As we have already seen in our previous article, SEO is doing more than just fine – better than ever, in fact. If you are able to develop together with search engine optimization, you don’t have to worry. However, those who declare SEO dead can expect their traffic to be too, due to incorrect and missed marketing measures.
Instead, customization is the key to success in any marketing channel and is necessary to master and ultimately overcome it. What worked very well years ago probably doesn’t work so well today and in some cases may not even be allowed anymore. This obligatory dynamic, which is a core characteristic of marketing itself, not only affects SEO, but also social media, branding, SEA and email marketing, for example.
But why is this misunderstanding so prevalent in the SEO sector? There must be something that divides opinion and justifies why the big claim is that SEO is dying – if not recently dead.
After all, SEO is experiencing an incredible peak phase in 2021 – and even before that – and is growing in relevance and marketing power. A tool that dominates Google and is also becoming a major topic that the giant search engine company provides information about. So how is it that SEO is still declared dead by many?
SEO is dead, say the pessimists
Unfortunately, this is not just a rumor. There are many marketers who are firmly convinced and truly believe in the death of search engine optimization. Whether it’s because it was too hard, because it has changed too much, or because they just haven’t managed to move up the Google rankings, they no longer believe that SEO is a profitable marketing channel.
One of the most common claims is that SEO is dead because it is confusing, has no standards and is bad marketing that simply doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest myths that people in marketing hear most often. According to a survey conducted by Search Engine Journal on Twitter, 41 percent agreed that they had already heard this rumor. There are also enough media outlets that continue to fuel this myth. According to them, local SEO, for example, is recently dead and is instead being replaced by integrated regional positioning. Sounds pretty similar to SEO, don’t you think? Search queries also show that over 31 million results can be found as soon as “SEO is dead” is entered into the search engine.
As you can see, there is a large camp that is firmly convinced that SEO is obsolete.
Obviously, there are enough agencies and experts who show by their very existence that SEO is anything but dead. So that we don’t just focus on the pure reality of agencies and experts, we naturally have plenty of data and experience for you to prove that SEO is not dead, but more alive than ever.
4 reasons why SEO is not dead
– SEO is constantly changing.
– SEO requires the necessary effort.
– SEO is more complex.
– SEO jobs and salaries are on the rise.
Why SEO is not dead
So let’s return from the pessimistic mythmakers to the reality of the marketing world. SEO is not dead and with this rise in relevance, it’s hard to know if it will ever happen. As long as there are search engines and the possibility of impressing the algorithm so that these measures are rewarded with visibility and traffic, SEO will continue to exist and become increasingly important. What the pessimists don’t tell us is that SEO is one of the most ROI-heavy investments in marketing. In addition, search engine optimization focuses on long-term success and not short-term campaigns.
This can be frustrating for some people if their marketing has to be maintained in the long term instead of making an expensive investment. But no matter how much pessimism there may be, SEO will always evolve and all it requires is the adaptability of your business and SEOs. If you can do this, then you have one of the most powerful marketing tools in your hands.
Here are the reasons why.
SEO is constantly changing
Many people are afraid of change and this is understandable in many respects. After all, if something is not broken, why should it be repaired? In fact, it can sometimes be hard to see that something is broken after all, and old SEO is usually outdated for a reason. Every change in SEO has at least one argument. Be it weak or strong. A very strong argument, for example, is black-hat SEO, which websites could still get away with until 2005.
The big problem – the content should never offer added value for users, and this role is occupied by all of us to a certain extent. It should only impress Google’s algorithm in order to position itself high in the rankings and bypass the system with lousy tricks. These black hat tactics include, for example, keyword stuffing (pushing as many keywords as possible onto the page), cloaking (showing the Googlebot one version of the content and the user another), link buying (paying websites to link back to you) and much, much more.
This has massively impaired the reliability of websites in organic search and simply made it more difficult for users. A harsh reality in the early 2000s and the rise of annoying websites. Fortunately, Google adapted and tightened its standards and guidelines. As a result, methods such as keyword stuffing and the like were not only ineffective. If Google finds pages that make pitiful attempts to implement these tactics surreptitiously, it will penalize them without hesitation. This can greatly reduce the traffic of the affected pages and even cost indexing.
Instead of tricking the system with black-hat techniques, white-hat tactics such as providing the best User experienceAnswering your users’ questions, creating a fast website and providing a solid website architecture are not only the top SEO trends in 2021, but also the fastest way to succeed in SEO.
SEO requires the necessary effort
Good SEO is not easy. Black hat tactics were all the easier. In theory, it was possible to type in hundreds of relevant keywords, recolor them in white text and subtly hide them in the same colored background. Voila: Keyword stuffing and cloaking at its best. The SEO traffic was safe. It doesn’t take much brainpower and annoys every user who lands on these annoying sites hoping for added value, only to be disappointed.
This problem no longer exists. This means actual work that needs to be done for SEO. Something that the comfortable tricksters and pessimists are mourning and have therefore quite dramatically already put SEO in a coffin.
Today the focus is on your users! For you, this means producing high-quality content that is actually relevant to your target group – from start to finish. We must not let up here. You need to create a fast page that loads in less than three seconds. You need to focus on content and technical SEO, write good title tags and metas, design a coherent page layout, update your XML sitemaps, make sure Google can render your content and much more.
If the latter sounds more difficult, then it is. SEO requires a lot more work in 2021 than it did in 2000. If you’re not willing to learn the ropes and really provide the best possible experience for your users and Googlebot, SEO won’t work for you. It’s not for nothing that SEO is so incredibly lucrative. Those who really master it will be rewarded with high traffic figures and leads.
SEO is more complex
Regardless of whether you started with content or technical SEO, SEO work has probably become much more complicated than when you started. What used to work in the past often no longer works today. To be successful in content SEO, you need to create a sensible page layout with logical headings, text content, hyperlinks, images, videos and transitions. If you don’t have a writing background or your own content team, you will often find this difficult.
On the technical side, SEO used to be all about updated XML sitemaps, robots.txt files and HTML. Today, teamwork, site architecture, JavaScript, dynamic rendering, pre-rendering, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and cumulative layout shift are all topics that SEO needs to grasp.
Whether you’ve moved up the content or technical ranks, chances are you’ve had to learn a few new aspects of the modern web that seemed confusing at first. With training and practice, the most successful SEOs learn to master these once confusing strategies and implement them as intended.
SEO jobs and salaries on the rise
If SEO is dead, why are more companies hiring SEOs and paying higher salaries? Well, because SEO is not dead.
According to Conductor’s 2020 Guide to Job Trends and Salaries, SEO jobs almost doubled in 2019 compared to the previous year and increased by 8 percent in 2020. While 8 percent doesn’t sound very high, content marketing jobs fell by 38 percent in 2020. These figures show an increased interest in SEO, but they also prove that more companies are bringing SEO in-house.
In terms of remuneration, the average SEO salary has risen by 8 percent since 2019 (from 68,150 US dollars to 73,167 US dollars). Salaries for SEO specialists, analysts and managers all increased from 2019 to 2020. In addition, the average SEO Director salary tracked by Conductor for the first time in 2020 was $117,100.
Many industries and professions saw a decline in 2020 due to COVID-19, but SEO careers are more profitable than ever, despite the naysayers who claim it’s dead.
Conclusion: Why you should invest in SEO
Considering the above trends, the return on investment for those who do SEO well and the following statistics announced by Google in March 2021, it is an absolute must to continue investing:
On average, local search results lead to more than four billion hits for companies every month. More than two billion of these are website visits and functions such as phone calls, directions, food orders and reservations.
Every month, Google search connects people with more than 120 million companies that do not operate a website themselves. Google sends billions of visitors to websites every day. The traffic that Google sends to the web has increased every year since Google Search was founded.
The Google search results page, which used to show 10 blue links, now shows an average of 26 links to websites on a single search results page on mobile.
Change is scary, but those who reorient and adapt reap the rewards that pessimists miss out on. Remember – despite all the changes we see from Google every year, SEO boils down to one basic principle: helping Google answer users’ queries. How you do this is up to you. As long as you provide your target group with the answers they are looking for (when they want them and how they want them), you will be successful in SEO.