Over the years as SEO has gotten more and more complicated, I’ve heard this nasty rumor flying around the digital marketing world: SEO is Dead! Every time I hear someone saying that — especially if they’re presenting at a conference or some other venue or event — I just want to jump up and shout: “No! SEO is NOT dead…it’s just different.”
SEO is NOT Dead. Search Engine Optimization Has Just Changed
The Internet and search engines are really based on the following premise: People have a curiosity and want to know the answer, they come up with a search phrase that they think will help them find out more on Google, they enter that search phrase into Google (or speak to Google directly from Google’s smartphone app) and Google pulls up the best search results they think will answer that person’s question.
Google’s sole purpose is to serve up the best search engine result pages (aka SERPs) — and those search results can only come when someone makes an inquiry. As an SEOer, my goal is to rank my clients for what I think people will be searching for when they try to find my client’s websites. That’s search. That’s SEO.
Granted, when I first got started with SEO back in 1998, Google was a baby so ranking high on the search engines WAS easier. Over the years, Google has gotten more sophisticated with how they define the best search results — one of the many ways is by using latent semantic technology. (That means Google can interpret what they think the person is searching for and pulls up website pages that they think are the best ones to show.)
Now more than ever Google HAS made it more complicated for those SEOers to achieve higher ranking results, but that’s not the end of SEO.
I found a great article on one of my favorite sites, Marketing Profs, that also backs up my statement that SEO is NOT dead. Check it out.