Last year in a BBC interview, Stephen Hawking warned that artifical intelligence could result in the end of the human race. This was largely due to the generations that it takes for humans to evolve compared with the speed of computers. Whilst it does not take generations for SEOs to evolve and Google is not necessarily Skynet - I hope that the analogy makes sense. The rate of increasing complexity and understanding of search behaviour at Google over the last 5-7 years has left many SEOs scrambling to catch up. Nor does Google appear to be abating in its advancement. Dare I utter one of the most overused phrases “Is SEO dead”?
Pure play SEO companies will suffer most
Hopefully many of these companies will have already spotted this issue and made the necessary adjustments, if not, have a read of Rand Fishkin’s presentation to 500 startups.
SEO as a stand alone product of keywords, title tags and link building is certainly dead and has been for quite some time now. In fact, SEO is not the only marketing facet that now struggles to operate as a stand alone product. SEO content needs social media to fuel exposure, social media can capitalise on PR, good PR should be intrinsically linked to driving traffic to the website. You get the point. Google now takes into account more than just keywords, and whilst in certain very niche areas you may get away with old school tactics, these areas are becoming harder to find and less profitable for clients. Effective search marketing requires knowledge in multiple facets of marketing, or at least open communication with teams from other marketing facets so that resources can be attributed and shared accordingly.
So what do I actually mean? Let us take content marketing as an example. It is all well and good having a fantastically written and genuinely interesting article sitting on your website waiting for the odd visitor to navigate your tricky menu structure to read it. Pushing it out through social channels, using it as a PR case study for credibility in order to get an interview and subsequently pushing that through social will produce results that will positively affect your SEO. It may even persuade you to revisit the UI (User Interface) of your site to increase your conversion rate. Engagement will be higher (so user and usage data will improve), you may ‘earn’ links (and deep links) through this increased exposure of your article, the interview that you do may result in increased social following which in turn will fuel the aforementioned engagement, etc, etc. The issue is that after many proposals from SEO agencies this does not seem to be part of the plan, which is worrying.
Can we keep up?
Yes we can. SEOs may have been previously operating under the pseudonym of ‘digital marketers’ to avoid the stigma associated with black hat SEOs. However, this is what we have (and must) become. We should be adapting our marketing methods, including SEO, according to how the public are utilising the internet rather than looking for the simplest way to try and manipulate Google. Whilst we cannot guarantee how Google will evolve, the public’s use of the internet is a pretty sure solid base to start from.
Google take notice of how their traffic searches for content and adapts accordingly, and so should SEOs. We should be targeting all the aspects of our digital lives, even if it is constantly becoming more and more complex. After all, the one guarantee is that Google’s search algorithm will not get any simpler...
By Simon Ensor, Managing Director at Yellowball.
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