When I say “A better view of SEO and Digital Marketing”, perhaps a lot of people will react like: “Are we perceiving it wrong? You are telling us we are wrong based on which fundamental?”
Currently, the Vietnam market is merely chaotic, let’s all sit back, take a deep dive into it and find our common ground.
2017 – 2018: SEO is changing in Vietnam
I remember back to the year 2007, when I was still an Assistant to the Web Project Manager. At the time, I was a part of this pretty big web project: timnhanh.com (the very first local Search Engine in Vietnam) and the social network: yume.vn. While on these projects, I also got trained in SEO.
Thinking back, it might not seem to be any sort of training, in fact, it was more likely to be an assigned task on SEO. A little story background, I was on the R&D team, there were only 2 engineering guys knowledgeable about Linux Server administration and programming language (one of them obviously was me), the rest were marketing geeks, journalists, etc.
In that period, SEO was quite simple, mainly regarding meta tags (which are no longer relevant to this date) and strong keyword spam tools. Building countless and meaningless websites to spam around the internet market is my work assignment but made me feel totally ridiculous with this ultimate question that I found myself questioning every time reflected on my daily works: “Why am I doing this nonsense? Wasn’t I trying to build great websites, not those?”.
Fast forward to the year 2008, when I founded DaisyWebs – a web design company. I have started to receive SEO cases from clients, but decided to outsource them all since I lost interest in the SEO market. Working back and forth between the client and the outsource team kept me in the loop of what was going on with the SEO updates. I then later joined Viet Solution – Babywolf Nguyen Vu Tuan Anh’s SEO Agency, where I did officially work as SEO Expert and got my passion back to the SEO world.
The SEO evolution here in Vietnam has always been dependent on the PageRank algorithm’s changes and update process. Apart from adding more signals from the Social channel, for a long time now, people are doing it for the ‘’quantity’’ not based on the ‘’quality’’ aspect of it.
I’m not saying it as a whole, I also happen to know there are teams that have done excellent work on SEO, especially a fews Indian based companies, their methods were on point. However, the Vietnamese market at the time was very far behind, and I was stunned. 🙁
That wasn’t all. Other SMEs with zero background on neither web design nor marketing, self learnt and asking for the impossibilities, forcing the SEO team committed to achieve the 10% conversion, which wasn’t their responsibilities to blame. Some did agree and failed miserably as the sales process wasn’t theirs to control, why taking the responsibilities to their name. I didn’t quite understand why anyone would agree to that?! Still questionable to me to this very minute.
How the Global SEO experts doing?
Since 2011-2012, a number of Vietnamese companies have tried to expand their work globally. They worked hard to write and post guest blogs, exchange articles between webmasters, link to author names,etc. The number remains very few, mostly just spam. How about the service’s commitments?
When you get committed to keyword rankings, obviously you might as well understand how much of a risk it is. Why not explain to the customers or ask them to pay extra for the commitment instead of quietly agreeing to all the offers? They might misunderstand and ask unacceptably, but why follow their lead, to me it was not entirely their fault.
Even more than the stupid commitment, not only to ranking keywords at incredibly low prices, but also committed to bounce rates, CTR, etc. as a free service. For websites with numerous posts, do you know how much bounce rates discount service might be? 🙂
Sidewalk a bit, I know there are SEO guys committed to the sales volume from SEO, and financial sales. lolz Okay!!! Isn’t it funny when you are an outsider and now in charge of sales? What if the product sucks, you are lucky and get the sales volume up for a month. What about next month? People talk, and the bad reviews will gonna get you. You cannot sell bad products, it’s impossible in this digital age.
You might be able to approach people, but making sales meet, is likely the internal jobs of the product company, not the SEO guys, so WAKE UP people, if you might!
There is no need to commit Sales when you do SEO
Doing SEO helps your clients to attract traffic to their inbound marketing funnels (Attract, Engage, Delight), your customer or their Sales team has to know how to exploit, or they have to pay you extra cash on conversing lead than just pay for the SEO contract itself. Two different jobs, don’t you think?
When will we ever compete with the global SEO friends around the world while getting yourself thinking inside the box instead? I have always looked forward to the day when the Vietnam market will no longer have the ridiculous nonsense customers, the global SEO networks and technology communities will have their respect for us and the Vietnam market.
Let’s all take part and help people to correctly approach SEO in particular and the Digital field in general, unless we don’t want the Vietnam market to be stuck in this awkward phase. Come on guys!