How SEO Is Surviving The Death Rumors

Read Time: 4 minutes

Some people believe that SEO is dying, when in fact it’s rather changing and evolving rapidly. SEO encompasses many more techniques than just including links and keywords. SEO has become a holistic approach and outdated SEO strategies will not be as effective as they once were. SEO is evolving fast and stats show us that it’s expected to keep on growing into the future. Let’s have a look at how SEO is growing and what techniques and strategies can be used to garner this growth. Here’s how you can build a sustainable, yet ever evolving SEO strategy.

How Is SEO Growing

Let’s have a look at some statistics that debunk the myth that SEO if dying. According to Internet Live Stats, Google receives over 63,000 searches every second on any given day.

• Around half of all search queries are now four words or longer
• According to Junto.com, 81% of people perform some kind of online research before making a large purchase
• According to Marketingdive.com, 82% of marketers have reported the effectiveness of SEO
• 42% of marketers state that SEO‘s effectiveness is increasing significantly

These are just a few of the convincing stats that are evidence to the fact that SEO is here to stay.

Techniques That No Longer Work

SEO death rumors resound the loudest when outdated strategies and techniques are used. Let’s take a look at some techniques that are simply no longer relevant in SEO.

• Keyword rich content isn’t as crucial as it used to be. Exact keyword matches aren’t required anymore as Google uses newer technology known as latent semantic indexing. With this form of indexing, the search engine searches through the entire page searching for the most common words and phrases that could be identified as keywords.

• More backlinks won’t rank your page higher. Backlinks, or hyperlinks, that link from another webpage, back to your own webpage are still important in SEO. But how you acquire your backlinks is important. Buying backlinks can tarnish your reputation with Google. Make sure you stay away from Spam backlinks as these will make it looks like you’re trying to manipulate your rankings. Quality trumps quantity when it comes to backlinks. 

• Stuffing your title with keywords won’t necessarily improve your ranking. Although it used to be fairly successful before search engines wised up to this practice. Websites are now often penalized by Google for keyword stuffing according to Googles Webmaster Guidelines.

Search Industry Trends

There are a lot of new trends taking the stage in SEO. Voice search is a big trend in SEO and is growing fast in its popularity. According to Forbes, By 2020, the experts believe that 50% of all searches will be voice searches. This requires a different optimization strategy. People are beginning to realise how easy it is to access information using voice search. It’s often more convenient and faster than typing into a search engine. Most voice search entries are questions and so a good SEO strategy is to include content that’s answers specific questions which people are asking. Voice Search is a sustainable SEO trend as voice searches are on the rise amongst a wide range of age groups.

Mobile first indexing is another developing trend. In a nutshell, this means that Google uses the mobile version of your webpage for indexing and ranking. This means that mobile webpages will take center stage for ranking and therefore mobile-friendliness and adaptation is vitally important. The use of mobile devices in also constantly on the increase and this trend is here to stay.

Page speed is another trend to be aware of. Webpage loading time is becoming an increasingly important factor when it comes to ranking a page. Speed metrics are taken from a performance database that reflects how your site loads for each visitor. As more information is becoming available daily online, users will continually desire and favour faster loading webpages.

Another trend is the rise of different search engine players apart from Google. Amazon for example, is fast becoming the ‘Google’ of e-commerce. If you sell books, music, electronics, or anything that would sell on Amazon for instance, you need to make use of optimization. This optimization will need to take place on the Amazon page where your products appear, as Amazon only recognizes its own pages.

Video SEO is another emerging trend to keep an eye on. YouTube has now become the world’s second largest search engine with over three billion searches actioned each month. Video not only catches the attention of the viewers but is also very shareable. It’s worth creating and optimizing video content for YouTube as you will be ranked considerably higher when you follow certain criteria. Online video consumption is on the rise which makes video SEO sustainable.

How To Build A Successful SEO Strategy

A successful strategy requires a good understanding of the company, as well as the audience. It’s important to know what strengths you can use to your advantage in order to get the best results. This includes identifying a product or service’s unique selling proposition, understanding the company’s vision, as well as what the company’s weaknesses are. In terms of the audience, it’s valuable to know where their level of knowledge is at when it comes to understanding the product or service that is on offer. Understanding how they respond to marketing will also help you to make sure you have the correct approach to your SEO.

At Connectica LLC we offer a free local SEO report. This will give you immediate information on how your SEO strategy and webpage is performing. This will give you helpful insight as to how you can improve your SEO strategy. As you can see, SEO is very much alive and growing rapidly. Ultimately, building a strategy is about adapting and evolving your SEO approach continuously to remain relevant.