As the husband carries his new bride through the door of their new house, they quickly learn that they should have utilized a Realtor
Broker to find the house and to help with the Purchase Agreement. Click on the animated image to see a "pitfall" that could have been avoided, due to a licensed broker's limited realistic liability to check for obvious "house for sale" problems.
I had a Realtor Broker's license in California, and I must give a lot of credit to Jennifer Laycock for her Realtor analogy in this recent post of hers on Small Business Ideas Forum. The topic was based on her 11/8/05 Search Engine Guide article entitled "Does the World Need an SEM Match-Maker?". I agree with Jennifer about a great need for the SEO-SEM industry to have help in their trust, credibility, and educational challenges with clients. I especially liked this quote from her post on "Search Return" for the topic "Search Work Referral System": "I see a true need for this type "match-making" service if search
marketing is going to continue to grow. While the industry is starting to mature, there are still valid concerns from companies about who they can safely hire."
Actually, I was waiting for a knowledgeable "insider" (is directly involved in the SEO-SEM, Search Marketing Industry as a consultant and, or article writer) like Jennifer Laycock to bring up this very topic for quite some time now. In fact, I have recently done a series of posts on the many challenges for both clients and SEO-SEM Consultants starting on 11/2/05, 11/3/05, 11/4/05, 11/6/05, 11/8/05, and most recently, "SEO - It All Comes Down to Money (Pricing) vs. Value" on 11/10/05.
While most of those posts are leading to only one, specific, controversial suggestion (soon to come) to help the Search Marketing Industry grow, they bring out some specifics relating to the general theme of what Danny Sullivan discussed in his, still timely, 7/12/04 forum post on "Improving The Reputation Of The SEM Industry", and then again on 5/16/05 in "SEM Industry Biggest Growing Pains". In that last post Danny said "The biggest problem in my view remains the SEM industry's reputation. We have a bad one."
OK, what about solutions, you say. Jennifer Laycock said "On my more ambitious days, I think that I'll actually build something out on www.seomatch.com, a domain that I bought earlier this year when I thought it would be interesting to get into SEM brokering." Ah yes, an SEM Broker or Intermediary. These are terms and keywords close to my heart, and close to about 22 years of my business experience. However, Jennifer is wise enough to say in her forum post: "The problem is that for something like this to be effective, you would need to have a person, or team of people that could actually keep up with a large number of firms. Visit them on site, understand their work philosophies, know their track record, etc... Then that person (people) would have to be trusted to make the best decision for everyone when making a match." In her article she says: "The reality is that the size and scope of this type of project would be larger than what I care to manage. As I see it, you'd need to have a good system in place as far as reviewing and cataloging techniques, skill levels, price ranges etc."
But, CONGRATULATIONS TO JENNIFER FOR RECOGNIZING THIS KIND OF NEED! Again, I feel it is important that she says: "I see a true need for this type "match-making" service if search marketing is going to continue to grow." But, like anything done in this world, it is very important HOW YOU GO ABOUT IT. So, my follow-up post on this will elaborate more on Jennifer's "Realtor for SEM" analogy, and it will encompass some of my views on the brokering of long term SEM clients with ethical, and value driven SEM sellers.
Animated image courtesy of www.artie.com.
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