Interesting question really, most people would probably say ‘are you joking!’ but the reality is Google is adapting and developing to, ultimately, create more relevant results to the users.
A Brief History of Time.
Ten or so years ago before Google we had meta search engines and directories, both very easy to manipulate in order to help your website appear high in the results. Problem was that there were millions of documents and web pages on the net and these search engines couldn’t deal with relevant results. Along came Google with their ‘pagerank’ algorithm and created a way to categories web pages based on off page factors (links).
The number of Google algorithms has since increased and the level of complexity in the overall rankings results is more and more difficult to manipulate.
So back to the question, is SEO dying – the answer is yes. Google doesn’t want you to ‘buy links’. A method still used by a number of dodgy search agencies that will ultimately backfire on their clients in the next year or two, resulting in the search agency going out of business if they don’t adapt quickly.
The other optimisation techniques involved by search agencies is the on-page optimisation. Now this is very important and does work for uncompetitive search terms but for the competitive terms you have no chance of benefiting purely from on page factors. Also more and more people have an understanding of this, using freely available tools to find traffic driving search terms, so why use an agency to optimise a site for you?
Google is trying to be more about other factors (although they have not quite achieved this just yet). They are looking for useful content, people clicking on a link and staying on the site for a long period of time. Links are still important, but Google is hoping to nail the ‘naturally acquired links not paid links’ type of algorithm. Whether they are close to this I don’t know but with more competition there comes more marketing analyst that are happy to report a competitor for dodgy tactics. If you don’t like that idea? Tough! If you are my client’s, or my competitors and you are cloaking or buying links and it means I will gain out of it, (and i’m not doing anything wrong) then I’ll be the first one to report you. Don’t like it, then don’t do the dodgy tactics! I’m sure more and more ethical agencies and companies will be taking this approach as search becomes more and more difficult to gain naturals positions. Search Engine Journal recently had an interesting post on whether others would consider reporting unethical sites.
So what can SEO do for you today?
Well not a lot really – you can’t buy links, you can optimise the pages but that isn’t particularly effective tactic in a really competitive market. So what else can a ‘search agency do?’
I know the answer is to become a digital agency but that justifies my question in the first place – search marketing is dying. The answer is to have creative and useful content, a well designed and user friendly website, market research (whether through talking to your customers or using social websites to understand what people are saying) and more importantly, getting the content out there. To become the new search marketing agency you need to become an online PR company, a copy writer, a creative, a web designer. You have to be a marketer, not a techie!
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