Is seo dead ?!
“Websites are dead!”, “Search engine optimization is ineffective!” – those who do not do this shout from all the irons and are trying to attract as many people as possible to their services.
Since our studio is engaged precisely in complex work with sites (development, SEO and contextual advertising), our task is to explain to current clients and future ones why it is worth continuing in the same direction.
In this article, we will consider a painful problem – the effectiveness of search engine optimization and website promotion.
Does SEO die in 2Q20?
No! It just changed. Search engine promotion has been buried many times over the past 10 years, but what was mistaken for the “death” of the customer acquisition channel turned out to be an evolution. It’s just that the methods that were effective 10 or even 5 years ago have changed and the degree of their effectiveness has changed. There are difficulties in the work of search engine optimizers today, often offensive and unfair circumstances, but for now it is important to accept the main thing – SEO still works.
What doesn’t work anymore
Using what we list below, you risk not only not getting the result, but also being under the filter or sanctions of search engines.
Cheating behavioral factors. What it is? Behavioral Factors (PFs) are characteristics of a page or site that describe the behavior of an average visitor and influence search engine rankings.
These include: clicks in search results, traffic, time on site, bounce rate, pageview depth, return on pages, and other parameters.
In the context of today, you can wind up PF (freelance exchanges to help), but search algorithms can easily distinguish people who are really interested in your products / services from “motivated” traffic.
Buying links by “wagons”. 10 years ago, it was quite possible to limit this. Buy 1000 links on questionable and cheap sites and raise the resource in the TOP of search results. Search engines have learned to analyze the link mass and the site’s ranking no longer depends on the number of links. One, natural link from a quality and live resource will give more effect than 1000 links from questionable dead sites.
Spamming keywords. Indeed, there was a time when search engines promoted those sites that contained more keywords to the TOP. But today the situation is different.
You like to read texts like “Moscow buy online cheap with delivery”. No? The search engine doesn’t like it either. Today search engines give preference to user-friendly sites made for people. This also applies to texts.
Surprisingly, SEOs still use this. Despite the fact that Google and Yandex have long learned to understand word forms. “Buy online in Moscow” is the same as “buy Moscow online”.
Spam in the comments. If you spread copy / paste comments all over the Internet, then this will not bring you success either. Today there is a more advanced version of this method – crowd marketing. We had a corresponding article about this.
Placement in 1000 directories. If earlier this helped to improve the position of the site in the search results, today in 99% of cases you will be sanctioned.
What works now
Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and constantly analyzing large amounts of data, on the basis of which they understand how users interact with the World Wide Web. Based on this data, those factors are highlighted, which then become the most important and most strongly influencing the position in the search. They include:
Improving usability (convenience, benefit and comfort of use). Users are becoming more and more picky. They leave the site if they are not satisfied with the design or loading speed.
What needs to be done: carry out deep internal page optimization, maximize the site loading speed, adequately adapt the site for mobile devices and try not to annoy the user with pop-ups and other marketing husks.
You should split search queries into clusters and create pages for each cluster, not a query.
The already mentioned crowd marketing. Ideally, use several approaches at once: publishing articles and participating in discussions (for example).
Don’t ignore the trends in voice search. For example, Bright Local research showed that over the past 12 months, about 58% of consumers have used voice search to find information about companies and products. It is necessary to study the specifics of forming a query by voice and apply it in search engine optimization.
More focus on the mobile version. Between 45 and 80% of your business customers will visit your website using a mobile device. This was the reason for the emergence of the Mobile-first principle in Google. It is already impossible to promote in this search engine without a high-quality mobile version.
Expert content. Who would have thought, but search engines pay attention to how much your expert content is posted on the site. Even a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) filter has been introduced, which monitors this.
If you have written content on your site that has no value, or even worse, content that can harm the user, such pages will drop out of the search results.
Constant monitoring of competitors. Why is this necessary ?! In order to have an understanding of how things are in a niche, find non-obvious points that are important for a given specific topic.
Difficulties of search engine promotion in 2k20
Without them, nowhere. In part, these difficulties are also to blame for the fact that SEO has come to be considered ineffective in promotion channels:
Weaning traffic from organic search results. Make any request to Yandex. Most likely you will see the following picture. The organic search results will be supplemented with: four special placements, a contextual media banner with ads on the right, then another one below on the first page. The second page often contains a link to all Yandex.Direct ads.
Add here mixing in various Yandex services (pictures, maps, videos, services, and others), as well as indexed social networks.
This entails the following changes: the share of traffic that is distributed among organic search results has not changed, but the internal distribution has changed. The average CTR of the first place fell from 58.6% to 38.8%. The second place’s CTR also dropped. The distribution of clicks was “averaged” over the TOP-10.
Business owners are overly focused on PageSpeed Insights load speed metrics. This service from Google checks your site on a number of indicators, and then gives estimates of the download speed for mobile and desktop.
Most of the site owners have learned to look only at the numbers shown by the counter and come with the request “conjure 100% there.”
The most important thing is the recommendations that the service offers. They really have a lot of benefits.
Extreme variability of algorithms. What successfully promoted your projects a year ago may already harm you today. Therefore, it is so important to hire a person or a group of people who are well versed in search engine optimization and constantly keep their finger on the pulse.
Outcome
SEO is not dead, it has changed, it has become more complex and now requires constant monitoring of trends in the field. Hire professionals in your field and you are guaranteed success.