Download to read offline
Uploaded byDixon Jones
Is seo dead?
The document discusses the evolving landscape of SEO, highlighting that while traditional methods may seem outdated, they still hold value in certain contexts like portals. It emphasizes the importance of innovation in content rather than simply optimizing for long-tail keywords, using various examples to illustrate shifts in industry practices. The author suggests that despite changes, SEO is far from dead and requires adaptation to thrive.
More Related Content
Is seo dead?
- 1. IS SEO DEAD?…..AGAIN? (Images under license via Shutterstock & Giphy)
- 2.
- 5.
- 7. “ ” SEO IS GOINGTO GET HARDER & HARDER Matt Cutts in 2012
- 8. SEO WAS SUPPOSEDTO BE A RACE TO THE TOP SOMEWHERE IT BECAME A RACE TO THE BOTTOM BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS: SEO IS FOREVER
- 9. “ ” AT THE HEARTOF CAPITALISM IS CREATIVE DESTRUCTION. Joseph Schumpter’s Creative Destruction Theory (1953)
- 10. THE OLD TRICKS THESEDIED RIGHT? • Frames • Directories • Links • Keywords Tag NO THEY DIDN’T • Widgets then API connectors (Zapier) • Specialist Portals (Booking.com) • That didn’t die at all! • Semantic Markup
- 11. “IT IS ARESOURCE ISSUE, NOT AN OPTIMISATION ISSUE”
- 12. CONTENT GETS LOSTAT SCALE
- 13. STOP CHASING LONGTAIL KEYWORDS!
- 14. INNOVATE DON’T IMITATE! ElectricCar > Tesla Vacuum Cleaner > Hoover > Dyson Taxi > Uber Auction > Ebay Library > Google Pizza > Dominoes
- 15. SO… YOU NEEDTO THINK DIFFERENT. INNOVATION IN CONTENT NEEDS TO BECOME ENSHRINED
- 16. OLD SCHOOL STILLWORKS BEAUTIFULLY …..ON PORTALS
- 17. AMAZON.CO.UK • Title iskey • Drive external traffic to screw with the algorithm (Raises Amazon ROI) • Faster shipping • Product reviews • Bounce rate (on Amazon pages)
- 18. CHROME STORE • Timeseems key • More complex algorithm • This example: Not ratings • This example: Not review counts • This example not just title • Note: Different “suggestions” box to main Google.
- 19. BOOKING.COM • Old Adwordsstyle algorithm: • Pricing / Location / Rating • Reviews are most organic element • Photos. Facilities. Personalisation. • Pay to play < Visibility Booster • Align your objectives with Booking.com’s
- 20. OPTIMISATION COMES NATURALLYIN SOME PORTALS Remember John Mueller: “Just don’t optimise, We’ll do it for you” (misquote!) Remember Matt Cutts: “Be yourself” – Wordcamp. 2009.
- 21. SO WHAT’S NEXT FORME? • Maybe Domaining isn’t dead either • Maybe it just metamorphosed…
Editor's Notes
- #2 It’s the last event on the last day. So I hope we get the tone of this right. Also (quite possibly) my last ever presentation as I am due to retire from Majestic in November and I am winding down…. So rather than rambling on for an hour – we thought we’d open the discussion for about 20 minutes and then have Damien interrogate me in a fireside chat. Because after that…
- #3 I may be off! I have been involved in SEO and internet marketing for over 20 years. First website using Frontpage ‘97 (which was crap by the way) – when I started selling my Murder Mystery Evenings in PDF files online. So the 20 year old topic “IS SEO Dead”? Again?” seems to be a pretty fun way to end the conference today. Not all of you will know me, but I imagine plenty of you do, and you’ll fall into two broad camps. A: respect me B: Suspect Me for only having half the SEO tools they think I need. But if I leave the SEO industry in November for good, I will not go away feeling I under achieved…
- #4 UK/EU/US Search Awards have been great to win – if you argue that’s just vanity, then the Deloitte Fast 5o certainluy isn’t. I have been to Buckingham Palace twice witrh consequetive Queens Awards. And we printed the Internet in 3D on the ISS. So I hope I have one last talk in me as I Look back over a 20 year period. Nothing’s really stopping me from leaving it all out on the field – but I think time gives me a perspective that we usually can’t see day-to-day. Seeing the “wood for the trees” metaphor seems to come to mind. Maybe this is the helicopter view. Maybe it is just the Old Codger in the corner, having a last hurrah . Let’s find out. Honestly – after 20 years of SERPs and being at the coalface – I expect you also have had days like this!
- #5 About 4 years ago I committed the ultimate SEO Hari Kari by losing the word SEO from our domain name. Arguably the strongest word in our industry. But really, the business imperatives were heavily outweighing the SEO argument. In the end, SEO is not what Majestic does! 20 years ago, getting to the top for the generic word that your site was about was great… brands were building and specialisms still developing. So what’s are the arguments supporting the mantra “SEO is dead”?
- #6 There is a few prevailing arguments as to why old school SEO is dead. 1 is: There is an overwhelming move towards AI. Machine Learning is one of the most prolific forms of AI and we think it is coming to take over Google.. And it is… but what is the Page Rank algo except Machine learning under another name? The algorithm is beautiful. Even if it is becoming less and less prominent as a ranking factor, the legacy it leaves behind remains hugely influential in SEO. The PageRank algorithm built up over time and created some winners and some losers. Amazon and ebay were winners. Boo.com and….
- #7 …. This list…. Were the losers. Now this was a post dated 2005! The cards had largely been played by then. We had already seen the first .com crash and already the likely winners in most industries were emerging. That’s 13 years ago! No wonder many of us wake up more and more often and think that we are hitting our heads against a brick wall!
- #8 But the SEO is dead mantra started WAY before AI became the buzzword of the day. This was either at Penguin of Panda… I think Penguin. 2012. But really the start of the “SEO is Dead” argument started for the old guard during Florida. Does anyone remember the Florida update? Called that because Pubcon was in Florida at the time. Was anyone there? turned out you could start over optimizing things.
- #9 What had gone wrong? This…
- #10 It turns out that even though SEO moved from a force for good to a force for greed, it started to emulate capitalism. And capitalism – it turns out – is highly predictable. Whilst it may have been defined in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, its DNA – its algorithm if you like - was pretty much decoded in 1953, with Joseph Schumpter’s destruction theory. Schumpter though that Capitalism would destroy the systems on which it founded itself. He infact thought that socialism would evolve from the destruction, but infact, in the west, it seems that capitalism has instead been able to simply adapt and reinvent itself. It has done this through building iteratively more and more specialist systems. Like houses being rebuily again and again on the same land. Higher and higher, but also more and more specialist on nature. Capitailism teinvents itself. And so does SEO…
- #11 So that when you start to look at the aspects of SEO that we might think are dead, we find that death was a bit of an illusion!
- #12 But where I DO think SEOs have dropped the ball is in understanding what is stopping the search engines from getting better now. We tend to think that Google wants the best results and that SEOs are Google’s biggest problem. Resources are Google’s biggest problem. They said as much at Pubcon in November. It is not that Google can’t crawl more. It is that crawling more (after a point) just screws up the learning algorithms. Google needs to A: Crawl, B: Process, C: Store D: retrieve on demand. Only the last part of this has to be instant, but parts A and B can be infinite, and the more we throw crap content at Google, the harder C and D become. Content is the next thing to die for SEOs. In particular…
- #13 Content will increasingly get lost at scale. Not JUST because of the implications of position zero voice searches (although that’s a factor). But the resources Google needs are NOT limitless. So they have two problems The first being – how do you crawl everything at that scale?The second being how do you rank everything at such scale? If you write the BEST content for a given keyword, nobody will find it The best links for a given keyword go to the most influential content, not the best content. (Web – can tear and still work… pyramid of content… the bottom layers can be removed without ill effect). Content is the next thing to die for SEOs. In particular…
- #14 Long tail keyword content. Partly due to reasources, but ALSO due to creative destruction in capitalism. In content terms, Innovation boils down to this… Stop chasing long tail keywords. Because every keyword worth its salt wil develop its own market leader swallowing up all surrounding keywords.
- #15 Businesses that innovate, destroy the old paradigms regularly. Then change the mindset of the searcher. This and the volume of pages has a profound impact on content creation…
- #16 Innovation needs to be enshrined into your content strategy. To do this it helps to look at some of the research and science behind innovation. I would urge you to look up Portfolio theory – which was originally to do with investments, then turned to innovation. Now I think we need to look at how our content optimisation reinforces the business goals. We need to turn searcher from asking in nouns to asking in brands that define a genre.
- #17 Remember when we were young? In the world of the blind. I believe, in a world of Expert portals, there is a rich and robust future for SEOs of all sizes. I think here is where the old school SEO skillset has a ripe future – and if we don’t get our heads our of our arses, we’ll miss the myriad of opportunities. If you are a local business – then you have Google Local of course…. Who says web directories are dead? We have Greg Gifford leading the charge on that one. But a load of others are MUCH more fun!
- #19 If you are lucky enough to be technology or service based, then the route is Appstore, or Chrome store. We have had a lot of success on the Google Chrome Store with our Chrome extension. (Google reports 53,000 users)
- #24 So – SEO is not Dead, and I don’t think I’ll disappear off the scene altogether either. I expect I’ll come back to haunt you in the future. Thankyou.