Recently I've met with two people who are responsible for their corporate website marketing. One was from a pure play online financial brokerage company the other from a car rental company where most of their sales come through their website.

They had very different strategies on SEO with one having just let go of their SEO team and the other currently hiring a number of people to add to theirs.

Which is right? They both work in similar roles for similar types of companies and they're making these decisions based on information that they have about the performance of SEO on their website.

One area to consider is the type of service that their customers are looking for.  If you're wanting to buy life insurance then you want to make sure that it covers you for all the areas that you need if you're looking to hire a car for your holiday in Spain then it needs to be able to fit x number of people and their bags. In the first scenarios you buy on features in the second on price. This would suggest that SEO strategies can produce a large volume of leads in a commodity market but of a very poor quality.

Why then do so many companies believe that any form of SEO strategy, no matter if it fits their business, is going to revolutionize their website performance.

Personally I much prefer the concept of findability as suggested by Peter Morville where if you build a site in the correct way and keep the information on there themed, relevant and up to date you will be naturally findable.

There is a great article on A List Apart, written by Aarron Walter,which I have just come across that all agency staff, including ours, should read.

If you think about and plan to build a findable website from the outset the benefits can be huge and at a much reduced cost than paying a company or building a team dedicated to SEO.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Findability, A List Apart, Peter Morville, Aaron Walter