Last month I attended the Connecticut business expo in Hartford, CT. During lunchtime, one of the seminars open to all was about improving your web traffic through blogs and social media. Since I have a business in website marketing and I’m always looking to learn new things, I made sure to listen to what Brian Halligan, the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, would say. Listening to him speak down to a non-techie audience was annoying in itself, but I stayed thinking, “Maybe this guy has something to say”. When it came time for Q&A, Mr. Halligan decided to take a big old verbal dump on all SEO companies. responding to a question about SEO, he said that SEO companies were a scam and anyone could do what they do without paying all that money. Of course, not only does HubSpot offer SEO as one of their services, but today, while seeing how my own AdWords account was placing ads, I came across HubSpot’s SEO ads, again and again. Now, I have always gone by the precept that you do not talk badly about your competition. It’s a scummy practice. If you can’t outperform your competition, then if you’re desperate and untalented enough, trash them. Which brings me back to the title of this blog posting. Hubspot is a pretty big company, their Alexa traffic ranking is 1584, pretty darned good. So, why talk badly about your competition? Because scummy business practices work. We all have opportunity in business to do something scummy. Take an employee’s idea and run with it without giving credit, maybe even firing the employee. Screw your partner over. Run up personal bills on the company and then file bankrupcy, you get what I’m saying. but most of us as not going to be successful like Mr. Halligan because we have personal ethics. We don’t knowingly make promises that we know have no chance of being realized. And we don’t publically trash an entire industry of professionals just to make our competitors look badly so that we can take their business. I have heard many stories about less that savory SEO companies. Companies that take a retainer and are never heard from again. I think every industry has these scumbags and the faster they are out of business, the better for all the legitimate business people.
It’s funny that HubSpot would put down SEO. Their entire business concept is an SEO play.
Of course anyone can do SEO if they take the time to learn it. I’ve spent years learning first as a hobby… then as Sr. SEO Manager for LendingTree.com for several years… and now as a search marketing (SEO/SMO/SEM) consultant.
But the same could be said of brain surgery. I could learn to do that myself as well, if I want to dedicate an extra 4-6 years of my life learning it.
Would learning to be a brain surgeon be cost effective if I need brain surgery? No. Would learning SEO be cost effective if you want to get started now and have SEO successes in a reasonable amount of time? No.
I agree with you. Bad mouthing your competition does little to help your business and only stands to make you look like an idiot.
As my Grandmother always taught me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone then don’t say anything at all.”