[zelly]

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives.

The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to-door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.

[weisbaum]

This isn't accurate for a few different reasons...

1. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.

2. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.

3. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.

I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.

[xamuel]

>If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.

I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?

[cbsmith]

You're missing the point here. Regardless of the causes of the decline, there are invariably things you can do to improve your content or just generally change your approach.

[ClumsyPilot]

Improving your content to optimise for SEO is not the same as improving it for the user. I hope that fact was made bloody obvious by SEO-hugging websites full of garbage occupying top spot of many google searches.

In fact i might google a spesific product, like a Monitor, and the top result will be "but Monitor XYZ on Amazon". When i click on the link, turns out they don't actually sell or stock that product at all!

[weisbaum]

There is absolutley a blend that the smartest marketers understand how to activate. In fact, id argue that the advent of adding 'reddit' to the end of a query signals a change is necessary in order to really surface the best content for a given result. Even Quora is filled with spam these days. Spammers will get into anything wherever they can.

With that being said, in any marketing tactic, the right way isn't always the best way - however - understanding why some garbage site ranks for your query is incredibly helpful in figuring out how you can improve your content to do the same.

[sowbug]

You clicked an ad. Amazon is happy to have paid for you to land there.

[ClumsyPilot]

Please, I not a genius but even I can tell apart an ad from a search result.

[ALittleLight]

This seems a bit backwards to me. If you have the best website for a subject, and Google doesn't rank it, the problem is not that your SEO is bad, it's that Google is failing. You have the best website for the query and Google's job is to find the best websites for a query. If Google fails to do that, that shouldn't mean you need to do more work. It should mean Google needs to make some kind of change.

[ghaff]

>How is that "deserved"?

It may be deserved because that's what many people want rather than a plain vanilla list of ingredients and instructions.

[tehjoker]

I haven't met a single person that prefers the current state of things. Every time my friends and I search for a recipe we are constantly annoyed by having to scroll through a story that appears to be there simply for ad placement or SEO.

[ozfive]

This is a common issue for more people than you may imagine. Having to scroll through stories and ads is beyond deplorable. My wife and I have gone back to books as they are timeless curated sources of information.

[ghaff]

I have zero issue with finding a basic recipe if that's what I want. I prefer background and context.

[tehjoker]

I don't mind background and context, I just mind them being placed in a way that makes it difficult to locate and use the other information.

[heavenlyblue]

You prefer, but is it useful?

[weisbaum]

That assumes there is no progress, convergent thought, or evolution in your field and its entirely static. As an expert you should want to figure out and identify new ways to explain or communicate your field - again - sitting static is never a good idea, in any industry, ever.

With that being said, google can recognize brands, influencers and leaders in a given industry - but if they dont actually explain their content or choose to do it in textbooks rather than online, why do you feel that their overly complicated expert opinion deserves to rank over some new site who tries to approach and explain the topic in a more simple way? Furthermore how can this unquestionable expert prove to a new user on their site they actually are an expert? Who cares if the other academics in a field look to this person as a leader, the general user needs to be convinced in a way that leverages experience, authority and trust.

You have to DESERVE to rank. It has always been that way. Yes there will be people who try and game the system, and that game will work for a set period of time, but not forever. They want to display the best content to the user. Just because someone is an expert does NOT mean they automatically have the best content or explain it in the most user friendly way. This has always been Google's M.O. and will be and is also how it should be.

EDIT: Content farm gibberish can outrank unoptimized better content - because its created specifically to game the system, and often those content farms spend more time building links or promoting the content. The bigger worry here is GPT3 and how that begins to erode the trust of content as a medium over time.

[throwaway2048]

You are ignoring the point about how content farm adcram jibberish regularly beats out actual good content, SEO wise.

Not new cutting edge ideas that have passed your old ideas by, and Google is doing the world a favour.

A pile of garbage.

[T-hawk]

There's room for both of your arguments. Industries are different.

Industries that work on a workflow of hunting and fulfilling need SEO. People search for an item or service that they know exists and grab the top result.

Industries that work on a workflow of discoverability and browsing take advantage of social media. You didn't know you wanted that cute dress or household gadget until some listing pushed it into your attention.

[marcrosoft]

I would like to take the opportunity to point out that your comment could be exposed to thousands more viewers.

We at the SEO-institute-of-fill-in-the-blank can dramatically increase your traffic.

[Yetanfou]

Imagine a down-voting button for search results. Had it not been so easy to abuse this might be a solution to this conundrum.

[dumbfoundded]

I don't think that's true. The reason SEO is hurting is because google is trying to increase their revenue by increasing the space that ads and their own widgets take up. SEO, Social (both micro and macro), Email, Paid Ads are all different viable types of marketing. The best strategy is to find a good balance of multiple items. You can build a large company on SEO alone. You can build a large company on social. The best companies seem to be the ones in multiple channels. The only long term sales channel that really matters at all is word of mouth. Customers directly getting other customers for you. Every other channel is hyper competitive.

[john_moscow]

There's plenty of legitimate SEO that does work. Figure out what your audience is struggling with, and publish articles explaining how your product solves that.

[a13n]

There are multi-million dollar businesses that run entirely on content + SEO (eg https://sleepopolis.com/).

Yes, you are taking on a big platform risk in that your business depends on Google continuing to serve you high amounts of traffic. Does that mean "you will go extinct one way or another", heck no.

Risk management is a big part of building a business. Just because there's a low chance that you could lose a significant chunk of your revenue overnight doesn't mean the business isn't worth starting.

Every company has risk (AWS, Stripe, npm, etc, etc, etc).

[zelly]

The opportunities to start businesses like that are shrinking every day, by design, by the way that search engines are supposed to work. There is more content produced every day, some of it very good, and there can only be one (1) first page of search results. Your doom is essentially guaranteed. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's just not an innovative or forward-thinking field to get into. The only way this risk would not exist is if search engines were inherently corrupt and you had some reverse engineered way to rank at the top. That ship sailed 5+ years ago[1] when the top search engines switched to machine learning.

[1] Unless you're w3schools, for some reason.

[riffic]

SEO itself is a garbage industry full of pseudoscience and snake oil quackery but the fundamental process of optimizing your web presence is something that isn't going away.

Social media is not a replacement for a great web presence.

[Animats]

If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another.

Yes. Also, Google is cracking down on off-brand sites pushing medical advice.

[killface]

Exactly. The web of yesteryear where you could make a living one-manning a website is practically gone. If you told me 20 years ago that I'd pine for the days of blogs, I'd have laughed. Now who's laughing...

[WA]

If people look for a solution to a problem, SEO is still the number one for marketing strategies. It’s a lot less effective if you just sell another brand of a consumer good item such as coffee or whatever.