5 reasons SEO is alive and well.

3:08 PM July 18, 2014

For the last few years, a handful of authors and experts have been practically shouting that search engine optimization is dying, if not dead already. It no longer works, they say, isn’t relevant anymore, and actually, poses a threat to your business. Even Mashable – a popular news blog – recently joined in with this article suggesting SEO is coming to the end of its long run.

All of these writers make some wonderful points and observations. The only problem? Their conclusion is all wrong. SEO is not dead, it’s alive and well. In fact, it might be getting even stronger.

To understand why we first have to look at the reasons people are giving for the demise of search engine optimization. In some cases, it’s fair to say that the people who want to throw dirt on SEO’s grave simply aren’t very good at it. It is getting harder, and more competitive, to climb the search rankings. If you aren’t a skilled marketer, and a patient one, it won’t take long for you to conclude that optimization techniques “don’t work.”

Once you look past that crowd, however, there are some very intelligent people involved in the debate. What they usually point to are some indisputable pieces of evidence: that over-optimizing websites for search have made it more difficult for actual users to find useful information, and that Google and the other search engines have started looking for ways to punish (or at least de-emphasize) those websites as a result. In fact, through the magic of semantic search, Google can now match pages to context, meaning exact keyword and link matches aren’t as important as they used to be. Instead, factors like author credibility and social following are being prioritized.

Those are good arguments, but they still don’t suggest that you shouldn’t optimize your site, just that you shouldn’t over-optimize it. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially when there are so many opportunities to take advantage of.

5 Reasons SEO Is Alive and Well

Obviously, I disagree with the notion that SEO is dead, or even that its importance is going to be significantly diminished anytime soon.

Here are five of the biggest reasons why:

1. Search engines are still incredibly important to marketers. Google alone processes more than 2 billion searches each and every day. That means its power to supply you with new customers through organic referrals far outweighs what you can get from email, social media, video marketing, or even pay-per-click advertising.

Why would any company willingly trade away any share of that traffic? It wouldn’t, which is why search optimization is going to continue to be a hot topic for as long as people continue to use search engines.

2. The search engines themselves need SEO. Even with advanced algorithms and traffic flow studies, it’s incredibly difficult for the search engines to sift through a massively exploding Internet to find the relevant, high-quality results their users are looking for. With good SEO, you make your website easier to find, understand, and catalog. That’s not just helpful to you, but also to Google and the other search engines.

If web designers were to suddenly stop paying attention to the details that tell Google what websites are all about, things would be a lot more difficult to manage.

3. Content and links still matter. The importance of content on a website, and to the usefulness of a search engine, should be relatively self-explanatory. Without lots of content, Google doesn’t know what people can find on your site and whether or not it’s relevant to what they’re looking for. Links matter for largely the same reason. They also help clarify topics and themes, while adding credibility to a website at the same time.

The more quality links you have pointing to your site, the easier it is for Google to tell that you’re a trustworthy source of information. There’s no reason to suggest that dynamic will change anytime in the near future.

4. On-page optimization is still a thing. To be fair, things like meta tags and keyword density are far less important than they were just a few years ago. However, if the goal is to make your site as visible to Google as possible – and not to try to game the results with low-quality content – then it’s easy to see why making sure your most important keywords are used, and that your content is as searchable as possible, still has to be a priority.

On-page optimization is now more of a detail than a focus, and the way we’re handling it has to change. But, it’s still necessary to separate yourself in a crowded search market, especially if you have lots of active competitors.

5. Smart marketers will grow and adapt. Really, the argument about the “death” of SEO largely assumes that web designers and their clients can’t, or won’t, make the necessary changes to the way we work. But when has that ever been the case?

With the stakes so high, and the ingredients to a quality website being more clear than ever, you can bet that our industry is going to keep up with a new set of philosophies and best practices.

How to View SEO Going Forward

As someone who makes a living helping people to find new customers over the Internet, I’m not advocating that marketers start burying their heads in the sand and ignoring what’s going on around them. To be sure, search engine optimization is changing.

But, saying that those changes, or even a big evolution in the way SEO is handled, amounts to the “death” of our most important Internet marketing channel is heavy-handed. It suggests that you should turn your attention elsewhere when few things could be further from the truth.

It’s not enough anymore to add keywords to your page titles, throw a few meta-tags into your site, and submit junk articles to build backlinks. Succeeding in SEO these days requires a consistent and nuanced approach to generating content, building a social media following, and even watching your reputation online… to say nothing of managing technical factors like page loading times and navigational structure. In other words, you have to build a better website if you want to catch Google’s attention.

Shouldn’t that be the goal anyway? And, is saying SEO will be harder the same thing as saying we shouldn’t do it? I don’t think so, and I’m betting you’re not either.

So, let me say it again, SEO is not Dead, it is alive and well. The difference now is that we need to work harder, for ourselves and for searchers, to deliver quality along with our marketing messages.

Now that we’re finished with that, if you have a business website and you’re not at the top of page 1 in Google, well, we can help and we have proven case studies to show our work. You can call us directly 800-658-0113 or drop us a request for a quote.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jessemawhinney/