The Death of SEO - Is the Game Over?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a lucrative business for many consultants in the past decade but the game is almost finished.

Why?
There is so much competition online today that attracting high search engine rankings for major keywords has become difficult.  SEO is becoming a "big boys" game and many smaller SEO clients can only afford to target increasingly narrow keyword niches.

The “new establishment” will freeze you out.
Companies that today have sites or pages with top organic rankings for popular keywords are making good money from their positions.  Understandably, they will reinvest to maintain those positions to keep attracting traffic. This will keep new players from obtaining top ranked placements for major keywords.  For example, if Toyota figures out how to become #1 for the keyword “minivan”, why would they ever surrender that ranking? They have the resources to deploy to keep it.

Search Engine Algorithms are Getting Too Smart for Your SEO Consultant Games
In years past almost any page with well-placed keywords, meta tags, and links from highly ranked sites could rank highly in search engine results for its chosen keywords.  Today, as niches fill up and search engines get "smarter", it's increasingly required to actually publish worthwhile content to attract top rankings and traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other top search engines.

Organic rankings are already increasingly calculated including "off page" factors that measure not just link backs but quality of content, clicks, and conversions. This means it's becoming increasingly difficult even for professionals to game the system for higher rankings. All the emphasis on creative brain-storming of new keywords is proof that competition is intense and increasingly difficult to beat.

TV had it Right!
In fact, those who own organically top ranked websites may become the new TV networks – renting their valuable Web real estate to advertisers the same way TV sold audience attention blocks in the 20th century. You can see this already with top bloggers essentially renting the ad inventory created by their content to top–paying affiliate programs.

If I'm correct, these trends will combine to:

a) allow the top-ranked sites to perpetuate their hold on top keywords
b) causing search engines like Google to continue improving their ranking algorithms to find and rank the best "real content" instead of the best-optimized sites
c) thereby leveling the technical playing field and reducing the effectiveness of SEO techniques
b) which will put most SEO consultants out of business

What do you think?

Are these trends hurting your SEO yet?  Is SEO going to fade away as a relic of the "first generation" of Internet business? 

What are you going to do for a living once the SEO party ends?

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Comments

[Dwight MIller]

Maybe it should be dead because the real deal for most business isn't necessarily page rank but leads and customers and the expert that helps get leads and customers and conversions may not care as much about SEO and PR.

Dwight Miller
Not an SEO Expert

[Scott Fox]

Very good point, Dwight. Thanks for posting.

Many SEO experts focus just on results rankings when the bottom line for site owners is sales, or at least leads.

Good SEO consulting to improve results ranking should feed into a planned visitor conversion strategy on the site itself.

[David Peters]

Scott,
I have to say that's pretty deflating to read. After spending hundreds of hours learning the finest skills of SEO for it all to be for nothing is more than just a bit of a concern. If the internet is supposed to even the playing field for the small business entrepreneur, am I now to understand that it's business as usual where the big companies control it all and the small guy is squeezed out? What is your recommended plan of action? Should I be concentrating my efforts primarily on SEM (Google Adwords, for instance)instead of SEO? Please let all of us know your thoughts regarding what move we should be looking to make next in the face of this changing environment. Thanks as always for your excellent advice.

[Scott Fox]

Hi David,

Sorry about that - Don't be discouraged! The key words are in the first sentence above: "almost" and "for consultants".

SEO is still going to matter for entrepreneurs and small businesses for at least 2-3 more years until these trends all converge, and longer than that if you have a narrowly targeted niche.

But for SEO consultants who make their living selling services to entrepreneurs like you, I think the gravy train is slowing as outlined above. Competition for "big" keywords and the corporate clients that support SEO consultants is only increasing, while effectiveness of their efforts is declining.

If you're following my advice and pursuing a niche market with good quality content, SEO is still a valuable investment of your time. But in the long run I'm predicting that your quality content will supersede SEO as your primary reason for high search engine rankings and traffic.

So my advice? Do both - invest in SEO now to get traction and then develop your content to maintain and increase your reach in the future.

Does that help?
Thanks for writing.
Scott

[David Peters]

Scott,
Yes, that does help... thank you. I completely agree with you but just needed a little clarification. I do have a couple of web stores getting ready to go "live" in the next couple of weeks that I have worked very long and hard on and am terribly excited about starting, but... I also am positioning myself as an internet marketing expert to help start ups build websites, optimize, help with SEO and run PPC campaigns. I even have my site about ready to launch :) The reason? I absolutely love the field and all the hours that I invest in learning hardly feels like work to me. I really want to make a go at my little small business internet marketing company but I think based on your suggestions maybe I need to change my focus (strategy?) a bit for the internet marketing company side of things? Thank you again and by the way the audio version of IR is EXCELLENT! Never leaves my iPhone. Thank you.

[David Temple]

Scott, we're all dying but how long do we have, that's the question. I've been reading this same type of chicken little stuff for years (at least since 2002) and guess what, seo is still around. I do agree that some of your trends will play out but certainly not that most seo consultants will go out of business.

Yes seo has changed a lot it is not near death, it's changing. Adapt or die is the rallying cry and I can assure you, plenty of the "big boys" haven't even gotten in the game. As far as the little guy only being able to target niche keywords, that's the good news, since those are the words that convert.

I think you have a narrow definition of seo as well since you keep referring to content but what about the technical aspects of seo? I mean you can have all the best content in the world but if you don't make sure you can be crawled and indexed then you won't be found. And no not every webmaster knows how to do that.

Anyway to your questions; Are these trends hurting seo? No way, the industry is still in a growth stage especially globally and in particular in my region.

SEO is dead, long live SEO.

[Ernesto Bent]

Hello Scott,

I do agree with you in that the SEO game is changing. For a small business it is not wise to go after the keywords that the “big boys” are going after (i.e. minivan). It will be a slaughter house! There are many keywords they are not targeting or do not know how to find them.

The internet is changing where one needs to deploy a strategy of both organic and Pay Per Click methods. Without these two things you are looking to fail from the beginning. You must set up your website to target highly niche keywords (the ones the big boys are not thinking of) and expand that site to meet SEO criteria.

Content is King and Linking is Queen. This is really important to websites and being able to be indexed by search engines. The more links (quality of course) that comes back to your site the better you are in the long run. SEO takes time and needs to be done correctly. This needs to be done together with Pay Per Click to get the traffic coming in while you build your SEO position.

That way no matter how small you are you will be able to compete in this ever changing internet world.

I hope this helps a little! :0)

Ernesto Bent

PPCMarketingConsultants.com

[Hindsah]

Nice post Scott!
I would agree to a large extent but would like to disagree about the death part...
SEO and internet marketing change and evolve with time, its all about traffic and conversion.
Instead of the death, I would think it would be an evolution and survival of the fittest.
Fewer but better SEO consultants.
Regards

[Scott Fox]

David, Ernesto and Hindsah,
Thanks for your thoughts.
It sounds like we all agree that the SEO market is changing. The evolution brought by these changes is going to force SEO professionals to adapt if they want to keep up.
Another way to look at the same phenomenon is to expect fragmentation and increased specialization as we go forward. So some SEOs focus only on content optimization, some on technical, others on keyword selection, some on corporate clients and others on small or local business.
Which do you think are the most important trends in this space?
Thanks for stopping by,
Scott

[Top 10 Rank]

Internet is a great promotion toll. Bud you need SEO software AND backlink tools.