Everybody’s talking about search engine optimization (SEO) as a key ingredient in the marketing mix, during the financial crisis. If SEO was important before the crisis, it’s even more critical, when advertising revenues are decreasing and marketing budgets are reduced. But what happens when everybody seeks this Holy Grail?

SEO is a cost effective way to get quality traffic to your website. So your SEO experts get to work, right? They fix all the minor errors on-page, find great long-tail keywords, and start linkbuilding. And it’s working; the cash starts flowing, and you’re making a decent chunk of change. You can lean back because this is a cash cow! But one day your SERPS have dropped, and the next week they’ve dropped again. You’re losing revenue. What happened is that your competitors realised how high your SERPS were and copied your on-page and off-page optimization. Damn it.

You see, through different SEO tools the transparency online is huge. Your competitors can see what keywords, you’re using, which links you have, how you optimised your pages, and how your traffic has improved as a result. And they start doing the exact same things and you see your SERPS drop. You counterstrike with more aggressive linkbuilding. Suddenly, the SEO is time consuming, your revenue is decreasing, and new competitors start competing on the same keywords everyday.

This happens all the time. SEO can be frustrating. Consequently, some companies cheat. We’ve noticed a competitor using black hat tactics. If you search for mobile games on Google, you’ll see a website ranks higher than all the mobile behemoths, like Gameloft and EA games. Mobilclub.org scrapes content from other news sources with the keywords, they want to rank high on, and posts the articles on the bottom the frontpage, they use keyword stuffing, and link farms. It’s sad to see such a porly made website rank high.

In these financially harsh times, companies can get desperate in an attempt to survive. Fact is that, SEO is not the blue ocean everybody believes; the competition on good keywords is tough. Like in business strategy, if you’re doing something right, and earning a pile of cash, your competitors WILL imitate you.

Put in the situation, where competitors are competing hard on the same keywords, we believe many companies will look to the dark side of SEO. This is damn unfortunate, since it degrades the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines, which has become the single most important access point to the information on the Web.

We’ll never turn to the dark side!