When Carol Krol of BtoB Magazine interviewed me the other day for a story on how search marketing is becoming its own specialty, it rang true to me. Carol’s premise, supported by several interviews in her article, is that search marketing started as a sideline for most of us, on top of our other work, but now many are full-time search marketers. I am definitely seeing this trend, but I think it is just the beginning.
As search marketing matures as a profession, I expect you’ll see even greater specialization. After all, how often do you find someone facile enough with language to write good searchable copy, but also be fluent enough with numbers to analyze Web metrics? Not very often.
So why do we expect that we’ll find someone like that to be our “jack-of-all trades” search marketer? In truth, we expect this because we can only afford one person for the job—we’re actually thrilled that it is anyone’s full-time job, as Carol points out. But as search marketing becomes more and more important, you’ll increasingly find two- or three-person teams within companies. When that happens, expect them to be specialized. You might get a words person and a numbers person. Or a tech type and a marketing type. Or an organic specialist and a paid search expert.
Regardless, not only is search marketing its own full-fledged specialty today, but it will become even more fragmented in the future. Don’t be surprised if you fast forward a few years and find that today’s search marketing specialist has been replaced by even more specialized personnel. So, would you prefer to be a keyword analyst or a spider specialist? Someday you might get to choose.
