I’m into blogging & SEO since 2011. This means I’m an SEO guy since the beginning. I’m a huge fan of SEO, I still am. But after over a decade-long involvement in this industry, It’s hard for me to say that SEO is on the verge of extinction.
Here’s why.
What we see on SERPs is highly fabricated in terms of SEO-friendly practices, white hat or black doesn’t matter.
A very small percentage of what shows up at the top is user-friendly. Google, being the largest search engine on the planet is trying extremely hard for the creators to create user-friendly content.
The line between user-friendly & SEO-friendly is fading, it’s a blur now. There’s hardly any difference the algorithm can make between the two.
Everything valuable is going directly to end-users on social media. People who’re building a personal brand, are serving the cream content, the actual user-friendly content directly to their audience on social media.
Social media has people ready to consume content from the creators. Creators just have to find & connect with them.
On search engines, it’s not the case. You have to create content, then wait for it to get indexed by Google, then wait for the data to populate in the Google search console.
Once that happens, you have to optimize for the keywords you didn’t cover in the first place, & continue to do that until you reach the top.
End-users are nowhere to seen in this scenario. Every effort the creator has made is to please the search algorithm & not the end-user. This is exactly what Google & all search engines don’t want.
Search engines want to serve the best results to their users. There are 5.5 billion searches made every single day on Google, 15% of those are totally new.
Now you can imagine how much data & webpages Google is processing every single day. Google, as a search engine isn’t able to achieve its goal in terms of serving the right information.
This exact problem makes Google vulnerable to extinction. Social media is posing a serious threat to Google in terms of user-friendly content.
The problem isn’t the algorithm, the problem is people who treat SEO & algorithm superior over the search intent & users. More than social media, the content creator are a threat to Google.
If anyone from Google is reading this, put efforts to educate people about SEO (I’m doing my bit) SEO isn’t a practice, it’s a remedy for you to instruct & teach the web crawler about your page, nothing else.
So, Is SEO dead, or will die eventually?
Definitely not, Google is a $700+ billion company. It won't’ lose a fight so easily. Google is already making changes to the algorithm (Over 500–600 major/minor per year)
With each of the changes to the algorithm, many sites lose their rankings. The effect is so bad that many sites haven’t been able to recover it whatsoever.
Google is making changes so quickly that the creators have no choice but adapt to their strict norms of performing SEO.
I won’t be surprised if they start addressing SEO as UEO (User-experience optimization). If Google won’t, I’ve started addressing it that way.
So SEO isn’t going anywhere. The algorithm is getting smarter, it can read the end-user’s interactions based on that the algorithm can switch results & show the best one to them.
SEO is the way you discover new users for free & forever. I still have faith in search engines, SEO & the people who do it, need a lot of polishing.
To conclude this answer, I’ll share just a couple of unorthodox best practices for SEO that deal with the mindset for performing SEO.
- SEO isn’t a practice, it’s a remedy to teach the web crawler about your webpage.
- Ranking factors can’t decide which page ranks at the top of the SERPs. It can only indicate the value of the web page.
- Search engines have nothing to do with your content, it’s just a medium. Don’t waste time please the lifeless piece of code. Use that to reach the target audience & help them.
- Use social media to educate people, use the search engine to acquire new audience.
- Text format is the undisputed king of all. No matter what the trend is, the text is evergreen.
I think these many best practices are fine, maybe I’ll share some exclusive best practices in a dedicated question. Make sure you follow so that you don’t miss it.
I hope this helps. I’ll see you around in the next one.