Member Article

SEO declared dead (again)

If search engine optimisation were a person then its ability to rise from the dead again and again would be hailed as nothing short of a miracle. Time and time again over the past couple of years industry commentators have declared SEO dead, and now even The Guardian is at it.

In a Guardian article entitled ‘SEO is dead. Long live social media optimisation’, Tim Anderson declares that: “Using SEO to reach your audience is becoming increasingly futile,” and puts ‘social media optimisation’ forward as a replacement.

The main thrust behind Anderson’s argument depends on two statistics. The first is that, “a Google search may display only 13% on organic results.” This however is misleading as it refers to a single piece of research which used a 13-inch laptop screen and a limited number of queries. The fact is that the amount of ads, maps and other additional content varies widely depending on what is searched for. The research was also referring purely to content ‘above the fold’ – the content visible before scrolling.

The second statistic was that 32% of users found websites via social media versus 54% via organic search. Far from proving the ‘futility’ of organic search, this suggests that more than half of all users found websites through search engines – hardly something that business owners would want to discard out of hand.

SEO – Alive and kicking

Anderson goes on to suggest that this: “…is another reason why traditional SEO is decreasingly important,” and that: “A better model for today’s businesses is to consider what it means to be social-media optimised.”

While social media is of course an increasingly important method of content discovery, to deduce that that means that search engine optimisation is irrelevant is clearly fallacious reasoning. Sensible businesses will use a combination of both practices to maximise their online exposure.

At the nub of the matter, the vast majority of people use search engines like Google to find things that they’re looking for, and continue to click on organic results. In order to ensure that your pages rank highly, SEO is as essential as it’s ever been.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jon Celeste .