Ask anyone responsible for a business website if they’ve used an SEO agency. Then watch the face they pull. It’s a bit like asking someone to bite a lemon. You know what their reaction will be. And so do they.

The reason?

People have done SEO badly for so long. They’ve taken shortcuts, they’ve used quick and easy tactics. They’ve made it look like they’re doing more for your website than you could imagine possible.

They stuffed your homepage full of keywords. It worked for five minutes. They probably gave you a 50-page report about how much instant impact it had. They probably (no, definitely) showed you pie charts and graphs with how far you’ve bumped up Google. You’re on page two! Then a month later you’re not even on Google anymore.

They wrote a blog and it got published on two hundred websites! TWO HUNDRED! It’s hugely damaging to your website, full of duplicate content (which Google hates) and they paid for it to happen without any effort on their part. But, y’know, TWO HUNDRED WEBSITES! That nobody ever looks at. Yay!

Sound familiar?

That’s why I say SEO is dead. Because they’ve killed it. They’ve turned “SEO” into a distrustful phrase. When I say I work for an online marketing agency, people stop me and say “so you work for an SEO agency?” and I say no. Then I say it again. And again.

Online marketing isn’t SEO.

The most overused, overblown and irrelevant promise used by old school SEO agencies is that they’ll increase your traffic. They’ll get thousands and thousands or new people to visit your website. Bank on it. They’ll give you more of those reports to prove it. Look! LOOK AT THE GRAPH WITH THE ARROW GOING UP! Now give us our money and marvel at all your new traffic.

But is more traffic what you want? You’ll probably say “yes, of course it is” and I can’t argue with your logic. But it’s skewed logic. The reason you want more traffic — more visitors, to make it a bit more human — is because that’s what you’ve been told is important.

What do you really want? The likelihood is you want more people to do whatever it is you want them to do on your website. If you run an eCommerce site, you probably want more people to buy your stuff. If your website is a marketing tool, you probably want more people to click the GET IN TOUCH button.

Getting more people to your site isn’t the answer. Getting people to your site who want to find you — even if they don’t know they want to find you — should be the real goal.

That’s where online marketing comes in.

Old school SEO agencies will go after keywords — usually ones you ask them to go after — and do everything they can, however dirty, to improve your ranking for them. But what if that’s not what people are searching for? What if your website, once they get there, isn’t the website they were looking for?

An online marketing agency will look to understand the true goal of your website (increased sales, increased number of marketing leads) and work out how they can help. Of course, a big part of that is taking certain words or phrases and making sure the site ranks well for them on Google…but the key is making sure they’re relevant. Making sure the content on the page is relevant when they click through is even more important. Creating helpful, interesting content and posting it to blogs with a link back to your site? Perfect. Is your GET IN TOUCH button hidden away? Make it more prominent.

The biggest thing? They shouldn’t be charging you a fee for doing it. They should be working out what those sales and leads are worth to you and making sure you’re getting something back. If you spend £500 per month, you’d expect more than £500 back in the long run. Otherwise, what’s the point in doing it. If you opened a shop and thousands of people came into it but then walked straight out again, how long would you wait to change something?

I’ll say it again. SEO is dead — and good riddance to it. But online marketing is alive and well. You just have to make sure you’re talking to the right people.

Elliott works for Miromedia, an online marketing agency based in Warwickshire. Elliott can be found on Twitter or LinkedIn.