Wal-Mart sister company Sam’s club has teamed with Innuity to bring Search Engine Optimization to the masses. I discovered this disturbing news while reading an article by Scott Buresh of Medium Blue. I am not going to rehash all the gory details, but I do agree with his overall conclusion. What they are offering is a $25 per month service that allows you to input your business data into a simple form that then is submitted to several “local” search engines like Yahoo local, Yellow pages, Google local and some others. So they are not truly competing with a real full blown SEO company.

However shocking as it may seem, it is both good and bad for the industry. Good because it does expose more people to the concept of SEO for their business. That is less advertising you have to do to educate the general public. The bad is that they are not providing the full concept of Site Optimization and Organic Engine Ranking. This may leave a lot of small companies with a misunderstanding of what true SEO can do. Plus what company with a website that generates lots of business traffic wants to trust it to a company who brings them giant mega packs of granola bars and 5lb tubs of peanut butter. I would not.