SEO is Not IT – Not Just For Techies

It seems that even in the technology-dominated society in which we live there are still many people struggling with a few tech-oriented concepts.

For instance, not everything involving a computer or the Internet is the exclusive domain of the elite few, the IT techies.

The accessibility of the Internet has made it a tool to be used, and a world to be explored, by one and all. Today, one of the groups most benefited by the information revolution, aside from the techno-geeks, are marketers and advertisers.

The Online World Is A Market

Just consider it! An entire new realm, a platform from which to reach anyone, anywhere at the exact time they’re looking for what you have (thanks to the search engines).

The Internet is a magical world, a marketable world.

Now, I know I’m probably preaching to the converted.
I’m sure that anyone reading this article is more than aware of the awesome marketing power inherent in a global community such as that on the Internet.

The Lost Techie In The Marketing Meeting

If the marketability of the Internet is such a well-known and well documented fact though, why is it that whenever a company arranges a meeting with a website construction or online marketing firm they always make sure to have an IT guy present?

Worst of all, the poor soul always ends up sitting in a corner trying harder and harder to look as inconspicuous as possible as the realization slowly dawns that he is as out-of-place as he would be had he attended a technophobe convention.

I challenge you, go to your company’s IT department and ask the bunch of them to explain to you the theories and practices behind the term SEO. Unless any of them have their own website, (and even then we’re assuming they’ve actually put any research into how to run it properly) they won’t have more than maybe a very slippery grasp of the concept.

Online Marketing Is Still Marketing

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against your average members of the IT crowd, many of my best friends are involved in that industry. Those same friends though, would be the first to admit that they have no business being anywhere near a marketing meeting, ANY marketing meeting.

I think the problem lay in the word ‘online’, as in ‘online marketing’. In many businesses any task involving computers in any way, shape or form is, almost by reflex, delegated to the IT department as though they are the all-knowing guru’s of technology (Fall to your knees in reverence to their mighty technical proficiency.)

Well, forget that. Omit the word ‘online’ if you must, but remember that online marketing is simply a different branch of marketing. The same basic principles apply, it’s just the tactics and strategies used to implement your marketing aims that have been developed to target the online world, thats all.

Leave the techies where they’re comfortable, doing what they know. A website is a marketing tool, and techies will inevitably come into its construction, but they have no place in a meeting about the strategies involved in marketing it. Thats why you leave that part to the pro’s.

Thats why you leave it to us. 🙂