It has been a while since there the requisite “SEO is dead” conversation. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the longevity of search. Let’s face it, my career revolves around the product offerings from roughly three main companies (and one of those companies controls a 70%+ market-share).
While Google is nowhere near going out of business, the search industry is seeing a significant challenger in social media. Numerous start-ups have sought to capture the social web. A few have already seen significant traction, a la Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter. Social sites are now starting to drive more referral traffic to some major sites than traditional search engines. Crowdsourced traffic is surpassing algorithmic traffic (in a few select cases).
So what does this mean for search marketers, particularly SEOs? First, I think it means that the search engines will have more external factors to consider when ranking pages. Many of the SEO bloggers who acknowledge this point refer to it as the catalyst for the demise of SEO. But we have seen this before. In the past few years, external linking has increase in importance to drive traffic and rankings. But SEOs have been able to adapt and find ways to gain quality links.
Still, I feel as though keyword targeting will eventually become less and less important, as SEOs will have less and less control over targeting specific keywords. Search marketers will need to take a more holistic view of their campaigns, as they realize that they have less and less direct control over the factors that are used to rank sites in the search engines.
With this, content and architecture will increase in importance. Yes, these factors are important already, as SEOs know. But big companies still do not embrace best practices, opting instead for Flashy, easy to manage sites that present significant issues for search.
As external ranking factors become more important, specifically pertaining to social media, companies will need to make it as easy as possible for lay users to share sites with friends, family, coworkers, etc. Strategically, search marketers who can harness social media to direct traffic to landing pages where users can perform a desired action will find success.
While marketers grasp with the decreasing ability to control keyword rankings, content will become more important. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) will gain prominence as search engines try to develop more information about the domain and what the domain’s content is about on an aggregate level.
Social media will change search, but it will not not be the demise of search. The fundamentals will still be to create great content with site architecture that allows content to be easy to find, easy to share.
