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I can’t claim originality to the theme. Emergence Media gave a recent and great analogy of the Underpants Gnome problem regarding Web 2.0. SEOmoz gave another post a good mention, and there are probably similar posts out there on the “Interweb”.

What if we took this business model and specifically applied it to search marketing?

Check out the South Park video. You can replace the words “collect underpants” with “rank high on Google”, or “get to the front page of Digg”, and even “be #1 in Google Local (Maps)”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZaKSko5I8]

It happens all the time. Many still pitch this philosophy, and just as many potential clients buy right into it.

What happens when the client is enjoying all those Google rankings, and then calls up a few months later wondering why their phone isn’t ringing?

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love search marketing and it’s a lot of what I do for a living, but there’s a reason many outside of the industry relate it to snake-oil sales.

It does give me a good feeling to work with different Web teams. It presents the opportunity to provide a Web site worthy of all the traffic without having to think for a second on how to “manipulate” search results.

The common sense approach makes the Web better. Really!

Four years ago I would have slapped myself for posting this.

Sounds like Yahoo thinks so. Starting in June,  Yahoo will require that pay-per-click ads be 70 characters or fewer (currently, you have a long-copy option to include up to 190 characters).

It’s pretty much copying Google, but I love this. It makes you think more, and work smarter. How can you say the same thing in 70 characters and have it be just as effective as someting you would say in 190 characters?

An hour ago, I received a nice spam email from a SEO company guaranteeing top 10 placements in Google and Yahoo. Upon going to their SEO plans page, they list 14 specific services they provide, with none of them focusing on analytics or how people actually find and access their site.

At my full time job today, I had a situation where the client has ranking reports for their own client, but didn’t know how to explain what it means.

I can’t blame them. Can you actually measure business success by how well you rank in Google for five or ten phrases? Hey, I admit to being there, but it was 2003. I didn’t know any better.

It winds up that their client implemented Google Analytics (GA) from the start, but haven’t looked at it since. I was so happy to hear that!

With that, I was able to put together a document based on GA, with screenshots included. It’s a short piece showing a marketing summary, how people find them, which pages users land on, which pages users leave from, navigational paths, etc.

The nice part is we gathered enough data to explain to their client what is working, and what needs to be improved at a level that they can understand. Not everyone is a search geek. That’s why they’re clients and depend on outside expertise.

We’re all getting together tomorrow for a client conference call, and it’s always exciting to engage them on their actual traffic and not just where they appear in Google for a few phrases. It educates the client, shows that search engine marketing isn’t about waving some magic wand, while hoping it turns into a long-term business relationship.