According to the article SEO spending in Britain will reach £400 million this year, and the figure is growing 60% year on year.

The article also highlights another, less welcome trend: basically that newspapers really don’t get Search Marketing!

When it comes to describing SEO I found it simplistic. Keeping things simple for the sake of clarity is of course a good thing… but in this case the article manages to be simplistic and confusing.

For example, Author James Ashton describes SEO as:

Part crystal-ball watching, part trial and error, it is the practice of improving lacklustre internet commerce by getting a firm noticed on the results pages of search engines.

Hmm! Not sure that’s really it.

Summarising how companies go about SEO he adds:

Most companies achieve SEO by peppering their websites with keywords that Google’s technology can easily read.

While comparing SEO and PPC he ventures:

Of the two, SEO was invented first, with the concept of paying for positions in search results introduced only a decade ago by Goto.com, now part of Yahoo.

Strictly speaking the article isn’t inaccurate, and it has some interesting facts and figures in it, but overall I found it a tad misleading.

Perhaps my biggest problem with it though is the unwritten implication that SEO is about gaming  the engines — when of course (at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term rankings), that’s really not what it’s about at all.

Think I’ll stick with this SEO theory.

The answer, of course, is neither. The answer is the user, the audience, the digital consumer… call them what you will.

Think about it. Content is there for one reason, and one reason only… to attract and deliver value to the consumer. Search engines are also in the business of delivering value to the consumer. Their entire business is built around satisfying the consumer’s need for great content.

In the digital world advertisers and marketers aren’t in control… neither are the search engines, ad networks, social networks or any other body corporate. The user is King, they’re in control… now more than ever.

According to Maeve Donovan, managing director of the Irish Times and chairwoman of the National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI):

“This level of increase — against a backdrop of general economic uncertainty — is proof positive that agencies understand newspapers and recognise the unique benefits of the medium.

“Newspapers offer a cost-effective means of targeting a clearly-defined audience while other media have to take account of increasing audience fragmentation and reduced opportunities for targeting. “

This leap in print advertising revenue bucks the international trend, where print media are losing revenue to digital media hand over fist as advertisers divert ever more of their advertising budget online. In the UK internet advertising eclipsed newspaper advertising back in 2006, and leading online analysts firm e-marketer predicts that online advertising will overtake Television, the granddaddy of traditional advertising media, by 2010.

So is this surge in newspaper advertising a sign that things are different in Ireland, or is it just fuelled by traditional agencies who don’t “get” online marketing panicking and throwing money at what they’re more familiar with?

Another comment from Maeve Donovan in the Independent article highlights that the traditional agencies aren’t the only ones who don’t understand online advertising.

“Newspapers offer a cost-effective means of targeting a clearly-defined audience while other media have to take account of increasing audience fragmentation and reduced opportunities for targeting.”

Sorry Maeve, but that increased “fragmentation” is actually the aggregation of like-minded consumers into increasingly specific online communities. The ability to dynamically adapt online creative to engage with these smaller niche markets, and to measure results in real time, means that online is a far more targeted advertising medium than newspapers can ever hope to be.

Reading between the lines here, I can’t help feeling that this growth in newspaper advertising revenues in Ireland is like the terminally ill hospital patient who suddenly gets a new lease of life, right before they kick the bucket.

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