Adaptation is the key to success with any marketing channel. What worked well years ago probably doesn’t work as well, if at all, for various avenues like email, social media, SEM, branding, and of course SEO.
There are many misconceptions about search engine optimization, and perhaps the biggest of them all is that SEO is dying. Don’t be fooled: SEO is not dying, but it is evolving into much more than it has been for years. If you’ve been debating whether or not you should invest in SEO for your business, read on to find out why SEO isn’t dying, it’s actually thriving.
SEO is dead, said the naysayers
As much as it pains me to say it, there are many marketers who believe that SEO is dead. Whether it was because it was too difficult, too much changed, or they just couldn’t climb the ranks of Google, they no longer believe that SEO is a profitable marketing channel. Ben Hirons of SmartCompany he thinks SEO is dead because he thinks it’s confusing, there are no standards, it’s lazy marketing, and it just doesn’t work.
Those reading this are not the only ones hearing these myths. A Search Engine Journal poll on Twitter – from 2017 – showed that the most common SEO myth marketers heard is that SEO is dead (41 percent). Four years later, this issue is still being debated, which tells you all you need to know about whether the claim was true at the time. More recently, SEO Book has shared an infographic with several marketers claiming that SEO is dead for one reason or another and why they are wrong. The Middle Well claims that local SEO is dead, in favor of integrated regional positioning (which sounds a lot like SEO, if you ask me). Finally, if you Google “SEO is dead”, millions of results will appear.
It is clear that there is no shortage of both professionals and hackers who claim that SEO is dead. Fortunately, we have the data and the experience to prove that SEO is not dead, but flourishing.
Why SEO is not dead
Let’s go to reality. SEO is not dead and it is not going away anytime soon, if ever. SEO will continue to evolve and SEOs, along with their businesses that depend on it, will have to adapt as well. Here’s why.
4 Reasons Why SEO Is Not Dead
SEO is changing. SEO requires more effort. SEO is more complicated. SEO jobs and salaries are on the rise.
Many people are afraid of change, including me. After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Well, the old way of doing SEO was broken. Perhaps no later than 2005, websites could get away with black hat SEO tactics. These Googlebot-centric scam tasks never considered the user and only tried to game the system. These black hat tactics included keyword stuffing (stuffing as many keywords into the page as possible), obfuscation (showing Googlebot one version of the content and the user another), buying links (paying sites to link you) and more. , far more.
In the early 2000s, all of these tactics worked. Fortunately, Google adapted, tightening its standards. Not only will this no longer help you generate more organic traffic, they could result in a Google penalty, which will significantly reduce your traffic until everything is fixed.
Today, instead of gaming the system with black hat techniques, white hat tactics such as providing the best user experience, answering user questions, building a fast website, and providing a solid site architecture are not they are just the main SEO trends, but the fastest way to succeed in SEO.
SEO is not easy. Those black hat tactics I described earlier were easy. Sites could literally write hundreds of relevant keywords, wrap them in white text, and place them behind certain pages. Voila: keyword stuffing and cloaking at its best. The SEO traffic would surely follow.
Not anymore. Today, you need to produce quality content that your audience actually wants to read, from start to finish. You need to create a fast site that loads in less than three seconds. You need to focus on content and technical SEO, write good title and meta tags, design a cohesive page layout, update your XML sitemaps, make sure Google can render your content, and more.
If the latter sounds more difficult, that’s because it is. SEO takes a lot more work today than it did back in 2000. If you’re not prepared to get in the weeds and really provide the best possible experience for your users and Googlebot, SEO won’t work for you.
Whether you started out in content or technical SEO, it’s likely that SEO work has gotten a lot more complicated than when you first entered the game. What worked before often doesn’t work today. To be successful in content SEO, you need to provide a reasonable page layout with logical headers, body content, hyperlinks, images, videos, and transitions. Those without a writing background or dedicated content teams may find this difficult.
On the technical side, SEO used to be about updated XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and HTML. Today, Teamwork, Site Architecture, Client-Side Rendering, JavaScript, Dynamic Rendering, Prerendering, Larger Content Painting, First Entry Delay, and Layout Change Cumulatively these are all topics that SEO needs to understand.
Whether you climbed the content or technical ranks, chances are you’ve had to learn some new aspects of the modern web that seem confusing at first. Through education and real-world practice, the most successful SEOs learn to master these once-confusing strategies and implement them as intended.
If SEO is dead, why are there more companies hiring SEOs and paying higher salaries? Well, because SEO isn’t actually dead.
According to the director 2020 guide to labor trends and salariesSEO jobs nearly doubled in 2019 year-over-year and rose 8 percent in 2020. While 8 percent doesn’t sound like much, content marketing jobs declined 38 percent in 2020. These figures show a growing interest in SEO, but also show that more companies are incorporating SEO in-house.
In terms of compensation, the average SEO salary increased 8 percent from 2019 ($68,150 to $73,167). Salaries for SEO specialists, analysts, and managers increased from 2019 to 2020. Also, the median salary for a SEO director, tracked for the first time in 2020 by Conductor, was $117,100.
Many industries and professions saw declines in 2020 due to COVID-19, but SEO careers continue to excel, despite naysayers claiming it’s dead.
Why you should invest in SEO
Taking into account the above trends, the return on investment for those who do SEO well, and the following statistics Google announced in 2021, continuing to invest is a no-brainer:
On average, local Search results generate more than four billion business connections each month.
This includes more than two billion website visits, as well as connections such as phone calls, directions, ordering food and making reservations.
Every month, Google Search connects people to more than 120 million businesses that don’t have a website.
Google sends billions of hits to websites every day, and the traffic Google sends to the open web has grown every year since Google Search was created.
Google’s search results page, which used to show 10 blue links, now shows an average of 26 website links on a single mobile search results page (more opportunity for users to click).
Change is scary, but those who pivot and adapt reap the rewards the dinosaurs miss. And remember, despite all the changes we see at Google every year, SEO boils down to one basic principle: helping Google answer user queries. How you do that is up to you, but as long as you give your audience the answers they want when they want them and how they want them, you’ll be successful in SEO.
