While I guess I can get behind "Don't do time sucking ineffective SEO when you could be implementing marketing which scales", the rest of the post strikes me as misguided. You can end up with traffic dominated by SEO over referrals for many reasons. One is being good at SEO. One is having a strong brand on the Internet. (I'd put money on over 90% of first time visits to, eg, 37Signals coming from Google. That isn't because they're particularly focused on SEO, but because Google is so many orders of magnitude more popular than the sum of every page which mentions them.)
Another plausible reason is being in a non-techy market, because you run headlong into the 1/10/89 activity pyramid except it is closer to 1/10/989: people who can't tell the difference between the green Googles and the blue Googles don't often start blogs to talk about their abiding love for invoicing software, and they don't come to websites directly because they have learned a way which works to access your Googles and that other way with the typing a website email address never really worked that well. (They still can make great customers, though.)
Writing good and useful content (like you do patio) is always a great idea. However, trying too hard to work on SEO without understanding your target audience is what we are debating in the article. If you can turn visitors into customers, more search traffic is great. However if you can hardly turn any visitors into customers and still keep working primarily on SEO to bring in more traffic, you may be wasting your time. The idea is to work on your funnel as much as you work on bringing people to the site.
We wrote the post because we see a lot of people focusing on traffic when it makes more sense to tighten and work on the funnel. We have been guilty of this too :)
And yes, this doesn't really apply to non-technical markets, remember the "Facebook login" debacle? There's a whole slew of users that don't use the address bar, they just use the Googles.
Historically, a rough rule of thumb is that there is one content creator to every ten people who interact around content (say, comment on it) to every hundred people who consume content. You can play around with the numbers a bit (they're not really that important -- it is an order of magnitude guesstimate) and come up with 1:10:89 as ratios of creators : interacters: consumers.
This is an important thing to keep in mind, since as an SEO you'll typically be wanting to influence folks in those first two categories with the eventual intention of increasing your reach among folks in the last category who only want to pull out their credit cards.
If you want to get into it, you can do a lot of sociological work on how creators are quirky fish and how/why to optimize for their preferences. (For example, there is a strong anticommercialist streak among many influential folks on the Internet, so a core skill for businesses is not looking like they're just in this to separate you from your money while still successfully separating people from their money.)
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While I guess I can get behind "Don't do time sucking ineffective SEO when you could be implementing marketing which scales", the rest of the post strikes me as misguided. You can end up with traffic dominated by SEO over referrals for many reasons. One is being good at SEO. One is having a strong brand on the Internet. (I'd put money on over 90% of first time visits to, eg, 37Signals coming from Google. That isn't because they're particularly focused on SEO, but because Google is so many orders of magnitude more popular than the sum of every page which mentions them.)
Another plausible reason is being in a non-techy market, because you run headlong into the 1/10/89 activity pyramid except it is closer to 1/10/989: people who can't tell the difference between the green Googles and the blue Googles don't often start blogs to talk about their abiding love for invoicing software, and they don't come to websites directly because they have learned a way which works to access your Googles and that other way with the typing a website email address never really worked that well. (They still can make great customers, though.)
Writing good and useful content (like you do patio) is always a great idea. However, trying too hard to work on SEO without understanding your target audience is what we are debating in the article. If you can turn visitors into customers, more search traffic is great. However if you can hardly turn any visitors into customers and still keep working primarily on SEO to bring in more traffic, you may be wasting your time. The idea is to work on your funnel as much as you work on bringing people to the site.
We wrote the post because we see a lot of people focusing on traffic when it makes more sense to tighten and work on the funnel. We have been guilty of this too :)
What is the 1/10/99 activity pyramid?
And yes, this doesn't really apply to non-technical markets, remember the "Facebook login" debacle? There's a whole slew of users that don't use the address bar, they just use the Googles.
Historically, a rough rule of thumb is that there is one content creator to every ten people who interact around content (say, comment on it) to every hundred people who consume content. You can play around with the numbers a bit (they're not really that important -- it is an order of magnitude guesstimate) and come up with 1:10:89 as ratios of creators : interacters: consumers.
This is an important thing to keep in mind, since as an SEO you'll typically be wanting to influence folks in those first two categories with the eventual intention of increasing your reach among folks in the last category who only want to pull out their credit cards.
If you want to get into it, you can do a lot of sociological work on how creators are quirky fish and how/why to optimize for their preferences. (For example, there is a strong anticommercialist streak among many influential folks on the Internet, so a core skill for businesses is not looking like they're just in this to separate you from your money while still successfully separating people from their money.)
Of the people that visit a site, you'll get one 'producer,' ten passive signups, and 99 bounces, basically.
It's like when you see those twitter statistics that suggest only a fraction of the userbase actually Tweets, and the rest are consuming.
This is relevant with regards to the 'Why aren't people talking about you?' angle that they bring up.
99 visits, 10 demos, 1 paying customer ?
Don't forget people who don't know what the address bar is. They will Google "www.companyname.com".
And people who can't remember if it's .com, .net, .org, etc will Google "companyname".
This group is only likely to become larger once ICANN start allowing registration of new gTLDs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#New_to...)