At least once a year we hear that SEO is dead. Each time it keeps coming back. This is because it’s never really died in the first place.
Why Reports of SEO’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
People think it’s dead for many different reasons. In 2007 Facebook was launched in a world quite unlike the one we live in today. It was still relatively easy to get listed in the search engines – even without having a social media presence. This all changed when Google’s Panda and Penguin updates inflicted damage on websites that ultimately helped improve search engines as we now know them. Now we must focus on producing great content that meets our visitors’ needs. Initially this is when many people started saying that the search engines were dead, but this wasn’t true. Our relationships with the search engines were merely changing.
Finding ‘Greener’ Pastures
For a while, many marketers chose to use Facebook instead of the search engines for their platform. This is because they’ve highly encouraged businesses to use their brand pages to build a fan base, saying it’s “easier” to ensure your audience sees your brand and your website receives relevant, engaged traffic. Of course, in the beginning you could get 1,000 – 5,000 visitors per 10,000 engaged fans daily by making a few posts, but now Facebook is starting to limit these pages’ organic reach to the point that most pages barely reach 1% of a business’ audience. This is because without paid ads your brand pages are invisible. This is why it’s foolish and irresponsible to completely rely on a single traffic source.
Why you Can’t Rely on a Single Advertising Medium
Marketers who invested heavily and relied primarily on Facebook advertising, as well as those who spent most of their time marketing firearms, cryptocurrency, and bail bonds have learned this the hard way. When the advertising medium makes changes (something that can happen at any time without any warning), you could be left with nothing. However, this is something that doesn’t happen with SEO because it can’t since you’re creating content you’ll always own. Of course, your rankings may fluctuate, but unless you engage in spammy, high-risk tactics, you won’t disappear from the search engines.
Long Live SEO
SEO isn’t dead, nor will it ever die. What it will do is continue to evolve as part of the continuing digital landscape. In doing so, it’ll grow increasingly more complex as things like structured markup, voice search, and artificial intelligence are introduced. This evolution will make this form of advertising even more important than ever. It’ll also help make search engines an even more powerful and reliable marketing channel. This is why it’s worth spending your time and effort to create amazing content today – something that really is no different than the time and effort social media require. Considering how you must create this content either way, you should simply choose to optimize it for the search engines so you can get some valuable organic traffic while you’re at it.
What you Need for Long-Term Success
Your long-term success here depends on you keeping up with search technology’s advances. Failure to keep up, the desire to find a cheap means to success, and trying to find the easy way out will lead you to say that the search engines are dead, but your website and business will soon be dead too. However, there’s still a need for SEO. As such, you may wish to consider hiring Affordable SEO Company. They have many years of experience providing customers with powerful results that have propelled many of them to the top of their niche. This is exactly what you need too so make sure you contact them today.