Is SEO dead?

This is such a bizarre idea, that I have to remind myself that some people actually believe it!

Clearly the idea is often used as mere clickbait. This Entrepreneur article, for instance, The Top 4 Reasons SEO Is Dead, uses the concept as a way to get people to read the article; the author’s concluding paragraph suggests that he doesn’t actually believe SEO is dead at all.

On the other hand, this excellent post at SearchEngineLand shows that indeed people have been describing the demise of SEO for a long time; when someone says “I’m beginning to believe that search engines are a dead-end technology and fretting over where your site comes up is a big waste of time” … sure, they really do believe SEO is dead. (And that was back in 1997!)

There are two reasons that SEO is not dead: 
1: There are tens of billions of searches through major search engines every month
2: You can do things to your site to make the site rank higher in the search results

It’s just basic marketing commonsense. You go where your prospects are, and many of your prospects are using the major search engines.

Here’s the latest comScore stats for searches through major search engines: 18 billion searches in October of 2015. And that number only includes searches within the United States, from desktop computers!

In fact, it’s been reported that worldwide, Google alone handles 100 billion searches every month. That’s 14 searches a month for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Add in other search engines, in particular Bing and China’s Baidu, and allow for the fact that the Google figure is several years out of date, and the number of searches worldwide climbs closer to 200 billion a month.

Okay, so if people are using the search engines, the question then becomes, Is there anything you can do to influence the position of your site in the search results?

And the answer to that question is a resounding Yes!

In fact in many cases it’s incredibly easy to rank well in the search engines. Okay, if you’re an attorney involved in mesothelioma litigation, a realtor in San Francisco, or a mortgage broker in Dallas … you may have to work hard to make SEO pay off.

On the other hand, though, if you are a bookkeeper in a small town, an in-vitro fertilization clinic in any town, large or small, an e-commerce store selling some kind of specialized equipment … you may find it ridiculously easy to rank well and bring in real business, by optimizing your Web site.

The world’s very different today from 1998, when Google launched. There are so many more ways to reach people online. But that doesn’t mean search engines aren’t important, they still are.

SEO isn’t dead, nor dying, because people are still using the major search engines, an average of once a day per person worldwide (far more frequently when you remove babies and Papua New Guinean tribesmen from the equation and focus on adults in the “industrialized” world)…and because you can influence how search engines regard your site’s usefulness to searchers.