SEO is dead, long live SEO!
SEO isn’t like it was till just a few years ago. You can longer reliably get on top of Google’s search engine results page (SERP) while using a few keywords. That’s right, SEO can’t be tamed; it’s taming us. And that’s not such a bad thing. It means that we can find relevant information faster than ever before. And it’s consistent. Unless you do a web search for a company name, you’ll find a bunch of blogs and other content reviewing what you’re looking for. This means that Google puts more emphasis on content marketing. SEO in 2019 When you Google the following queries, notice what you get. That’s right, you get a lot of blogs reviewing the best phones, sneakers and restaurants that Google thinks are relevant to me based on my location, search history and other data that they have on me. This is especially true for your web searches looking into the best phone and sneaker. It’s also true when trying to find restaurants, but perhaps slightly less so. Let me explain. Unlike in the SERPs we get when searching for a product, when you look for a restaurant Google is going to first shows addresses of restaurants it thinks you’ll like based on the data (i.e. reviews, ratings, restaurants you frequent, etc) they gather from Google Maps. But when it comes to pulling up websites the algorithms believe you’re likely to want to visit, Google once again prioritizes blogs and articles reviewing restaurants. There literally isn’t one restaurant brand that makes it to the first results page. This is consistent with searching for products. In 2019, the best companies can hope for is to have their website listed somewhere within the first 10 pages of Google. Which obviously isn’t good enough for our clients. Which is why SEO in the traditional sense is now dead. Why is traditional SEO no longer viable in 2019? There are many contributing factors behind this. Here are some of the reasons why SEO in 2019 is so much more different than SEO in 2014. Google’s leveraging the data they’ve been collecting on us all this time As well all know Google has been gathering a lot of data on its users. Whether it’s through our Google searches, Gmail (although they don’t any more), Google Docs, Android or a suite of other services that they offer. In fact, as Google’s Research Director Peter Norvig once said, “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” Google are now using this data to help us do research. They help us find social media influencers and reviewers to help us make our decisions. Google wants to monetize their data Google’s main source of income is advertising. It’s one of the biggest online advertising platforms in the world. And it’s already been overtaken by Facebook as of 2014. This means Google is trying to pressure small businesses to pay up to be listed in their SERP via Google Ads. Googles Ads are the future! So are paid local listings, a special ad system that you can pay to get on the top. Just look at the image below to see what I mean. AS you can see, Google is moving beyond just indexing and showing ads on its SERP. It’s now creating it’s own premium listing, leveraging Google Maps to show ratings. In short, they’re no longer in the business of providing a number of services isolated from one another. They’re taking a leaf out of the Chinese mega-app WeChat—they’re bringing all their services and data to one major platform. This means as consumers we spend the majority of our time looking up information on Google, where it can monetize our time and attention. Google: The Mega-app Google is transforming and innovating. It’s in this phase where it’s still not entirely clear what Google will look like once it’s completed its metamorphosis. But we can see where it’s headed. The mega-app. The app-killer. The primary source of information. Indexing websites and showing the best routes to our destination is no longer enough. That was Google in 2010. There are many search engines out there today that can go toe-to-toe with Google. Bing, Qwant and Yandex do a decent enough job whether we like to admit it or not of ranking indexed websites. DuckDuckGo is great when it comes to aggregating its results by using listings from the other search engines. And StartPage is the best way to access Google’s own SERP, while providing privacy to users. Google has to move on from being a simple search engine and differentiate itself if it wants to continue its dominance. This is the best way it can do just that. Now how does all this leave us when it comes to my bold claim that SEO is dead? Understanding how Google thinks and is reacting to competition is key to answering this question. In short, we live in a post-SEO world because of the changes the search engine is making to its business strategy. SEO tips for 2019 The old way of doing search engine optimization is dead. But the practice itself isn’t. We just need to make changes to the way we’re treating SEO to remain relevant. The way that Google treats queries is key to understanding the new strategies that SEO companies need to implement if they’re to stay in the game. Google is changing the way it does business. If we don’t change with it, if we stagnate, we’ll be left wondering what just happened and how did we not see it coming. We need to adapt now before it’s too late. As long as people use search engines, SEO will remain as relevant as ever. In fact, it’ll become even more relevant as an increasing number of SEO agencies continue to treat the optimization game as if nothing’s changing. Let’s recap: Pay-per-click (PPC) is more important than ever Unless we spam keywords, we won’t be able to outrank huge brands that have been around for ages. PPC has never been so important.
Good Website vs Bad Website
How can you tell if a website is good vs bad? It’s a combination of the way they elements that we’ll discuss in detail.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps people find information that’s relevant to them when they do a web search. When a company hires a SEO agency to optimize their website for them, they’re basically asking help on how to make their website stand out to potential customers when they search for the products and services they offer.
The Importance of Online Marketing
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]Online marketing is key to doing any business in today’s world. This is something an increasing number of businesses—big and small—are coming to realise. There are many reasons why online marketing is overhauling traditional marketing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_single_image image=”6354″ img_size=”full”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text] Nudging While we may be dismissive of how effective marketing just is on us as consumers, what academics are saying should not be ignored. Study after study has found that marketing is very effective in influencing us to do things. This is called nudging. Despite popular opinion, marketing isn’t about influencing you to buy something. On the contrary, it’s seldom, if ever, about getting consumers to buy anything at all. No, instead, marketing is all about subconsciously making people think about a certain brand.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSkWqI7M3Ts”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]The key here is the word “subconsciously”. So long as we’re exposed to a brand frequently and over a long period of time, we will come to trust them more than a brand that we’ve never been exposed to before. This is precisely why businesses like Gillette get away with charging more for men’s shaving products than competitors like Dollar Shaving Club do — although that’s changing too, largely thanks to Dollar Shaving Club’s successful marketing strategy. So we know that marketing is very important in getting consumers to remember brand names. But then, this article is about online marketing. So what’s so special about online marketing? Turns out, a lot.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Internet marketing is simply the marketing but on steroids. After all, if technology can improve our lives by improving our efficiency, they can also be counted on to help us with marketing. And so today’s marketing has all the following benefits for us: Targeted audience. Think about it—unlike traditional marketing where businesses have to share their advertisements and commercials with everyone with the hope that a small subset of the population might be interested in their products, businesses today can deliver their ads to Internet users who are actually interested in their products. Internet platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have developed their capabilities so much that they can, with a high level of confidence, deliver ads that are highly effective and well-curated to their audiences. Businesses are in charge. For the first time in history, businesses decide how much they bid for their ads (ads with a higher bid appear more frequently than those with lower bids), for how long they appear and have real-time access to their ads. This means that they can increase/decrease bids for their ads, pause or cancel their ad campaigns and change its text instantly. Ads are individually-tailored. Gone are the days when marketers had to shoot in the dark and hope that they hit someone, somewhere, who’s remotely interested in their goods and services. Now, businesses can easily determine who sees their ads on the Internet. They can even have different consumers see different ads based on their online profiles. And so, it is for this reason that online marketing is something every business should consider implementing to their overall business strategy. Today, businesses no longer can ignore the benets of marketing on the Internet any longer. And premier online marketing companies like triHead LLC can help with all forms of online marketing.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”6357″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row]