Photo Credit – Moz

SEOmoz Rebrands – Drops SEO

The last week or so has been a big week for Rand Fishkin of Moz. His company dropped the ‘SEO’ from ‘SEOmoz’ and while this may be a small thing to many people, I think this is a big deal. Moz says they are rebranding for a number of reasons, including no longer wanting to be limited by having ‘SEO’ in their name (mainly due to recent acquisitions), SEO being more than just SEO, pronunciation, and general branding/marketing purposes. I think they nailed it.

SEO Carries a Negative Connotation – Like It or Not

The first reason I think they nailed the rebrand is that people view SEO as smoke and mirrors or manipulation. If you’ve ever had to sell a C-level exec on the value of SEO, you’ve probably run into this. This is something many people in the SEO industry know and just don’t want to accept. There have been far too many snake-oil salesman that offer black-hat services or are flat out scams that reflect very poorly on the entire industry. While there are plenty of legitimate agencies, freelancers, and in-house SEOs, there is no real way to escape what has come from poor services. A lot of work has been done to fix these problems, but there’s no way to fully recover from that perception.

SEO is Evolving

Another reason I think they nailed it is that SEO isn’t just SEO anymore. It hasn’t been for awhile. The days of the ’10 Blue Links’ are long gone, and aren’t coming back. Search algorithms have evolved and the SEO industry has to come with it, or else it’s going to fall behind. You can’t just build a site that has the basics down well anymore. Now that schema markup, social factors, brand mentions, and more are being factored into what websites rank, there’s no way to be an SEO without working in other spheres like content marketing, social media marketing, or conversion optimization. This is the new kind of SEO.

Signaling a Change In the Industry

This is where I think the rebranding is really going for Moz. This new kind of SEO is quickly becoming a hot topic in the industry. Some people call it inbound marketing, some people call it SEO. Others call it web marketing or internet marketing. I’m not personally attached to whatever you call this ‘new’ marketing (it’s not really new, just a holistic mentality of SEO/web marketing that the industry should have been paying attention to all along), but I work for a company that does inbound marketing, so for now, I’ll stick with that. Inbound marketing is what we do, and we do it well. I recently wrote this blog on the Fit Marketing website called Why Inbound Marketing is More than SEO.

I hope this is a good transition point for the web marketing world. It’s time for the industry to grow up, and it has done a lot of growing in just the last few years. I’m excited to see what happens next.