Industry Standards
Most industries have several tiers of formal qualification that are necessary to attain before one can claim that they are professionals in those industries. Doctors have to pass all manner of tests before they are legally qualified to practice medicine. Lawyers have to pass bar exams in every state in which they wish to practice law.
In other industries, the qualifications are not of a legal nature, but are industry-standard. It’s unlikely that anyone lacking a PhD in their specialty will be hired by a university to teach a post-graduate course in that specialty.
In many cases, qualification rests on the nature of one’s education. For instance, a bio-engineering lab is unlikely to hire a liberal arts major because that individual would lack the necessary skills and knowledge to do lab work.
New and Young Industries
There are, however, some industries where anyone can claim to have adequate training, experience and expertise to successfully practice their trade on behalf of others for payment.
These industries, one example of which is SEO, have no formal training. There is no legal SEO qualification one must attain and industry standards are still being decided because of the relative newness of the field.
Formal education is completely lacking–after all, by the time ink dried on the text books, the changing nature of SEO will have already rendered them obsolete.
So how does one claim to be a professional with no possible external qualification? How are business searching for qualified SEOs to decide who is actually qualified and who is selling snake oil? The answer is simple.
The All Important Portfolio
SEO’s only concrete claim to the value of their service is their history of success. There are a few in the industry that have achieved such renown that their expertise is deferred to by most other SEOs, but for the majority of small SEO companies or private practitioners, their portfolio of success is the best way to judge their overall ability to achieve the desired results.
For practical reasons, this makes things much easier for those purchasing SEO services. Clients can judge the SEO firm based on their actual, concrete experience in the industry instead of trusting a third party accredidation party to tell you that they are qualified.
The Formalization of the SEO Industry
The SEO industry is slowly becoming more formalized and structured and there are several organizations such as SEMPO and even Google that offer different SEO certifications. However, none of these are benchmarks of quality the same way a MCAT test is for medicine or the LSAT for law. The true test of quality is still the portfolio and professional history of the SEO firm or individual in question.