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Is SEO a dying art?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mr Demeda
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Is SEO a dying art?

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Mr Demeda

So, someone said to me recently that performing SEO as a full time job in 2015 was a waste of business resources.

Whilst I strongly disagree, it got me thinking... there's more people out there that think the same.

My question to you: Is SEO a dying art? (in a nutshell).

I'm also using UKBF's poll system for the first time, apologies if it's a little off!
 
Rather than being a 'dying art', it just requires more resources than it used to; having a well-optimised site is as important today as it ever was.

With that being said, for some small businesses it might make financial sense to not be a priority, depending on their business model.
 
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I think its all been said before in the other thread, but your question is too linear for me to give you an opinion.
 
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SEO is still as important and relevant today as it was 5 years ago, even 10 years ago.
I think the days of a one medium strategy are long gone. Companies won't simply rely on the organic rankings due to the votality of Google and their algorimthmic updates.
SEO used with PPC and other forms of advertising is important.

On site SEO (basic good web development practice) is arguably even more relevant.
This gets more complex as time goes on based on Google introducing new factors such as page speed etc, and the role of the SEO evolves with knowledge of CRO and UX being a desirable.

Off site SEO still worth it's weight in gold.
 
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Some say SEO, some say Inbound Marketing. Call it what you will but if a site's not being promoted, and that could mean anything from blogging to PPC, it's going to struggle. In my view SEO has moved on and has become credible and mainstream.

d
 
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the poll wasn't granular enough....I've been contrarian - there are so many SEO 'experts' out there that the market is so crowded, that I think it's dying skill to try & win business on!
 
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As a company, who offer SEO services we can see the importance of it a lot of our clients, with many different business models. However, some like to build a website and create presence on a website, which fundamentally offers nothing! Its something which everyones saying you MUST have but as somebody pointed out - it does depend on the business model.
The market is very over crowded and we only offer the service to those whose websites we build for that reason. Keyword research alone tells us if your website is offering a produce or service that 40,000 people are searching for, why wouldn't you want to be ranked highly? Until a new wave of discovering websites (whatever that may be) takes the front foot, SEO will never be a 'dying art'.
 
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If you are an SEO then you wont be working for one client so working for several clients then it is a full-time job.

If you are a business owner you won't have the time to do SEO properly and regularly so would be better off handing that work off to someone who can.
 
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Absolutely not! There are about 200+ ranking factors used to determine how and where to position websites in SERPs (search engine result pages). OF COURSE SEO IS ALIVE – IT HAS JUST EVOLVED!
 
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It's an interesting question, and one I've seen asked many times over the past decade. "SEO is dead!" etc...

My take is that Google is always trying to provide the best and most apt results possible on search. It dislikes any manipulation where sites try and trick its spiders, pandas penguins (and whatever other hairy creatures it sends) into ranking it higher. There's an ongoing battle between Google and SEOs, with Google changing its tune regularly, and SEOs trying to adapt to its new demands. With each update, more and more time/resource is needed to get the same organic ranking - today, things like unique content, multimedia, carefully created niche specific links, videos (etc) are needed to rank a site on top. Most companies do not have the skillsets to do this themselves, so the choice is to either focus on SEM or hire a consultant.

An art? Yes. Dying? No, in my opinion - because, the future is online - and just about every company wants more online visibility.
 
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The only thing that is dying is the name people use. SEO isn't being used as much anymore because of the bad name some companies have given it. It has evolved now and website need promoting because it is often a company's sole method of sales. Online marketing, internet marketing, digital marketing...whatever you want to call it, it will always exist.

SEO as it used to (building numerous links and looking for rankings) is dead yes because that tactic will get your website kicked from Google. The process of marketing your website requires a mixture of PR, content marketing, onsite optimisation and paid search for it to be truly successful.
 
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Google have got better at identifying the difference between poor quality work/content/links/spam and genuine/legitimate/credible sources that improve your domain authority and ranking. Old seo techniques were easy and quick to implement and seo companies enjoyed making money for doing little, nowadays google are looking at quality and legitimate methods and want to return results that contain what the user is looking for rather than someone who has a billion spammy links and content. Ultimately this is a good thing.
 
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I think the best way to put it is that SEO isn't dying, but rather maturing. Tactics are becoming more heavily focused on producing quality content for the voracious public -- and that can only be a good thing for the web as a whole.
 
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Mr Demeda said:
So, someone said to me recently that performing SEO as a full time job in 2015 was a waste of business resources.

Whilst I strongly disagree, it got me thinking... there's more people out there that think the same.

My question to you: Is SEO a dying art? (in a nutshell).

I'm also using UKBF's poll system for the first time, apologies if it's a little off!
Click to expand...

The people who think this are the same people try to do SEO themselves for a couple of days, do it wrong, then blame SEO. They are also the same people who sit around SEO forums sharing theories and listening to rubbish about SEO being dead instead of testing what works.
 
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Site Optimisation, Content Marketing, Niche Guest posts, Funnel articles, Social Media Marketing. It's not dead, it just needs a more inclusive new name. Digital Marketing perhaps?
 
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The key part of SEO is the optimisation AKA making your site the best it can be. In the past a lot of SEO work in reality was more to do with search engine hacks - SEH may have been a better word.

Now you really do need to optimise websites - work on engageability so that people don't just read what you have but follow links and watch videos in their full. Traditional SEO is also still effective, what's getting less effective is cheating but then trying to cheat the system is very short sited. You can't spam your web page all over the place and expect it to rank from inbound links alone. Keyword stuffing has long been dead. Link building isn't as dead as Google would like you to think. Getting a follow link on an authoritative website can cause a huge spike in ranking.
 
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We use a technology and business architecture from an incubator so don't have this issue, but do understand the problems most have. Ranking is difficult and engines try and balance providing quality search results against driving retailers to ppc for revenue. In reality you need both seo and ppc, but organic is only 2% of business online revenue so spending more time/money than that is often a negative return.

An example, we helped a company with business processes where they uploaded 20,000 products on a new site via the incubator architecture and was 35% indexed in a few days with no media. The seo services these days are time based and they just can't keep up with the rapid changes. It's very much in the forefront as it's free traffic, however it's becoming more and more biased to those with the experience and/or those with the architecture (fortunately we have access to both), basically large companies.
 
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Mr Demeda said:
So, someone said to me recently that performing SEO as a full time job in 2015 was a waste of business resources.

Whilst I strongly disagree, it got me thinking... there's more people out there that think the same.

My question to you: Is SEO a dying art? (in a nutshell).

I'm also using UKBF's poll system for the first time, apologies if it's a little off!
Click to expand...
As long as their as search engines and websites. There will always be Search Engine Optimization.

Website to Search Engine to Computer Surfer = SEO.
 
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Can't agree with people who are saying that SEO is becoming more complex, but not dying.

It's becoming more complex because Google are being more skilled at making decisions on who should rank based on signals that we as marketers cannot manipulate.

So SEO is increasingly outside of the control of the marketers, ad increasingly, results are caused by the wisdom of the crowd.
 
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Actually if you look on webpronews Google just announced some massive changes as early as the last part of April. The main one initially is that if your site looks bad on mobile devices your ranking will be diminished. I agree that people could figure that as being more Web Dev based, but most SEO's handle the basic Web Dev portion as well. The most massive change is coming late 15 early 16 in that Google, whom already mentioned this on their youtube channel last year as of testing, will be releasing an update in which how accurate information is from a fact standpoint will out weigh links. This will be major from a SEO standpoint. So there is literally millions of old sites that Google will be forcing to update if they don't want shut out. There is about to be a boom and quickly. Another major factor is that Bing keeps gaining momentum and there is a lot of SEO people whom are focusing more on Bing, we could see this as well. Many SEO people handle their client's Social Media as well, this being said that is not going away soon. Yes Facebook is dead to us now, but there is many other solutions. Linkedin being my choice. Just my two cents.
 
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We really recommend that your website is mobile optimised! Would help immensely with SEO. Hope this helps someone.
 
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SEO is turbulent. FACT.

If you can make PPC Marketing work, that is a great win for your business.

I believe that every business should manage a range of marketing tactics / channels concurrently. Never rely on one. I have spoken to many business owners over the last 3 years who relied on SEO and suffered a significant dent in their business pretty much overnight due to Google algorithm changes!
 
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SEO is becoming more complex and in part this is because of the amount of people getting on the 'band wagon' and more companies existing, and more companies wanting to use SEO services.

This should ensure SEO is expanding rather than dying?
 
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SEO has become a creative art.

People selling their template prints are dying. The Banksy's are thriving.

You must put time and effort into your businesses online presence - not go round building links anywhere and everywhere. Ideally you can put your business in the position where people are doing your 'seo' for you.

So, in answer to the thread - SEO is an art in adolescence
 
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SEO is definitely not dead, it has changed a lot because of Google new conditions and measures. Your SEO strategy must suit Google requirements and it will work. One more thing- do not forget that any site or blog must be visitor friendly, with comfortable architecture and interesting content.
 
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We couldn't say that SEO is dying but just evolving into many other forms or better yet perhaps it’s merging and moulding into the one single form which we call Digital Marketing.
 
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Nothing has changed for me, I am in this business since 2005, of course if someone using BH techniques these days it`s harder in every next update to rank anything that way, and this is something good for those who do it right way. So as long as backlinks are taken by googla as most important rank factor nothing has changed, top quality backlinks sources are essential these days. Of curse content and other on-site factors too, but it`s maybe 10-15% of success, escpecially in tought niches those values may be even lower - backlinks do most of the job, backlinks from high quality relative contextual sources like (PBN`s), worked 10 years ago and working these days like a charm (:
 
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SEO is becoming more important every year.

I used to do SEO around 2 years ago for about 8 clients and its 100% a skill I knew guys saying they could do it but never achieved the results. I had all 8 of my clients on page 1 but your client needs to know the benefits and they need to be commited financially..
 
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