SEO Is Dead! Or, Well, Not.

Ready for a new round of why an online marketing discipline is pushing up the daisies? Sure you are. Soundtrack, please!

So in my professional feed recently, there's been much back and forth about how the job skills based in SEO work are now being transitioned to social media, because that's how Those Wacky Kids find stuff, and we're all about the leads, and those are coming from social now. (Also, How SEO Is Dead, Dead, Dead, because no form of Internet advertising is allowed to just be; it's either on the rise or at death's door.)

But on some level, this speaks to a generational shift that's more than platforms or sites, and will require more nuanced thought. Which leads me to the following bit of theorizing.

The first way to find anything on the Web was to either go to portal pages and be passive, or to take the wheel with search engines and drive as an active user. Users who grew up with closed system software, no "wisdom of crowds", and the relatively sudden wonder of a world-changing utility were used to finding their own information. It may have been time-consuming, or frustrating, but on some level, they took pride in the accomplishment, and were indoctrinated to that way of working.

The active users today are using esoteric search engines, maybe even checking the dark Web, and going far beyond ordinary sites. They are also more at risk for viruses and malfeasance, because black hat coding is a world-wide crime of opportunity. In addition to that chilling, the passive users are outnumbering them, because mobile traffic is outpacing desktop / laptop. So instead of being directed by the portal page, passive traffic comes from content aggregators and social media tastemakers or algorithms. Passive is more prevalent, and for an entire generation used to small screen hardware, "active" surfing is a rare event.

What I suspect will happen from all of this is a separation of traffic worth and levels. In many consumer categories, it's defensible to de-select mobile traffic, the same as you might countries where your product is not supported. It's defensible today, and demographically, it may be defensible for a very long time. Which doesn't really speak to the SEO Death Knells, especially when you take into consideration the following.

Just because search hasn't changed very much in the past 10 to 15 years does not mean that's going to continue. Wearable technology, the Internet of Things, increasingly accurate voice recognition, all have significant power to make SEO grow again. So does data analysis that shows commerce is platform driven, or the profound spend level difference between demographic classes, especially with the rough employment conditions facing Millennials. This can and might all change again, in ways that are very hard to predict.

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