I have been trying to say this to some of my clients for some time - Marketing and Branding count for much, much more than any SEO/SEM you can do - maybe they'll accept it now that leading SEO authority Mike Grehan just said it, than me.
In fact, saying that SEO is dead got Mike Grehan a couple of death threats yesterday - and he ended up deleting a blog post he wrote about his widely read ClickZ article SEO Is Dead. Long Live, er, the Other SEO
"…I'm very excited about Universal. I'm very excited about the future of the industry. I'm very pissed off that last night some assholes invaded my private in-box suggesting that, perhaps, it would be better if I was dead, not SEO, as I'd written in my ClickZ column.
Unfortunately, I took the bait and posted here. This morning, I deleted the post. I think it is the most abhorrent thing ever, when, having just suffered the death of two of my most treasured and loved family, someone is evil enough to write to me and suggest that I follow them.
But enough of that. There are sick people everywhere, even in search, it appears."
I can totally sympathize - it's awful for people to react like that by threatening him - and it's not like Mike Grehan is saying anything different than what a lot of people are beginning to say…that SEO, while still important (mainstream now), is not getting results people expect. Mike Grehan is just stirring up the pot and that's why he's generated a reaction.
"…What does it mean for SEO professionals moving forward? It means we've finally reached point where better marketing counts — and not H1 tags. I want my company's site pages to be found with links to audio/visual presentations and images and blogs and…well, everything that can provide the best user experience, ever.
But, surely, I'll still need an SEO geek to tell me really interesting stuff about search engine crawlers and load balancing and code…and z-z-z-z-z-z-z."
I think Mike Grehan could have gone further and wrote a column on how searchers are evolving … it's not just the search engines …it's us. We want more - we're sick lousy content, of marketing that does not work, of fake branding…we want immediate, real results that are relevant to us….. and not some cheap SEO Trick…with H1 tags, or whatever it takes to be on the first page of results - or be number one.
It doesnt matter anymore if your #1 or #10 - in fact, you can't predict what your going to be ….within 2 - 3 years - everyone is going to see an entirely different set of search results based on who they are and where they're located due to personalization and Geo-targeting getting more and more sophisticated and precise.
What SEO will be when that happens is anyone's guess - if I take a shot at it … it will not be called Search Engine Optimization … as the term will be obsolete . I'm guessing SEO will become something like Search Audience Personalization, or something like that.
Practitioners will have to evolve a new set of tools and go after audience segments and try to figure out what terms they may use - and what images they might use (as Search Engines will start reading images - and even Flash and Javascript to some extent). It almost suggests that in the future SEO will be merged entirely with Content Creation and the SEO person, whatever they are called in 3-5 years, will be on the Content Creation team in Agencies - as the content will have to be planned, from the get go to sync in with the intended audiences.
From this point on, my crystal ball gets cloudy …. at the rate technology is evolving and people are evolving - it's almost impossible to predict beyond 5 years what things are going to look like for SEO in 2012, for example, so I won't try.
All I can say is Mike Grehan is right in saying SEO is dead, it died already in the last year or two and people have not accepted it yet - but just go look at your conversion rates and you'll see that unless you do better marketing and branding … forget about SEO, at best it will have a minimal effect of the bottom line without better branding and marketing.
