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One of the 101 things when building a website that aimed to convert visitors into revenue used to be SEO (Search Engine Optimization). With the rise of Social Media SEO had been declared dead because now everything was “viral” and your service would be recommended by your visitors to their friends which was far more effective than converting traffic coming from search result.

I think, we can state by now that this was, once again, an assumption on what might happen based on some early numbers when everything around Social Media was fresh, shiny and new. But probably the truth is a bit different though, at least in our industry.

Hence, let’s start at the beginning. What are you going to do most likely when looking for a language course? Right, you search for it. The chances that someone in your social graph is learning the same language as you would like to and then taking this further, the chances that this person shares it with his/her network are rather small.

As a next step, it is likely that you then go to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc and type in “learn German” or something similar. Google, or any other search engine, will deliver you more or less relevant results, you choose an organic result or a paid link and off you go.

Now, I am far away from being an expert on this matter but I know that the problem with SEO is that it takes time and skills to do it right. And doing it right in the case of search engines means that your product is listed on the first page as the vast majority of users don’t look at the second page, most of them don’t even click the third or fourth link on the list.

I am also far from being an expert in online marketing but some general rules are that you want free traffic, hence traffic through so called organic search results as these results are generally seen as more relevant and credible than paid ads.

Once again, SEO is a very complex and also complicated thing. Doing it right costs time and if you are not doing it inside your startup it will cost you money to hire SEO experts who do this job for you. And from my perspective none of the platforms or learning communities gave a dead rat’s behind on SEO. And I think, I can even prove it.

In April 2008 Kay Alexander built the website for my free Deutsch Happen video series on YouTube. The website www.deutschhappen.com did basically nothing more than serving as a hub for the YouTube videos making it possible for us to display Google Adsense ads around them and therefore monetize on the videos. We learned a bit about SEO basics, searched for keywords, optimized the site for some relevant search terms and then left it as you can see it today.

Today, more than two years later I can show you something really interesting. If you type in the search term “learn german online” you will find my Deutsch Happen website on the second page of Google. Not brilliant but still it brings me a constant stream of visitors and about 2 to 3 requests for online German lessons per month converting through the banner on the top which leads to my German teaching website.

Far more interesting than my own search result for this post is though that NONE of the big players on the market like Livemocha, Busuu, Babbel, Myngle, eduFire, … outrank me for this search term even though they all have a higher page rank than me and “learn german online” is not even my main keyword or a part of the domain name. Livemocha for example comes in on page 3, about 7 results behind me and all the other are basically not there at all, meaning behind page three.

If I spent some time on working on backlinks and some SEO I could rank on page 1 of Google for “learn german online” which is an exact description of not only my service but also the services of the companies mentioned above with the big difference that I am a “one girl show” and they are “real businesses”. I think, this is something to wrap your head around. The services that aim to offer you the possibility to “learn [insert language here] online” are not visible in the search results and I think this is a huge missed opportunity for them. On the other hand a big opportunity for independent educators .

But let’s take this a step further: it is exactly what the teachers expect from the platforms they are supposed to pay commission for. I won’t criticize a service that attracted more than six million users like Livemocha, of course, they must have done something right along the way . And for them, similar to Busuu and Babbel it “just” has an effect on their own revenue. But as Darien said in the comments about the seven reasons why online education might never take off: teachers don’t want to do marketing. Of course not, that is what the platform should take care of and this includes to rank for relevant keywords on the search engines in order to get traffic on the page and hence to attract students for their teachers. Pumping money into paid search is not the only solution and again, organic search results are far more interesting from an economical as well as from a psychological stand point.

And please don’t tell me they could not do better than Kay & I!

With this in mind: If we now took a look at TeachStreet you might understand why I am such a big fan of this service. They do exactly what the platforms fail at, taking SEO for educators to a level of perfection. Search for “learn german seattle” and take a look who is ranked on the number one page. Over time they will most likely rank at one of the top three spots. The same is true for emagister and School of Everything.

Therefore: SEO is not dead! You just did not care about it enough because it was not fancy anymore. There is actually a great quote from Gary Vaynerchuk on last year’s LeWeb. When asked by Loic “Why do you still publish a book?” he answered:”Why? Because people read books.”

The same is true for SEO. Why SEO? Because people use search engines. They are still the number one place to go if one is looking for a course or teacher.