I can understand believing that in the abstract, but that's why I provided an example. I guarantee you that I can objectively measure if someone is a dentist, and if so, the city that they practice in.
Sure, I don't doubt that. But what is the benefit of having said dentist spend extra money trying to 'optimize' the search engine?
Here's a hypothetical.
There is a town called Foo with two twin dentists, Bar and Baz, who provide identical services. They both get ~50% of Foo's clientele.
One day, Bar decides to hire a firm to SEO-market for him. He suddenly gets 75% of Foo's clientele, while Baz drops down to 25%. In order to counter this, Baz now hires the same firm. Now both Bar and Baz are back to splitting Foo's clientele. But they are also losing some chunk of money to SEO marketers in a rat-race against each other.
Who benefits from this? I think in your example you suggest that you as a consumer benefit from this -- why / how?
Sorry for the delay, part of the benefit of SEO to the consumer is that you optimize your website by improving performance and filling your website with information. Provided we're not talking SEO spam (inaccurate information) then an optimized website is more likely to answer the questions I'm querying for. Before, I (maybe) knew Bar and Baz were dentists in Foo. Now, I have the ability to actually compare the differences based on the specific queries they optimize for. Maybe one is open later than the other, or offers a procedure I'll need, or takes different insurance.
