Since the first strategies to position oneself in those primitive search engines began in the mid-90s, pessimistic voices have been raised cyclically crying to heaven that SEO is dead. And again and again they return to their burrows to hide from the sunlight because, apparently, the SEO does not feel like dying yet.
Lately it is a song that is heard again and again. Especially among marketers who believe that SEO standards no longer exist, that everything is very confusing, that it is lazy marketing and that, in their opinion, it simply does not work. Over time they have seen a lot of changes, it has become very difficult, it has been made impossible for them to continue moving up the Google rankings and they no longer believe that SEO is a profitable marketing channel.
But the truth is that they are wrong. As in any other marketing channel, adaptation and evolution is the key. It is simple, it is about assuming that what worked very well for us for years has already stopped working and finding the right ways. SEO is not dying, it is just evolving into something much more complex than it was a few years ago. Here are some reasons that show that SEO is not dead … at least not yet.
SEO has evolved
During the first years of the first decade of this century, a series of strategies worked such as keyword stuffing (placing as many keywords on a page as you could), cloaking (showing the user a version of the content and the Google robot a different version ), the purchase of links en masse (sites that you paid to link to your website and whose authority also did not matter much since the quantity prevailed) and many other strategies that are now considered black-hat SEO and , therefore, severely penalized by Google.
At the time they worked effectively. But Google adapted by toughening its policies. Their goal was to offer the user the best possible search experience. That forced us to develop new strategies focused on improving the user experience, answering their questions, creating websites that load quickly, show a solid site architecture, and more. Ultimately, the SEO work has had to evolve.
SEO requires more work
In the past, if you wanted to increase your organic traffic it was much easier than now. You took your website, you filled it with relevant keywords, you wrapped them in white text, you placed them behind certain pages, you bought a few links … and you practically only had to wait for the results!
But these days, SEO is much more complex. To start with, you have to forget about all those practices. Produce the quality content that your users want to find and create a fast website that loads in seconds. In addition, you should focus not only on the content, but also on technical SEO, think about web architecture, title tags, goals, a coherent page layout, update your sitemap, etc.
And all of this sounds so much more difficult because it is. SEO in 2021 requires much more work than in 2000.
SEO has become more complicated
For Google, content is still king. And content SEO has changed a lot in recent years. An SEO must care about all aspects of a website’s content: providing a responsive page layout with logical headings, proper body content, necessary hyperlinks, interlinking, images, videos, and transitions. The SEO must work hand in hand with the content marketing, design and front-end team, supervising and monitoring all the tasks in the construction of the website.
But if content is king for Google, the user experience is gaining more importance today. And in this aspect, technical SEO is especially relevant. Previously, SEO work in this field was limited to little more than up-to-date XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and HTML. Currently, SEO must work as a team with developers and worry about topics such as JavaScript, CSS, dynamic rendering, new image formats, the largest contentful Paint or the cumulative layout shift.
Over the years, SEO has become increasingly complex, forcing us to adapt and learn about different aspects of web design and development.
Why is it important to invest in SEO
As we have seen previously, the job of SEO is not dead. It has just become more demanding. But the truth is that positioning a page in the Google search engine is really an even harder job.
During 2010, Google made 516 updates to its search algorithm. In 2016 they were 1,653 and in 2018 they increased to 3,234. Of all these updates, Google only reports the three or four big updates to the core algorithm that it usually makes each year. But not even one of these explains its scope.
Let’s look at another piece of information: Approximately 5.6 billion searches are carried out every day. But a lot of content is also generated. There are, more or less, a billion blogs on the web. That means that when we do any search, we will always get a huge amount of results. For example, the keyword “wallpaper”, with a monthly search volume of 74,000 searches, generates a staggering 111 million sites with content on wallpaper. Imagine the effort to place a web page in first position among 111 million pages?
But in SEO we work day by day to overcome these mishaps. It may seem impossible to fight blindly against more than 9 algorithm changes a day or to pretend to rank first for a keyword against 111 million competitors. But the truth is that it is possible. That just goes to show that SEO is more important than ever, just harder than ever. The question is only to change the perspective.
Take for example the success story of Olay. Olay is a brand that sells skin care products. One of their products reduces dark circles. Before, they used to focus all their efforts on advertisements. But they decided to change, focusing on education, offering content that showed people how to reduce their dark circles instead of forcing them to buy their products. By driving users to educational content first and selling through that content, they drove their ROI up dramatically: clicks increased 87%, cost-per-click decreased 30%, and conversions increased 100%.
Let’s now look at some data that Google itself offers to respond to “zero click” complaints. Complaints of “zero click” have been produced lately as a trend that Google is allegedly causing according to which most search results end with no clicks:
- On average, local search results generate more than four billion connections for businesses each month.
- This includes more than two billion website visits, as well as connections such as phone calls, directions, food orders, and reservations.
- Every month, Google Search connects people to more than 120 million businesses that don’t have a website.
- Google sends billions of visits to websites every day, and the traffic that Google sends to the open web has increased 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 opportunities for users to click).
Conclusion
As on previous occasions, SEO is not dead yet and it is in good health. Only it has kept changing. Now it is more difficult, harder and more complex. The results are not so quick or so obvious. But it is still effective.
Do you think SEO is dead? Well, don’t optimize anything. Don’t worry about the quality of the content, nor the loading speed, nor the web architecture, nor the user experience… and wait to see how the competition will eat you up.