There are two fundamental things that make this important for SEO Agencies. But before I tell you what those are, just a warning: this doesn’t apply to every SEO company out there. This only works for the ones that do good web design as well. The ones that know online marketing inside and out. Who do research, who read. Who don’t sit back, who never coast (I happily include Loveclients in this category, of course).

Here’s why:

iAd Will Be the Biggest Competitor to Google’s AdWords & AdSense

There are about 85 million iPhone/iPod touch devices out there. By the time iAd launches, you can expect that number (add in iPad numbers too) to be quite a bit higher. None of these devices display Google’s ads properly. AdMob, the company Google is still in the process of purchasing, displays ads in tons of free applications, but these generally remove you from the application and take you into a web browser.

Apple realized a competitive advantage here. Since it controls the iPhone OS, it can create a better opportunity for in-app advertising, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. If it takes off, that’s 40% profits for Apple on every ad buy across the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform.

There is no other competitor to Google operating on this scale — Apple just announced a brand new platform, with new rules and new, as-of-yet-unseen tracking methods, that will eventually (this summer) compete on a major level with Google, albeit entirely in the mobile space.

What does this mean for SEO agencies? Well…

The Good SEO Agencies Will Leverage Their AdWords Skill for Compelling iAds

Advertising is advertising. Apple and Google know this, even though Google changed pretty much the entire game with their platform, and use it to drive nearly all of their earnings.

If your SEO Agency continuously educates itself on AdWords success, takes advantage of the inherent characteristics of the platform (for example, by knowing through experience what ads convert the best), and works hard to do PPC Management right, there’s no reason they won’t do the same with the iAd platform.

But it gets better…

SEO Agencies Who Build Standards-Compliant Websites Are Uniquely Positioned

First, agencies who don’t use flash are already at an advantage — we already work with standards because that’s what gets SEO results. It also happens to make good, accessible, future-proof, properly-degrading websites, too. Everyone wins.

But here’s the new development: Apple’s iAd platform is entirely HTML5-based. It is built on these standards. If your development team already knows how to build on these same standards, they already know how to make an iAd. OK, but hang on — anyone can make an HTML5 document these days. What makes a good SEO Agency any different? Well:

Combine that skill with advertising acumen. Now you’ve got the ultimate machine:

• an SEO/PPC Management company who knows online advertising.
• a company that can also build standards-based sites.
• an agency that knows how to learn an evolving ad platform.
• a company that knows how to market online.

It’s an all-in-one solution. If you’re looking for an internet marketing company that’s going to keep you on the cutting edge of the online ad market but makes sure you have a strong, solid foundation, that’s the kind of SEO Agency you need to find. (ahem)

This Will Change Our Industry

This is the “a-ha” moment for mobile ads. Apple controls the OS and a huge share of the smartphone market. Google controls another big chunk, and will no doubt transform AdMob into a competing platform with full AdWords integration across their devices.

Good agencies will be ready for all of this, because we’ve been getting ready for it from day 1, by following best practices and doing things right. Apple’s new platform and its standards-based foundation is a great validation for the way companies like Loveclients do business.

First: There’s No Flash.

Theoretically, flash could show up on the iPad in the future, but as we pointed out in our article on why we don’t develop in flash, we’re not betting on it. The source code isn’t very well-optimized for mobile smartphones, and Apple is already taking a practical/political stance on the plugin that suggests they’re going to heavily push HTML5 instead.

How does this affect us? Well, for one thing, flash remains 100% non-searchable. If you embed your content in flash, you not only cannot be properly indexed by Google, but you’re increasingly going to miss out on a ton of mobile traffic coming your way, and now on future search traffic from the iPad. If you build a fall-back site for iPhone/iPad/non-flash users, great, but that’s double the development costs and time, and requires you to update across two platforms. While Flash is plenty useful for some things, the fact that it’s not on the iPad is an important harbinger for where search and internet marketing are going in the future.

Second: It’s a New Paradigm.

While everyone was busy complaining that the iPad was “nothing but a large iPod touch”, some key writers online (especially Steven Frank) realized that inherent in that very statement is an entirely new way to think about how we use computers.

We’ve been using what are essentially “swiss army knives” for the last 20 years, and for a huge number of users, that level of functionality is absolutely, completely unnecessary. At the same time that this concept opens up the computer where it doesn’t really need to be open, it also makes computers incredibly complex and annoying for people like our collective grandmothers.

That’s a good metaphor for us — we often re-write clients’ copy in order to cater to a metaphorical grandmother, not because we’re trying to “dumb anything down,” but rather because it means you’re explaining your product in simple but honest, respectful language.

If the iPad becomes that one magical computing device that finally gets the grandmothers of the world onto the internet in greater numbers than they already are — and I already know it is the first and only computer (besides the iPhone) I have ever considered trying to get my own grandmother to use — that will be a massive, massive flow of new users streaming onto the internet.

They are going to be searching for things, and they are going to be buying things, and they will be doing so from their iPads and future iterations of the device. If it is a success, it will bring a mass of people online who are just not going to make the effort otherwise.

Three: It Will Probably Change the Advertising Game.

Both Google and Apple are pushing mobile advertising, and the iPad, for all that’s been written of it existing in the ‘netbook’ class of computers, is likely to be considered more of a mobile device than anything short of the iPhone itself. Hell, it runs the iPhone OS, after all.

That means those same ads that are quietly showing up in various apps right now, in what remains a small-but-about-to-massively-explode market? A huge part of that market will be taken up by iPad clicks.

Personally, I’ve never once clicked on an AdMob ad, mainly because I didn’t want to bust out of my app and see some ad — it just doesn’t seem natural. But if the iPad eventually introduces some sort of rudimentary form of multitasking, or the advertising models take advantage of its new “Popover” UI element, then I’ll probably be singing a different tune.

That means in a few short months, we could be optimizing your AdWords campaigns to be showing up inside the latest and most popular iPad app, where a customized landing page with a format that none of us have even thought of yet will be showing up.

It’ll be an exciting time, and we’ll be there for it.