As a marketing strategy the practice has certainly evolved dramatically, to a point where it is barely recognizable from the link farms and keyword stuffing that characterized the practice a decade ago.
Once considered a non-negotiable for any web-facing business, small businesses should think twice before allocating their entire marketing spend to SEO.
Image Credit: Flickr, Creative Commons, Pittaya Sroilong
The lines between SEO, journalism and marketing are increasingly blurred.
The alarm over "the death of SEO" is a back-and-forth with distinct echoes of the print industry. One day print is dead; the next there is a revival in niche letterpress printed flyers.
It should come as no surprise then that there are parallels in the world of SEO. With each Google algorithm update, or coverage of Google's progress with their knowledge graph, there will be a concomitant adjustment in the SEO practice.
Already the SEO practitioner has had to ditch a range of earlier tools, including once heavily relied upon link farms and keyword cloaking. In particular, algorithm updates Penguin and Panda steered SEO away from a primarily technical exercise, to one far more reliant on content.
The world of journalism is taking notice of this infiltration of marketing forces. In a recent article for the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Meyer does a great job unpacking whether journalism should worry about content marketing.
But SEO practitioners too are recognizing this shift. Writing about the proliferation of news platforms that are paid for with marketing spend, London based SEO agency Go Up have written: "Call it native advertising, sponsored content, brand journalism, interdisciplinary media... but the gist remains the same: the line between marketing and journalism is becoming progressively blurred."
Many SEO agencies now sell their service as part of a wider marketing strategy. Like any practice with the hope of sustaining itself through periods of change, the SEO industry has had little choice but to adapt.
For many this has meant a dramatic revision of tools and approaches. For others it has been a total repositioning - leveraging themselves instead as experts in the implementation of SEO strategies that are "content-driven" and "link-earning".
Perhaps one of the more symbolic manifestations of this shift, Forbes Contributor, Jayson DeMers has pointed out, is the decision taken in 2013 by venerable SEO experts SEOMoz to rebrand themselves simply as Moz.
Change has also made way for a wave of newcomers. A new kind of SEO agency, one that develops digital marketing strategies of which SEO is only one element, now occupy a significant chunk of the industry. SEO agencies like Koozai, Go Up, and Integrity Search all list SEO as just one part of their services which usually also include copywriting, PR, PPC, and social media.
The job market now demands SEO skills, not just SEO experts.
As long as there are websites, there will be a need for them to be optimized. SEO will never be redundant.
LinkedIn data shared recently by Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin, shows that SEO featured far more commonly in job descriptions than job titles.
In its earlier, more technical forms, SEO was an extension of the technical development work carried out by "the web guys", tucked away in a basement or overseas headquarter. Now, whilst the technical work certainly still has a very important place in SEO, any good SEO will rely equally or more on a team of media-savvy marketers and writers who spend a lot of their time interfacing with the press, the bloggerati and the market itself via social media.
What does this mean for businesses?
It's time for small business to start thinking of SEO as an integral component of their online lead generation, rather than the source of the leads alone.
It follows that they approach the talent pool with a similar approach or outsource, when needed be and just stop the unnecessary marketing activities that's costing big chunks of money.
With a limited budget, a small business will get much more bang for their buck paying for an SEO consultant to conduct a technical optimization and then train (and supervise) the marketing team in implementing a wider marketing strategy that makes SEO a distinct part of its strategy.
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