2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?

December 16, 2009 By Robert Scoble

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Yesterday I sat down with two of the guys behind a new company, coming in January, called “MyNextCustomer,” who already is working with about 50 small businesses and are getting much better results than more traditional “SEO/SEM only firms.”

Make no mistake, the two guys I sat down with, George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson, who are co-founders of ROI.works, which is a search marketing firm, have been doing search engine and online marketing for a long time (since 1996 in George’s case) and they share their insights in this 30-minute conversations about what’s happening to small business online marketing.

I came away from this conversations thinking that SEO is getting dramatically less important and that SEM should be renamed to “OM” for “Online Marketing” since small businesses need to take a much more holistic approach to marketing than just worrying about search results.

Are you seeing the same trends in your business?

Filed Under: Web

http://enrique-gutierrez.com nrek

“No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.” – About damn time. Being paid to be a human-thesaurus on a repetitive time-release is a sad way to make a living. SEO junkies should step their game up & become Social Media “Experts” anyway… Much more fun; and harder to track business results (for now, you grimy bastards)
johngotts

There's no question that the game is changing. The ability for people to rise quickly in rankings on Google and Bing by posting on social media sites and linking between social sites for relevance is only one way people are now gaming the system. SEO may not be dead but the rules for how you come up on the first page of a popular search engine are certainly moving in a new direction.

posted by http://www.johngotts.com
http://alecperkins.net alecperkins

Optimize it for humans. Make it accessible, easy to find, and compelling, and don't forget to promote it (without spamming). The search engines, and traffic, will follow. Trying to optimize for a search engine is pointless, because the search engines aren't the ones looking for you. Anyway, they're trying to mimic human behavior in terms of understanding what's important. If it's not compelling or relevant, it will never gain traction, with search engines or people, no matter how “optimized” it is.

http://www.rankmagic.com/blog/ Bill Treloar

You’ve taken an artificially narrow view of SEO, IMO. Good SEO isn’t just mechanically tweaking keyword placement and density and submitting to directories. A good SEO recognizes that it’s valuable content that wins the day. Old fashioned keyword-stuffed pages never converted anyway. You need to provide solid information of value to your customers as part of any SEO campaign. The search engines will recognize that, and so will visitors to your site.

http://twitter.com/communico Julian A Waters

Absolutely. My question would be how quickly this filters through to the like of a potential client I met today, an industrial soda blaster. Technologically laggard industries may not be tweeting any time soon… as much as it would make my job easier. SEO has always felt 'dirty' -> it is not building anything or achieving anything useful, beyond the core task of 'building a good web site' [see http://powazek.com/posts/2090
http://www.edgenation.com/ Paul..

With a shift such as this you also wonder what this does to the method and form of website development and content creation itself. Obviously they’re related, but with a lot of SEO activity targeted to sites that might once have been known as ‘brochureware’ sites, then if ‘real-time’ or near-time beats static in relevance that also moves the tools required to create, track and update etc. As you allude to – this is a potential opportunity for new ways to consult on and quantify (aka ‘score’) sites beyond page rank or similar measures. Call it SEO or RTSEO or whatever you like, but it’s an interesting shift..
http://www.blogercise.com/ BLOGERCISE

Yep, I’ve been saying this for ages. We all know that Google often fails to give us good results, throwing up tired and gamed affiliate sites (some made by me!) which don’t really meet the user’s search requirements. Of course Google were going to improve on this!

I look forward to the day when Google also stops weighting sites based on a good keyword domain match. There are some awful/empty sites that rank highly on this basis alone. I know it won’t last for much longer!
http://www.facebook.com/marcelfahle Marcel Fahle

Nice one Robert. I've been praying that to my friends for years, especially those friends who were mentioning SEO/SEM in the very first meeting.. In my experience it's exactly like Alec says above: “Optimize it for humans. Make it accessible, easy to find, and compelling, …. The search engines, and traffic, will follow.”
Personally, I'm going a little further and also try to optimize sites for screenreaders a little bit more, to ensure a good structure..
rohnsmith

y I have heard about this that goggle is also going to release new search engine on which all stretigies will change.
http://twitter.com/youpage YouPage

Thanks for posting @scobleizer Over on YouPage I have posted this question and asked the YouPage community to vote…
Do you agree? Disagree? Select Agree or Disagree and why on YouPage now?

http://www.youpage.com/MicroBlog.aspx?MicroBlog…
http://www.brainstech.com Facebook Apps Developers

I think this is important especially for newbies.
http://twitter.com/mdender Michael Ender

I don't think SEO has lost it's importance. The methods businesses need to employ to get their message out are evolving.
http://searchslingshot.com/ Jen

Some really good points here. But I’m not sure SEO won’t be important anymore, maybe it’s just that the traditional definition of SEO is changing. Many of the fundamental principles of SEO are still solid and still applicable. But SEO itself is becoming more one aspect of online marketing and not a stand alone practice of manipulating algorithmic loopholes.
http://twitter.com/paiMD Pai Solebille

I dont totally agree with the title “SEO isn’t important anymore' .

Though I agree with the author on most of things he says, I think the emergence of 'Social Media' has just changed the way SEO is done. SEO has always been an evolving 'science', if I may call it a science at all, and it will continue to evolve and include other aspects of marketing.

In our own experiences with online stores I own, even today google is still the larget factor sending in the punters onto the site. All SEM and no SEO is surely a disastrous strategy.
chornak

This seems to be one of those cases where someone picks out one part of SEO and assumes all SEO consultants do things that way. I work for an SEO company, yes our focus has been around building traffic from search engine's but this doesn't mean we're just building random links for PageRank increases like it's 2001… we have evolved just like any other good SEO company.

SEO it's no longer about optimizing just for Google it's about optimizing for all types of search including; local, social media, video, etc.

It's not that SEO isn't important any more… it's; Good SEO is More Important Than Ever!
StereoMob

It depends on what you mean by “SEO.” For years the best SEO companies have been focusing on social media, viral campaigns, link baiting, etc.. I've been waiting for the industry to hit the tipping point where companies using old school SEO techniques begin seeing serious hits to their rankings. Yes, it seems that point is imminent…
http://twitter.com/steve_e Steve Evans

It's definitely not going to be possible to be successful based on SEO alone. Content curation, user experience, creating semantic standards compliant code, being sociable as a brand and being usable (both as a web entity and a brand) are going to be key next year.

However, the one thing I would predict that gets a lot more focus next year is going to be conversion. I'm seeing many companies looking for people to head up 'conversion', to do that well you need to understand tech, grok marketing, understand sociability and know experience like a designer. 2010 will be a great year for those with a good range of skills in web disciplines as brands realise they need people with a holistic view to focus across disciplines to raise conversion (be that sales, contacts, views, whatever).
Oskar

“But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago.” What systems, what are the IR patents talking about them, what scientific journals , what tests have you carried out to reach that conclusion?

Boring repetitive stuff. Search for caffeine in Google, third result was google’s own caffeine update, with not a single line of content in it, only because of anchor text of inbound links.

I could give hundreds of examples like this where Page Rank algorithm is just essential for rankings. The SEO is dead mantra starts to be boring.
http://noweurope.com Steven Carlson

Working on the web in Central Europe (Hungary) it sometimes seems like we're behind. Maybe this time we just get to skip a step. Out here, SEO is practiced by a handful of consultants, but really hasn't been adopted by the mainstream. SEO has always seemed to me like a black science. Let's hope you're right!

http://noweurope.com/2009/12/16/good-news-centr…
http://www.twitter.com/sarjit_20 sarjit soni

I am agree with StereoMob. even also not believe seo is good or bad. its all about you. see if search engines are not exist then how we promote our new site and how we can get potential traffics. in that way we have to use only for SMM. I am not telling that SEO will be totally down but it will be very hard effect on those who are alwys used same technique that used before two years.
sarjit

I am totally agree with StereoMob. sitll i am not understand why people dont think that if search engines are does not exist then how people promoting their new sites? and how can get potential traffic without search engines? it is the only way to get SMM. And see we have must only concern about our ROI either our site is come on the top of the search enigines or not. its does not make any differnence .
and Now That is the dam sure that google in processing to change the seo policy. and we dont used the same stuff that used before 2 years.
http://ottodestruct.com Otto

2010? I thought SEO stopped being important in 2004.
http://alecperkins.net alecperkins

That's exactly Robert's point, I think. He's saying that SEO as a term is dead, because it has evolved to the “holistic approach” that includes a proper understanding of the Web, in terms of architecture, bot behavior, and most importantly user behavior. The SE of SEO and SEM ignores all the other ways people find and share content, even though SEO companies may in fact cover those ways Everything you're describing is Online Marketing, which includes search engines.
http://www.facebook.com/jeffputz Jeff Putz

I've been saying that SEO was bullshit for years. I knew it'd lose fashion eventually.
http://www.facebook.com/jeffputz Jeff Putz

I've been saying that SEO was bullshit for years. I knew it'd lose fashion eventually.
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan Danny Sullivan

Robert, sadly, I don't even feel like you know what the current state of SEO is. When you write on this topic, you sound like someone who thinks the world is in 2001, where it's all on-the-page optimization. And you talk about PageRank like it's the only factor Google uses. Aside from being contradictory, it's also not the case and hasn't been for some time.

SEO, for the record, is the activity of ensuring you are well listed in any search results that are offered to a user for free. So small businesses don't need to worry about SEO? Hey, the top box on Google is often taken up by a map with a “4 pack” or “10 pack” of listings.

Those listings are something that small businesses can claim. And if you claim them, adjusting things like your address (if not correct) or your business title (such as ensuring you are descriptive for important terms) can have dramatic effect on whether you get listed. And that, my friend, is also SEO.

Maybe later I can spend the 30 minutes to watch the interview. But when you write that these two guys are from former search marketing firms, I pretty much already suspect that whatever they do has an SEO component.

As for renaming search marketing to online marketing. What on earth are you talking about? I mean seriously, where have you been since the internet broke out?

There's always been online marketing, which is the umbrella term of marketing — well — online. It includes thing like social media marketing, link building, email marketing, virtual worlds marketing and yes, search marketing. Some online marketers can do all these thing. Many specialize, just as in the real world, someone might do outdoors advertising versus television ads.

The biggest issue for small businesses is one that we probably both agree on — that online can simply be overwhelming for them.
http://scobleizer.com Scobleizer

It is true that they do have an SEO component. It's just that that component is getting smaller and smaller over time — dramatically so in what I'm seeing. I never said to not do SEO, by the way. Some people seem to be reading that into what I wrote. But, yes, if you watch the video you'll get a much more nuanced view of the world than you might take away if you just read my headline.

And, looking at the responses above, I'm not the only one that still thinks SEO is just page optimization. I'm sure many small businesses haven't paid attention to the changes you've noticed and outline in your comment either (although I have, part of the point of my post and this video is that the world of search has dramatically changed over the past year and you've gotta reevaluate your businesses' approach to online marketing.)

By the way, the headline is a question. Thanks for answering! (Anyone here who isn't familiar with Danny Sullivan should google who he is and what he's done for the search industry).
http://twitter.com/JonathanNelson Jonathan Nelson

Good for you Scoble. I will challenge any SEO on stage anytime and call them on their crap. And if they want to go technical…BRING it on. I have been in the SEO industry for almost 10 years and most of these people are either adapting and modifying their strategy to go the way of 'word of mouth' marketing or their just abusing companies with overpriced snake oil scams. One thing I know for certain is that SEO is a blanket term that is completely abused. SEO to me is a standard list of items that every website should address…lets call them best practices or requirements. Actually!!! Let's start a website called SEO best practices and move on. I really enjoy what Danny and others do at Search Engine Land, but seriously SEO is no longer about optimization of websites, but rather about people.

Want proof? I just tweeted this today:

http://twitter.com/JonathanNelson/status/673812…

“@runlevelmedia SEO to me is dead. SEO did not bring 200k visitors in less than a week to my site. People did. http://tweetphoto.com/6541380“

To me SEO is a checklist of items that I approach before, during and after any product launch or client engagement. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just 1 of many tactics in my war book.
Brian

You say – “It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.”

Ahm, hi, that's what SEOs do. At least the one's who know what they are doing. Your article should have been titled “2010: The Year That SEO Techniques That I Heard About in 2003 Will Be Less Important!!11!!1″

or

“Today's Linkbait Article”
http://twitter.com/george_revutsky George Yury Revutsky

WOW. Had no idea our interview would get this much response.

Here's the net-net: http://www.MyNextCustomer.com is going to be launching publicly soon.

A lot of what motivated us to create the product (we are currently an SEM/SEO/Online Marketing company ourselves) was the lack of quality marketing solutions for local businesses, the difficulty those businesses have in measuring their marketing results, and the lack of transparency some high-volume providers of ppc services currently have.

For example:

1) If you're a customer of one of the PPC-service-providers, how much does the engine get vs. how much is kept by the search provider as commission/service fee? They don't tell you. “Pay us 3K/mo and we'll get you leads.”

2) Some of these mass-service providers are downright deceptive in how they implement their offerings. For example, some have had a practice of proxying an SMB's site to send PPC traffic to. Then, instead of no-following the site, they actually work to get the proxied site ranking high in the SERPS. Then claiming credit for the ORGANIC leads the proxied site gets. Then keeping most of the monthly media money for themselves. (Why spend it on Adwords, when you can steal the traffic from your client AND get them to pay you for it).

Notice how NEITHER of these criticisms is a criticism of SEO, or SEO practitioners. Its actually a criticism of some venture funded providers of PPC services.

FYI, if you're a PPC provider, there is nothing wrong with using a proxied site to send paid search traffic to, if you NO-FOLLOW it, so you don't create duplicate content issues and cannibalize organic traffic.

Our offering is useful for both SMBs and local search consultants to track and manage marketing efforts. SEOs would find it useful. In-house webmasters would too.

In no way shape or form does our criticism of cookie-cutter PPC services apply to legitimate SEO practitioners.

Re: The relative importance of SEO
Let's not rehash the SEO is good vs. SEO is bad debate here. Everyone on here is way too intelligent – just in too much of a rush.

We do believe SEO has as big a role to play in a local business's marketing as before. I just think its a mattter of semantics.

Robert is saying SEO is not as important now, since content creation, social media marketing, etc. are within many SMB's reach. Lisa and Danny are saying “I define SEO more broadly to encompass these things – local listings, content creation and distribution via social channels, etc.”

As long as SMBs are being told that they need fresh content, accurate local listings, clean code, fast loading sites, and are encouraged to take advantage of social media, I personally don't care if you call that SEO consulting, Online Marketing Consulting, or Internet Marketing Consulting.

I just care that we are up front with them. And I think everyone on this blog wants that.

Please feel free to email me or get in touch via twitter with any feedback. You can find my email on my twitter profile: twitter.com/george_revutsky
http://twitter.com/george_revutsky George Yury Revutsky

Hi Danny – we take no responsibility for that headline. I think Robert is (successfully) practicing linkbait here.

I want to be clear that in no part of this interview did we say that SEO is not going to be important, or is any less important than before. I've been a student of SEO for a long time, and continue to believe SEO is a very important aspect of any business's marketing toolkit.

The interview was a preliminary conversation about local search and social marketing in preparation for launching MyNextCustomer. I think it kind of got roped into a different discussion on here somehow…

Its too long because I've had no media training, talk too much, the camera kept rolling, and Robert was generous with his time.

Thank you (as always) for speaking up for the industry. Most of us would not be here without you.

George
tbutcher80

2006 – The year Robert Scoble isn't important anymore.
http://twitter.com/mosquitohawk Marty Martin

Baaaaaaaaah. Sheep.
websitetraffic

I've got the impression that showing social site's updates on a real-time basis at Google and other search engines show how important “search” is. So, search engine optimization is not going to die out! It's evolving into a new stage where you learn how to attract more visitors to your site through various on-page and off-page factors.
http://twitter.com/pearanalytics Ryan Kelly

SEO is just a buzzword everyone uses, and what's funny is that the small business community is just now catching on to what it is and what it does. A good SEO is not there to “game” the system, but rather to educate their clients on how the vast intricacies of the Internet and search engines work and teach them how to create good content that people actually want to read and link to.

I also liked what Jonathan Nelson was saying too. I think there is an opportunity to “commoditize” several facets of the SEO process, and so for the majority of small businesses, there is no need to spend thousands of dollars a month on consulting – let our application software do the hard work for you.
http://twitter.com/seoagent_org SEO Agent

The SEO isn't important anymore? I don't want to be rude, but on the YouTube video you posted it says:

“These guys are starting a new SEO and small business marketing company that will be revealed next month”

Should I countinue?
http://twitter.com/seoagent_org SEO Agent

Should I continue* (sorry)
http://scobleizer.com Scobleizer

Thanks for catching my error. That should say “a new SEM or online marketing” company. I will fix that.
http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/ Gerald Weber

Of course it is very interesting to see how search is evolving. However i think the idea that SEO is no longer important is a bit over the top. It is still the foundation of search and without it you won't go far in the way of achieving ogranic qualified traffic. There are simply more factors that will be taken into account when it comes to SERPs going forward, as search continues to evolve. This will keeps thing fresh, new and exciting. I personally as an SEO, welcome these changes with open arms.
http://iQuestions.com/ Michael B.

Great insight on the changes coming to the significant world of search.
kholsinger

Very insightful… thanks for making us think Scoble
http://www.websitemarketing.com lovekills_s a.k.a Sahil

Umm, I would love to disect the way Google Webmaster Guidelines have been modified.

“Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.”

Picking it up right from here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/an…

When they say *partly*, it deciphers out to be stating that there are other numerous factors that come into play. Well, that's no new invention, Google has more than 200 other factors with page load speed, the new baby in the making.

Deducing things from what it appears to be from my side of the window, I for one, think that things have evolved quite a bit. It's no more about just the Links Building, Page Rank.
Though they are not dead, and work upto certain extent, but does not guarantee a top listing in the SERPS. (Earlier they did)
And since, earlier they did work, does'nt mean SEO is dead or is going to be dead any soon! It's just evolving for good, and for the visitors who are looking out for something.

Its not just the links that determine popularity of a website(unlike the medieval times, pun intended)
It's the brand mentions across the web that seem to work as of now. And Platforms like Facebook, Blogs/Forums, twitter(still some juice left before it attains a saturation level) are just right.

It's about generating the buzz, ain't it? Earlier(2003-2006), if a site was 1 for a fairly comp. KW, it would get the buzz set up right. Now, the more the buzz about the brand, the more closer it gets to the #1 in SERPS.

Call SEO tasks a Checklist, but without those, everything would be just so temporary for obvious reasons. For a strong house, a Strong base is essential!

IMHO, anything you do to optimize your website's SE positioning has to fall under the SEO umbrella. SEO will always be important, but will evolve for good!
amen!
jeffbullas

Great Interview Robert… took notes furiously and will be watching this space
http://tobto.org/ tobto

Thanks for nice reading! SEO will stay alive as long as search machines work. Then, SEM or general marketing IS the base of SEO. If we talk of small business marketing, there are some areas of business which can and some are can't functioning without internet. But any site always is better with SEO, then without one ))
naganigi

y I have heard about this that goggle is also going to release new search engine on which all stretigies will change.

porno izle – Penis Büyütücü – sikiş izle – sikiş – sikiş
reputationmanagement

Totally agree, it's not just SEO but also PR and Reputation Management, no longer is it a clear distinction between who does what and where. We have to become online marketers and learn about all channels an opportunities. Good to see other seeing the bigger picture.
StereoMob

Hmmm…well…I'd argue (again) that it's mostly a question of semantics, unless Robert is suggesting that the the web is changing so drastically that traffic from search engines will soon be unimportant (and that's not what I take him to mean).
The use of search engines continues to increase each year, and as long as that trend continues, SEO in its latest iteration (ie, wholistic, focused more on off-site than on on-site optimization) will continue to be relevant.
http://www.kruse.co.uk/seo-consultant.htm SEO Consultant

Abandoning SEO? There's always room for SEO done properly. This is just people who didn't understand it in the first place getting off the bus.

BB
http://kikolani.com/ Kikolani

It's not that SEO is no longer important. SEO strategies of the past (link exchanges, for example) are not going to have the same weight as they used to. Instead, SEO companies are going to have to utilize new strategies to get their customers in the top of results, like getting them more involved with social media so their name is mentioned often in the real-time Twitter searches that will be higher in the SERPs.

Traditional SEO strategies are not going to be important in 2010. New and improved SEO strategies will be!
http://www.noeltock.com Noel

I'm tempted to think this is linkbait, but I'll bite

SEO is a foundation for accessibility and organic traffic. There's no way you can have a site called http://www.9380123.com and have all your text stored in images and then compete with another site called http://www.descriptivename.com which has properly structured/semantic coding *and* then expect both to rank the same (given all external factors remain the same). I'll however agree that OM & SEM is becoming more important as SEO is becoming more widespread & standardized (i.e. CMS packages automatically having “decent” SEO features, etc.).

2010 will be not be the year SEO becomes unimportant, neither will 2011 or 2012.
http://www.toprankmarketing.com leeodden

Different, but not less important.

Obviously, some of the premises in the post about SEO are “off” and are marketingspeak presented by the guys in the video to distinguish their new project.

However, I don't see anything wrong with, “small businesses need to take a much more holistic approach to marketing than just worrying about search results”.

Our small business clients get far more buying visitors from social and link channels than they did a year or two ago. Search is still the majority of referred traffic, but it's not the only one by far.

The bottom line is of course, to connect customers/buyers with small businesses and their solutions. Fish where the fish are. If that means search, great. If that means social, great. If that means, email, PR, advertising, etc. great!

It really comes down to understanding where/how customers connect with small businesses or businesses of any kind. How anyone could go wrong with a holistic approach is beyond me. Single channel SEO tactics are as limited as relying solely on any single marketing channel.

Good SEO's don't rely just on standard Google.com for their marketing anyway. If something can be searched on, it can be optimized for better performance in search. That means on Google.com as well as the search functions within social networks, media specific sites, mobile, local, and so on.

I think the statement to make is that good SEO has evolved (compared to SEO hacks making crazy promises) as a holistic discipline touching many marketing and communication channels.

Competent SEO is, by it's nature, already “online marketing” because it can positively affect any kind of content that gets crawled, indexed and included in search results.

No matter what people like Lisa, Danny, Robert or whoever, defensively say, best practices for small business marketing comes down to strategies that best serve the objectives of the business and not promoting a single tactic just because that's what someone knows best.

2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?

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