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S3 AcademyWhy SEO will be gone in the next 5 to 10 years.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps businesses and obviously also individuals or any other group to be found in the Internet. And as long as people search for a product not knowing their name or a technology, not knowing its source or a solution not knowing who is a potential supplier SEO is an important part of the marketing mix.
However, this is slowly and steadily changing. Today 60 – 80% of the so called educated purchase decision is based on recommendations.
Recommendations in turn are made by trusted individuals or groups that have no or no significant interest in the sale but helpful and experienced people using or knowing the product or service in need. And the number of recommendation based purchases is steadily growing. I'm sure it will hit the 80 – 90% range in the next 5 to 10 years. Already today people are searching for experience, do their background checks, seek for user reports and more. The website with the actual offer or e-commerce shop is the last step in a product or service evaluation process.
Now – what does that mean to SEO? Why should a business invest in search engine optimization if most of the purchase decisions are based on recommendations? Wouldn't it be smarter to invest into the "recommendation chain" instead in SEO? Wouldn't it be more effective and successful to make sure people recommend a product than hoping to come up higher in the list of search results?
Well – today not every consumer is looking for recommendations, experience and other indicator what product or service they should buy that fits their needs. But in 10 years most of the decision maker in the age of 35 are the 25 year old from today – who would just not buy a product based on the fact that it shows up on the first page of a search engine. If they had to decide to put $1,000 in relationship improvement versus SEO – guess where they spend their money?
Today somebody may type something into the search field to get some idea what product, service or technology may come up. The highly optimized site may show up on the top. Then what? Purchase right away? Never. Now the next step is checking all the results. And here comes the key: User based feedback from blogs, communities, groups, Q+A sites and more. What the searching user gets is now a good picture and quickly realizes that this first item on the search engine may not be the best. Often times it is not taken BECAUSE it shows up first, which makes many buyers suspicious.
While we have tens of thousands SEO consultants fighting for their profession, there will be people who buy it. Like people advertise in Yellow Pages still today believing it makes sense. The same people will pay for SEO even in 30 years but the primary SEO business will be gone in 5 to 10 years. I couldn't find any reason why it would be of value.
P.S.
The City of San Francisco finally banned the distribution of Yellow Pages as 90 tons of paper where thrown away a few days after the books where delivered. The only reason they still get printed is to get the ad dollars from the mom and pap shops who never knew that the books are basically go straight from print to trash.
Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS
Post viewed 3,373 times
I really appreciate the information you shared in this post;) But I don't think SEO is dying. SEO is just changing and it will continue to change as search itself improves and changes. And that makes this industry more and more exciting.
It is next to impossible to predict what is going to happen in the next month let alone 5 to 10 years from now when it comes to internet marketing. What is going to change is that those who think SEO is just about meta data, alt tags, linking, etc. The profession will evolve to a more rounded, inbound marketing skill set that understands how to take a brand, mix it with the technical, and put a digital footprint out there that is big and deep.
Search Engine Optimization will never be dead until Google gets rid of it's Search Engine… even today, more than 85% of any online website is found FROM the Search Engine first and not Social Media. It is still and always will be very important to be listed at the top of Google for competitive searches. FROM the Search Engines (once people find you), with a well created Social Media presence you will attract new followers… it's not all based on recommendations and likes, it is also based on searches.
Though I will agree, the practices of HOW you get to the top of the Search Engine are changing, but to say it will be dead is getting a little carried away I think.
Hey Axel, great post. Where have you seen this research?
Judy is right, SEO is just changing but it would still have an impact on how people decide what to buy. It might be true that there are a lot of factors to consider that is why we just can't rely on SEO only. Just like what you have said, people would rely to recommendations and that's how Search Engine works, they recommend and it somehow give impact to people to have an option then look for any suggestions. What the company could do to effectively increase their sale is that they should have provide quality service from there they would have repeat customers plus the fact that they could be recommended by other people. Just my two cents. :)
I agree with Judy's comment about SEO. It's not in a dying state now. I think one of the main reasons why some people think that SEO is dying is because the first thing that comes to their minds when they talk about SEO is making a website or a page visible on the search results. If you're going to look a little bit deeper, it's going to be like the recommendation chain you're talking about if you think of the SEOs who actually use it to promote things to the people and not mainly for the search engines. Besides, that's the point of having a website: Making it seen by people.
= Gerald Martin =