We’ve all had one of those business cards given to us at an industry or networking event. Handed over with a flourish that belies the Microsoft Paint-inspired disaster which now rests in your palm. Glancing down, you discover that the swaggering figure who handed it over believes themselves to be an “SEO Ninja”.

Not that this kind of self-aggrandising nonsense stops there.

People can also be an SEO…

•  Maven
•  Rockstar
•  Wizard
•  Guru
•  Hacker
•  Samurai

To be honest, I’d probably have more respect for an SEO Samurai than for an SEO Ninja. I think I’d have more faith in somebody’s ability to deliver if they were offering to commit harakiri in the event of your site dropping in the rankings.

The thing is, if you’re going to go around calling yourself any of these names, you have to really know what you’re talking about – right?

Wrong.

If there’s one thing you’d expect someone blowing their own SEO trumpet to know about, it’s search volumes. So if you’re going to call yourself something, shouldn’t you be calling yourself something that people are actually searching for?

Yet here are the monthly global searches for those terms:

Let’s put those numbers into some context. Less people are crying out for an SEO Ninja than are crying out for:

And in case you don’t remember who Ali Dia is… http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2008/nov/22/southampton-championship

What does all this tell us? Well, to make an extremely unscientific but life-affirming leap, it tells us that you may better off branding yourself as “Matt Cutts’s cousin” than as an SEO Ninja.

At Ambergreen, we don’t refer to ourselves by any of these ridiculous titles.

But if we really had to choose?

Well, in that case, call us SEO Spartans.