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SEO is Dead

by Micah on November 9th

Yesterday I moderated a panel on SEO and Social Media Marketing at the Thin Air Summit in Denver. Panel went great, the folks on the panel were fantastic. Jeremiah Oywang has a great run down of the panel and the advice given, so I wont rehash it here.

A hour or so after the panel was over, and we were all at a post-conference mixer, I sent out this tweet:

“If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years.” - @micah

Which got a lot more response that I figured, and I was asked to expand on that thought.

Almost as soon as the graphical browser was introduced, people have been trying to make money online. Over the years, online marketing has evolved, with some tactics continuing to have value, and many others falling by the wayside.

Banners - Still work, but the average click through rate on a banner is 0.4%, and there is research to indicate that its possible that 6% of internet users account for 50% of banner clicks. Banners have morphed a bit into rich media advertising, but really are only effective for brand plays (to get marketing touches).

Email - Noise/Signal ratio has destroyed what was once a great communication medium. Does email still work? Sure. Do people spend large parts of their marketing budgets on email? nope. Like banners, email has become relatively ineffective for lead generation or customer acquisition without an extremely targeted (read expensive) list, or a massive (read spam) list.

Which brings us to SEO. To be clear, I am not speaking about Pay-Per-Click marketing, which will probably be an effective medium for marketing for a long time. Its easy, specific, and makes sense. The market sets the price, so as people are priced out of the market, it should self-correct, and settle on pricing that works.

But the act of SEO - adjusting the code and content of a website with the primary purpose to be ranked highly in search results, is on its way out.

There was a time when SEO was seen as magic that only a few knew, but everyone wanted. SEO consultants could charge wild high rates and provide quick and obvious value. As all online marketers became wise to the tactic, more and more designers and developers were being charged with ensuring the SEO efficacy of the sites they were developing. Writers were expected to write for search engines.

Suddenly, everyone was an SEO expert.

Then social media blasted on the scene a couple of years back. People took their SEO tactics, and laid them on top of social media, completely missing the point of social media.

The content generated by users of social media began to rank highly in search engines, because it was RELEVANT. Because it had VALUE. Because it was TIMELY. Because it was REAL.

Suddenly, all the SEO experts also became Social Media Experts, as social media marketing became the hot new thing.

And, being resistent to change, as most industries are, SEOs just removed the word “search engine” from their tactics, and replaced it with “social media.”

With the net result being social networks and user generated content that is full of useless, noisy, crap.

Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers.

Not only is SEO on its way out, (as platforms such as WordPress and other CMS’ integrate SEO principles into their frameworks), we see the glut of SEO consultants now gloaming onto Social Media Marketing in an attempt to not drown.

Here are the truths of todays marketing marketplace:

If you are a company who employs an agency to provide Social Media expertise, fire them. Hire an internal evangelist. Several companies are doing this. Zappos and Ford are two examples that come immediately to mind.

If you are a company who employs an agency to provide Search Engine Marketing expertise, fire them. First, take the principles of search engine optimization (write focused content and use clean code) and have them distributed among the important personnel (development, marketing, sales, etc.). Make SEO organic, integral and integrated into your organization. Dont “do” SEO. Dont make it a separate function. Make tracking it part of your marketing effort.

Second, select a CMS framework (I recommend WordPress–it works great for even non-blogs!), that supports solid SEO principles. With WordPress, install two plugins: All-In-One SEO and XML sitemaps. Thats it for SEO.

If you are a company that thinks that SEO and SMM will be the holy grail to success, please send whatever you are smoking to me. There is only one thing that breeds success, and that is passion. Hire people that are passionate about your product; that can talk about your product with passion. Remember, its not your call as to whether you are passionate or not. Its the people listening.

If you are an SEO or SMM consultant, you have three years. Three years to adapt or be out of work. Learn how to be passionate and breed passion or find another line of work (I hear that Personal Branding is the hot thing).

After all, like Rob Blatt at the Thin Air Summit tweeted “The issue I always have with SEO is that I ALWAYS feel like I’m being told how to lie, cheat and steal my way to optimization.” - @robblatt

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Viewing 81 Comments

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    I'm a little bit confused by these statements:

    1) Then social media blasted on the scene a couple of years back. People took their SEO tactics, and laid them on top of social media, completely missing the point of social media.

    2) The content generated by users of social media began to rank highly in search engines, because it was RELEVANT. Because it had VALUE. Because it was TIMELY. Because it was REAL.

    3) Suddenly, all the SEO experts also became Social Media Experts, as social media marketing became the hot new thing. And, being resistent to change, as most industries are, SEOs just removed the word “search engine” from their tactics, and replaced it with “social media.”

    4) With the net result being social networks and user generated content that is full of useless, noisy, crap.

    Is 2 the "point of social media" mentioned in 1 that the SEO folks missed? As for 4, how did these newly-rebranded Social Media Experts influence the user-generated content? An SEO/SME can tell you to make pretty, RESTful URLs, and how to structure your content, but how can they cause your users to generate crap content?

    Next is this statement: "Second, select a CMS framework (I recommend WordPress), that supports solid SEO principles. With WordPress, install two plugins: All-In-One SEO and XML sitemaps. Thats it for SEO."

    That's probably very sound advice for the folks that are running sites that could be powered by WordPress or another CMS. But what about all of the web applications out there that cannot?

    Thanks, Micah
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    Hey Bill:

    1) If you listen to most SEO professionals that have begun to advocate social media they do it in this manner: "social media is great for links" / "social media is great for fresh content" basically laying SEO principles on social media, rather than treating as a new or different medium.

    2) Social media marketers begin to add to the noise that is generated. Posts on products, tweets about products, etc. It doesnt add to the conversation, rather it detracts from generating passionate users.

    3) RE: wordpress CMS - I agree, many web apps cant be built on WP. My point is more that when looking to build a site that is "seo friendly" (which tends to be more of a content driven site, rather than an application driven site), a CMS tool, like WordPress is a great tool.
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    Ahh, okay, I get it now. Thanks for the clarification.
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    WordPress is way over rated. What if you need to build a job board, or an aptitude test, or an social network, or anything that is even slightly different? Your going to need real applications, and to make those applications SEO friendly you're going to need an SEO.

    Don't think SEO is dead just because cooker cutter applications like WordMess have created a million worthless "me too" web sites. Good luck upgrading your WP after you hack the crap out of it to do anything remotely unique.

    Anything truly unique and valuable will need a talented SEO to extract maximum value from it.

    I think WordPress will be dead in 3 years.
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    Oh yeah. and make sure you read Dave Pasternack's post from 05' about how SEO is dead. It's a great read. Really accurate too. Just like this one's going to be.

    Yes, I know. I've been trolled.
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    Great article.. I am not sure I understand exactly the difference as even with SEO if you have content that is not decent it won't be of much value. And without being able to be seen good content can lay barren... Or am I missing something.
    I just wrote an article and maybe you can email how this as an example would fit with your post? It is on using keywords to get the ad I wanted while writing about making a decent cup of coffeee?
    http://www.ehow.com/how_4591063_fun-ads-writing...
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    Sorry I missed you at the summit. I appreciate what you wrote here and would agree that the best approach to generating other people's interest in your site is to foster genuine, "real", content. I'd also agree that Wordpress moves you a long way towards best practices right out of the box. We've been implementing Wordpress with most of our project this year.
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    Didnt realize you were there Kevin. Ah well, but the great thing about boulder, is a cup of coffee is just a walk away. We should connect soon!
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    I don't think it's just to "foster genuine, 'real', content". I think it's that and fostering genuine real relationships. It's getting out into the world and meeting your community. It's the meeting some at a conference. It's the meeting someone for coffee. Those relationships build community and the kind of relationship with a brand that someone wants to tell their friends about.
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    First: here's the tweet you were looking for, via @robblatt.

    Which actually is a good illustration of the point I'm about to make: "search" is not the challenge anymore. it's easy to get thousands of search results. The challenge is "filter".. finding relevant, quality results.

    Optimizing a website for search engines isn't a bad thing, but it's certainly not the be-all, end-all. When the Internet reached a certain point, people were excited to be able to gather information from multiple sources. Now, however, there has been a return to a need for recommendation. Trust is huge, and hence the power of social media. We want to find quality results, and often recommendations and ratings can help us in our filtering: we don't need to wade through all the sources to find what we need.

    That being said, there are many benefits to optimizing for search and ensuring your content can be found via search engines. I actually come from an accessibility background, and many of the tactics are similar: use clear language, don't hide your content in graphics or multi-media. As you stated in the session, don't be solely focused on algorithms, but at the same time I don't believe it should be excluded. Passion breeds great content, yes, but if it can't be forwarded, it can't be indexed or remixed or shared, it is only going to reach so many..
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    Andrea, Thanks. I corrected it in the post.

    I agree that filtering is a big issue, but thats the job of the search engine itself, rather than the business.

    SEO as a separate profession is dying. SEO should be integrated into an organization and become part of the ethos of the organization. I have also updated the post to match that.
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    I don't know if search engines should be responsible for filtering.. I think that's where the human aspects of recommendation come into play. If I trust your opinions, I can use that information to weigh in on my own decision making.
    I know there are ways to personalize content, and that can be automated to some extent, but it's not an easy task: which is why the amazon.com recommendation engine sometimes frustrates people.

    I apologize, I really skipped over your "bring the work in-house" point. The perils of commenting while in a conference session.. I'll go back and review..
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    Couldn't agree more. In a few years, saying you're an expert in SEO will be the same as saying you're an expert HTML coder. The distinctive advantage will be gone.
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    Great post Micah. I have been thinking this for a while now, getting confused when an organization is looking for an SEO guru. The days of something for not much in the realm of SEO are over. on to the next thing.

    The thing about being an evangelist is that you can't fake it. This feels much more authentic to me and is what has me looking to employ my marketing skills and experience in projects that are in integrity for me.

    People trust it more, word spreads faster, business grows bigger, no one is taken advantage of, the best products rise to the top. Darwinian capitalism at its finest.
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    If you think SEO is dead, you're doing it wrong.

    There will always be certain factors that influence search rankings and there will always be certain sites or people who understand those factors better than the competition. Before Google invented Page Rank, SEO was mostly about on-page factors (title / meta tags, keyword stuffing, etc). With Page Rank, search began to value off-page factors like inbound links. The tactics and techniques change, but there will always be ways to outmaneuver your competitors and increase your relative rankings. For example, if every site in the world was on Wordpress, someone would invent some sort of plugin or tactic that gave them a leg up. It's the nature of competition and innovation. The only SEO's who will die are those who don't evolve with these changes.
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    Joe, thanks for the thoughts. While the title of the post is a bit sensational, the point is that SEO as a profession, as a separate from an organization exists only because people can make more money doing SEO freelance, than if they are part of an organization. When I started doing SEO back in 2003 full time, I made 10x of my salary at ServiceMagic - in 6 months.

    But savvy companies are understanding the importance of SEO and bringing it in house and integrating it into the organization. Because of the influx of "experts," and the move to integrate SEO into the orgnazation, the profession as we know it will end.
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    Hey Micah, I agree that internal product managers and engineers are quickly
    getting up to speed on SEO, but I still think there will be demand for
    expert SEO consultants. If search is a key traffic source for your company
    - say you're a commerce site that receives 50% or more of your traffic from
    search - it still makes sense to pay one or even several consultants to give
    you an edge against the competition. I know of several companies that have
    internal employees with great SEO experience (some even worked for search
    engines before), yet they still bring in outsiders to brainstorm on creative
    SEO strategies, consult on new product development initiatives, and to
    diagnose SEO problems. I don't see that changing, though I do agree that
    many standard, obvious SEO tactics and knowledge will move internal.
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    I dont disagree.

    My feeling is that companies that "get" it will integrate SEO in this
    manner:

    - basic coding SEO practices (robots.txt, friendly urls, xml sitemaps,
    no session ids) will be handled by the developers
    - basic design SEO practices (less flash, no nested tables, more CSS,
    etc.) will be handled by the designers
    - basic SEO writing (keyword selection, density, etc.) will be handled
    by the marketing/pr groups
    - basic SEO benchmarking (ROI, reporting, etc.) will be handled by
    marketing.

    Two questions grow from that:

    1) Does one person "own" the SEO process? I think when done properly,
    everyone owns it, but a person in marketing owns the ROI.
    2) If you are a small organization, what do you do? Again, ensure that
    the right people know the right things.

    If you do designate a single person to manage SEO, his role should be
    primarily one of internal education and external information
    consumption.

    To leave it up to a firm, leaves a company way too open to a lack of
    success.
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    I'm not sure I agree with the statement "Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers." I know plenty of people who still use these tools all the time for communicating with friends and colleagues.

    Maybe what you should have written instead was something like "Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed as a marketing vehicle by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers. Friends and colleagues, though, still get plenty of use out of them for genuine communication."
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    It's absurd to argue that SEO is dead without arguing search engines are dead.

    But I think we can all agree that proclaiming SEO is dead is a great example of SEO in action (link bait).
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