Should the SEO industry be educated and regulated?

23 April, 2014

Most professional industries are regulated and have some kind of formalised education programme or qualification to support them. Most have a professional industry body that sets a code of practice and benchmark for service, helping to standardise and raise quality.

But SEO remains unregulated with no formal education route or qualification. Why is this? Should we have one? And who would be best placed to manage it?

Problems with an unregulated SEO industry

Despite awareness of search engine optimisation (SEO) increasing, and a general trend for more expenditure on digital and organic search (just look at the rise in the use of business blogs on company websites), the vast majority of people still don’t fully understand what SEO is or how it works. While many agencies claim to offer the best search engine optimization services, there is no way for clients to know who really offers the best SEO services as there is no benchmark to measure against.

This leads to two main problems:

(1) Poor SEO practice

Anyone can call themselves an SEO expert and can say, do and charge what they want. Some unscrupulous “SEO experts” take advantage of this, and charge extortionate amounts for dubious work – with the vague promise of getting higher search engine results and more website hits.

(2) A poor reputation for the SEO industry

Due to the secrecy that some practitioners shroud their SEO practices in, clients are left in the dark about exactly what has been done and what has been achieved, with no specifics to measure against and no guarantees. Without understanding why, they are often left out of pocket, without significant benefits their business. This leaves a bad taste in their mouths.

It only takes a few of these bad news stories to be shared to colour the view of the SEO industry as a whole.

So why isn’t the SEO industry regulated?

This question isn’t a new one. An article on Search Engine Journal discussed this back in 2011, saying the SEO industry needs better professional associations.

While other marketing sectors, such as PR and advertising, now have well established industry bodies, SEO remains the maverick of the group: “What the SEO industry really needs is an association that not only provides valuable educational resources to its members, but also actively works to help those SEO and SEM firms get business.”

Back then, SEO was a burgeoning industry undergoing a lot of change, development and flux. As a relatively new industry, it was still finding its feet and there was no established standard good practice. Lack of geographical boundaries also raised the issue of where such a regulating body should be based and how much influence it could really exert.

But three years on and I believe that a lot of these issues are not as significant now.

Algorithms have become much more sophisticated, and the quick fixes that used to work (albeit for a short period) have now largely been replaced by an understanding that high quality, regularly updated content is the best way to increase the popularity of your website and build long term engagement.

As for who should organize – how about some kind of TED-style movement with shared international ownership?

What about education? Is an SEO qualification possible?

While there is a certified education programme for paid search, there remains no formal widely recognised education programme for organic search. Why is this? Could it be done? Who should offer it?

Offered by Google, the certification in AdWords “demonstrates that you’ve mastered Google advertising best practices”. Now obviously it’s in Google’s best interests to educate people in how to use its paid services. And although things are changing now Google releases more information about its algorithm updates, there is still a reluctance to offer a certified expert qualification to stop people trying to “beat” the search engines.

But SEO isn’t just about links and keywords. There is a whole range of technical set up good practice techniques that would benefit all websites. And although this moves into the area of website development, it has a huge impact on a website’s PageRank, so is something that all SEO practitioners should get right before they begin an SEO campaign.

Understanding how to properly use things like metadata, pagination tags, author tags and multilingual content tags would benefit everyone and raise the quality of websites across the board.

There are some guidelines and suggested standards, but because there is no regulator, many practitioners don’t bother to follow them.

So what do you think?  Should the SEO industry be regulated?

How should regulation be managed?

Would it be possible to implement an SEO industry certified expert programme? Or would the content date too quickly for this to be valuable?

How do you decide who offers the best search engine optimization services? What questions do you ask your SEO analyst and what metrics do you measure?

I’m really interested in people’s thoughts on this one – please do share yours in the comments box below.

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