The question of whether SEO be dead in the future is a misleading one.
Further, the answer to the question is always no. As long as there are people searching for things online SEO will be around us. SEO is evolving since the algorithm for search engines has been evolving from the beginning and will evolve in the future too.
Evolution of SEO
SEO has been evolving – with respect to the shifting external influence, SEO gets reshaped constantly.
When SEO started, it’s all about irrelevant and excessive link building, hidden texts, keyword stuffing and more – described as black hat SEO. These methods followed to accumulate great results in a short period. Hence, to eliminate such spammy activities and encourage healthy practices Google is shifting its search engine algorithm as a way to force SEO in a series of fundamental behavior shifts.
Further, enables SEO to coordinate with other established disciplines such as PR, social media and content marketing to answer the user query in an efficient way.
Old School SEO is dead
When people debate that SEO is dead is not meant by the whole SEO concept is dead. It means the old SEO strategists are gone and replaced by new ones. Following the outdated strategists can result in potential penalties and low rankings in the future.
Here we will list some of the old school SEO strategies that are dead.
Link building:
Link building is one of the crucial things to remain in Google’s top-ranking position. There was a time when building as many links as possible to your site can rank you high. This is not the case anymore since Google set the standard in the way that the quality and relevance of the links matters over the quantity.
Keywords:
Keyword optimization is important in your post and page. Instead of stuffing your articles, blogs and headings with certain keywords – it is important to optimize your content for user experience, related queries and readability. Google sets the standard in the way the post with the highest quality answers will rank the top and not the one optimized for a given keyword.
User experience:
Ultimately, Google aims to provide its users with the most valuable and relevant results possible. When your content is optimized for the sake of search engine, now or soon it will go obsolete. Hence put user experience in the first place before optimizing your content. In other words, focusing on search engine over people is considered as one of the old school SEO practices.
First rank:
The goal of SEO is to get the number of 1 organic spots in the rankings, but getting the top spot in the Google search result doesn’t guarantee conversion or sales. Moreover, the results which rank below get more clicks and conversations. Keep that in mind, title tags and meta descriptions influence the click-through rate. Even if you are not in the top spot, an attractive title with meta descriptions can help you get more clicks. Position zero is another problem widely face by the top result of the page. Since there is a box of information that shows up at the top of search results and could overshadow the link.
Exact-match domains:
Another outdated SEO strategy is the exact matching of names with domains crafted around a keyword to earn optimal rankings. Google and other search engines have identified more valuable resources than websites just to match their exact domains. The search engines nowadays follow the latent semantic indexing that improves search results with machine learning. Further, Google also implements harsh penalties for spammy exact match domains site.
The future of SEO is booming
SEO is getting stronger than ever with its frequent updates to meet all user queries in the fastest way with quality results. For digital marketers, building an SEO strategy in these times of rapid change is a real challenge. For promoting and helping those digital marketers we have curated a list of SEO trending ideologies that would help them updated on modern SEO techniques.
Schema markup:
Schema markup is also meant by structured data that plays an important role in creating a potential impact on business results. Implementing schema into the HTML is an absolute must nowadays. There are hundreds of potential schema markup opportunities available, but Google uses only a few numbers of the subset to augment search results. You can mark-up schema by using JSON or with any structured data highlighter tool. Schema markup can help with impressions, clicks and click through rate and thus improve the revenue of your company.
To improve internet search results, Google has introduced an Artificial Intelligence feature that effectively recognizes words and phrases called the rank brain. The rank brain is constantly evolving through Machine learning and to optimize content for the rank brain, you should create hyper-content that is not just fixated on keywords. Since the rank brain is all about semantic searches, not just a lexical search that looks for literal matches of the keyword. The semantic search in turn understood by global search history, user search history, keyword spelling variations and the location of the user.
Voice search:
Regarding voice search, voice assistants have improved a lot since their inspection. The main purpose of voice search is to rectify the complications caused by emerging technologies and to improve user experience. In this journey, Google assistant, Siri and Cortona have become the successful voice assistant. Keep in mind long-tail keywords are the key to success in voice search and also Google prioritizes quick-loading websites. Hence one should provide extra effort to optimize content, image and video of your site.
Technical SEO:
Technical SEO is the practice followed to keep the workload manageable and provide the desired results without much hustle. The process aims to ensure that website meets all the technical requirements such as indexing, rendering, crawling and website architecture. Technical SEO includes SEO techniques such as
- Structured content
- URL structure
- Canonical Tags
- 404 tags
- 301 redirections
- JavaScript
- XML sitemaps
- Site Architecture
Business Listing:
Google My Business (GMB) is one of the best tools available online for business to manage your online presence in Google Search and maps. GMB helps you to view your business information populate in the knowledge panel of your search results. The major advantage of GMB is that it allows the business to list themselves in Google and maps at no cost. Google My business aims to assist the user to gain the maximum from their local search queries like – ‘Gym near me’ or ‘Restaurants near me’. Thus, helping the local business to perform the best with their customers.
Final Thoughts:
The basic truth about the death of SEO is that it does die with all its old strategies and getting constantly reincarnated in different new forms. Consequently, Google is also getting smarter with black hat tactics that are closer to becoming obsolete. Especially, those shortcuts or short-term strategies that try to outsmart Google algorithms won’t work anymore. Besides, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is going to rule the upcoming digital era, hence SEO should also become more intuitive, competitive and natural to keep up with the trend.