When one of the pillars of the SEO community drops SEO form their name if you hadn’t already seen the handwriting on the wall it should now be ringing in your ears. Rand goes into a series of reasons why they’re re-branding as MOZ but I have believe the primary reason is the sullied reputation that black hat and inexperienced SEO practitioners worldwide and here in Lancaster, PA have brought to the name of search engine optimization and the acronym SEO.
I remember clearly the day back in 2005 when my mother phoned me to say there was an article in Newsweek magazine about SEO. I eagerly acquired a copy and read about Rand Fishkin and his upstart search engine optimization firm out on the west coast. There along with a short story was a photo of young Rand wearing his trademark yellow track shoes. With the notoriety from that article and his own smarts, Rand built his company from a few employees at that time to more than 130 today. It’s almost 4 years now since they exited the SEO provider/consulting market place and carried on as a software concern publishing SEO and relevant marketing information and supplying SEO tools from the then re-branded SEOMOZ.org domain.
Is SEO dead? When someone as prominent in our industry drops the SEO acronym from his company name you might think so. However I think not, SEO has just grown beyond what was once a relatively narrow practice of on and off site activities to encompass elements that did not exist in the early days of the internet. Today SEO lives on strongly albeit tarnished by many bad actors and fly by night firms. SEO encompasses all aspects of online marketing including social media marketing, Pay Per Click management, content marketing, email marketing and beyond. SEO has just flowered into a much broader set of services.
Thankfully here at 1 Sky Media we never fancied ourselves solely as SEO’s. We’ve understood for years that SEO is a full set of services and never wanted to include the acronym as part of our name despite the small boost the inclusion might have had for exact match rankings. Perhaps with Rand (who is a solid white hat SEO) leaving behind the SEO portion of his company name, future clients may better except that SEO is not a small, narrow set of tasks to be performed. They may know better than to be swindled by the latest schemer that contacts them. They may understand the experience and labor required to build truly successful web campaigns.
