There’s no future in SEO

This state­ment may come as a sur­prise to some of you, as I hap­pen to do a lot of SEO.  And I do truly believe in its impor­tance and power in the online mar­ket­ing mix.  But I do not believe in its future.

Why?

Because when you get down to it — SEO is not very dif­fi­cult, and the pro­fes­sion has quite a bit stacked against it.

For one, SEO friendly devel­op­ment plat­forms are now very com­mon.  Dru­pal, Word­Press and Joomla all get you started with an SEO friendly frame­work, all with­out any cus­tom cod­ing.  Typ­i­cally, this takes the need to opti­mize code (one of the most tech­ni­cal aspects of SEO) right out of the picture.

Sec­ondly, the gen­eral pub­lic has become much, much smarter about how the web works, and more impor­tantly, how search engines work. Plus, there are many great SEO resources online, which give you all the infor­ma­tion you need to learn SEO — and most are com­pletely free! SEO does take quite a bit of time to learn, how­ever.  But if you’re some­what com­puter lit­er­ate, and have an under­stand­ing of the Eng­lish lan­guage, then you can do it.

When I meet with poten­tial clients, and they already have a work­ing knowl­edge of SEO, I start real­iz­ing that lever­ag­ing my career on a sin­gle mar­ket­ing tac­tic is prob­a­bly not the best idea.

Finally, when you boil every­thing down, good SEO is a foun­da­tion to be used with other online mar­ket­ing tac­tics, such as con­tent mar­ket­ing, pay per click, or social media.  When it comes to Inter­net mar­ket­ing, a sin­gle tac­tic just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Because of this, I pre­fer to say that I prac­tice Inter­net mar­ket­ing, or, as my friend Cameron Gaw­ley would say — Dig­i­tal Strat­egy.

So what is the future?

The future is in the gen­er­al­ist.  The mar­keter who’s good at exe­cut­ing and strate­giz­ing with a vari­ety of online tac­tics.  If you think you’re good at SEO, you bet­ter start learn­ing social media, or blog­ging, or pay per click man­age­ment, because it’s all impor­tant, and it fre­quently overlaps.

Hav­ing a gen­eral under­stand­ing of many online mar­ket­ing tac­tics means you can pro­vide a more well rounded cam­paign for your client or your com­pany.  It also means you’ll never run the risk of putting all your eggs into one bas­ket — some­thing I never rec­om­mend doing.

Hard­core SEO­ers will argue my point, as I have greatly sim­pli­fied the full scope of an expert SEO cam­paign.  But as search engines become more intel­li­gent and the gen­eral pub­lic becomes more aware of how to mar­ket online, all signs point towards SEO no longer being a viable stand­alone pro­fes­sion in the near future.

Photo Credit

Related posts:

1. The Sin­gle Most Effec­tive Tac­tic For Online Mar­ket­ing Success
2. 10 Warn­ing Signs That Your Inter­net Mar­keter Is a Dunce
3. 101 Free Ways To Pro­mote Your Website