEO is marketing. There are many types of marketing, and each type is still classed as marketing.

Telling one person about your business? That's still marketing. While obviously there are many subsets of marketing, I don't see how you can debate that a single subset isn't classed as marketing, yet multiple subsets combined are.
 
I've owned an evergreen product with for a few years now that fluctuates a lot in rankings because I have 8-10K (actually have had 56K in total history) affiliates in any given month pushing my stuff. I can't tell you about my personal SEO journey but I can give a pretty good birds eye view of what goes on in a big collective of marketers that do 1001 different SEO things to rank/promote.

Panda/Penguin is real - obviously. I took a hit with both (meaning a shitload of my affiliates just dropped off the map, hence sales went with them as well as awareness of my product in certain corners of the web - that were profitable).

The strong survived though, 66% or so of them remained untouched, and from looking at quite a few of their promos it's a shmorgus board of why some didn't get penalized and why some did, false positives everywhere.

No - SEO is not dead, YES - SEO is a hell of a lot harder to have consistency and long term rankings if you're promoting others products. One common denominator I found with those that survived and continue to thrive, are that they are seemingly natural, don't have tons of dripped spam/backlinks/wheels/etc. to fake out google.

The other common denominator is that the survivors/thrivers have multiple campaigns on both their own sites, and 3rd party platforms running as totally separate campaigns. Even when a few funnels take a hit, the others aren't linked to or harmed. Diversity in landers/ppc/adnetworks/freeSources/social has helped them understand the SEO game in a broad way vs still trying to trick out G.

For safety - create a product that attracts affiliates to it like flies on shit - you leverage your risk, leverage others efforts, and don't have to worry about SEO (as) much. My affiliates can dance circles around me fast as a group, I'd rather make them loyal vs compete for marketshare, and even with 5-10M as a marketing budget I wouldn't know how to inflitrate the net with my brand the way my affiliates have hit every crack possible, and get my return plus profit without crazy risk. Put up an offer and watch smarter marketers take your stuff for a spin, you'll be learning shit from them about SEO/winning daily.
 
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-joe- said:
Yes, SEO is marketing. There are many types of marketing, and each type is still classed as marketing.

Telling one person about your business? That's still marketing. While obviously there are many subsets of marketing, I don't see how you can debate that a single subset isn't classed as marketing, yet multiple subsets combined are.
Click to expand...

*facepalm*

Tactics != Strategy

That's the difference.

I'd love to see which voters have their own physical product offerings, just to see how those lines are drawn.

I wonder how many of you guys treat their "business" like checkers versus those who think of the whole shebang more like a game of Go.
 
danke said:
*facepalm*

Tactics != Strategy

That's the difference.

I'd love to see which voters have their own physical product offerings, just to see how those lines are drawn.

I wonder how many of you guys treat their "business" like checkers versus those who think of the whole shebang more like a game of Go.
Click to expand...

I treat my business like Grand Theft Auto.
 
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