So while I was busy lining up topics to cope with the long absence of blog posts and coming up with both offline and online marketing strategies for client sites, I stumbled on a blog post by Tom Gara, Is SEO our Friend? Enemy? Frenemy? Well it really got my attention when he said:

SEO is the bad guy here. It is the reason that you can rarely find what you want on “commercial” google searches.

What you really want when you type “computer stores in Dubai” is to find a great blog post or newspaper article, written by somebody who knows and cares, listing the city’s best computer stores. Sure, someone like CompuMe or Jumbo Electronics could spend more money on getting to the front page, but then, so can anyone, including some random page of googlebait whose entire business model is to get clicks from google searches and surround useless information with ads. “

Google rocks when it comes to factual information (finding a company website or wikipedia entry or whatever), but type in “boutique hotel in Hong Kong” or “cheapest flights from Dubai to London” and you will get page after page of spam – spam that has been well optimised to make it to the front page of google search results.

Of course, I had to leave a comment to somehow defend my profession but I felt like that wasn’t enough. So here’s my take on Tom’s article.

Well actually I won’t have to defend the industry as it is. Is I’ve mentioned in my comment, I don’t blame Tom for his reaction. Posers and cheaters have plagued the industry and have given clients and would be customers all the reasons to avoid genuine online professionals from doing their jobs. But that’s not entirely my point.

Since I came here to Dubai, I did some research on my own and found out major companies and SME’s don’t have that much needed online presence not only in search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) but also in other strategic places. I thought I had the only observation but I guess Flip Media CEO, Yousef Tuqan, feels the same way in his statement with AdNation on “The Web is a Joke”. Yousef states:

Most companies still don’t give the web the respect it deserves. If you look at a lot of the biggest banks out here, the biggest retail groups, the web is a joke. They spend so much money building these terrific brands offline, in retail environments, in advertising, they spend literally millions building those brands – then they fall down in the one place where their customers are

Reality is the lack of online presence for major businesses here in Dubai and for the rest of UAE (or maybe some parts in UAE) is evident, too obvious for us to ignore. Is it the only viable strategy? No, but it’s the ninja tactic you’ve always ignored and now is the great time to employ such strategies.

Thanks to Tom and Yousef for throwing this fact out into the open. I personally hope another headline would hit the papers and somehow greet the management a very good morning for today is a great day for SEO in Dubai, UAE.

What do you think folks? Do businesses here in Dubai or UAE need to invest more in online media in their advertising/marketing strategies? Let me know your thoughts.

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