“Dogfooding” or “eating your own dog food” is a term used in the tech industry to mean “using your own product.” It would be like the staff at Uber using Uber to get to work, or the staff at Yelp (here in San Francisco), using Yelp to find the best restaurants in San Francisco. In the SEO industry, it would be using SEO for your own purposes. People often call me on the phone, for example, and will ask, “Hey, Jason – how do I know you’re any good at SEO?” I’ll often reply, “Well, how did you find me?”
They’ll then say something like, “Well, I Googled San Francisco SEO Expert and you came up #1.”
Photo credit: DaPuglet via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
Long pause. Then I’ll say something like, “Hmmmm… Do you think it’s easy to rank high on the Google search engine results page for ‘SEO consultants San Francisco?'”
Then they’ll say something (usually sheepishly) like, “No, probably not.”
An SEO Expert Should Rank for Something
So there you go. Eating your own dog food as an SEO expert would mean something like using search engine optimization techniques to rank well on relevant search terms. But you’d be surprised at another scenario that I run into. So-called SEO experts, consultants, and/or companies that do NOT rank well for relevant terms. However, I often run across major SEO “experts” including speakers at very famous SEO conferences and/or writers in very famous SEO journals, and then when I check out their websites, I find that they are a) not very well optimized, b) lack inbound links, c) lack positive reviews, and d) hardly rank (if at all) for relevant terms. This is also true for various SEO expert witnesses; they claim to be experts in SEO, and yet they are all but invisible on the Internet.
This leaves me to wonder. I suppose there are two possibilities. Possibility #1 – they are just hucksters, and it’s all a big fraud. Or possibility #2, they don’t implement SEO on their own sites in order to remain “incognito.” Regardless, if you are looking for an SEO consultant not just here in the San Francisco Bay Area but anywhere, be sure to do a little research. Do they rank for any relevant terms of their own?
Have they “eaten their own dog food,” or not?
