Is SEO really dead?

If you spend any time online in the tech space these days, you are likely to find articles claiming that all manner of things are dead or dying, and prime amongst these is often SEO. But what these headlines hide is a simple truth: good SEO is as alive as it ever has been, it’s just grown up a little.

Over the past four years or so, Google (and other search engines) have become a lot more intelligent. It used to be that all you needed to do to rank really highly for a particular search term was include it in your page title and lots of times in the text, and have lots of links to that page from other websites. In short, it was about sending signals to the robots at search engines.

Today, the world of search has moved on and the algorithms that govern search results are a lot more complex.

In response to these changes – and believe us, they are happening all the time – search engine optimisation has evolved. Today good SEO is not about those robots, it is about the people who look at your website and giving them a great experience that matches what they were looking for. Why? Because, simply put, search engines want to offer their users the best experience and reward those who offer it.

There are still the ‘technical’ details that we need to look after, but today SEO is really a much broader term that includes lots of aspects. By focusing on what people are coming to the page for, we can create a much better experience for them; as a result, the website gains more trust with search engines (and other websites, which is also really important), which leads to better search rankings.

So is SEO dead? No, it really isn’t, it has just changed with the times.