In 2012, Matt Cutts of Google’s security team declared SEO was dead. With the large Google algorithm updates in 2012, including both Penguin and Panda, it seemed that SEO could have been killed off as a viable internet marketing tool. But it’s not. What is dead is a spam centric approach to SEO and internet marketing. But SEO is alive and well and has evolved to offer more functionality to internet marketing like never before. The SEO industry, and internet marketing by extension, evolves at the speed of light. These industries are driven in part by the search engine changes and in part by internet users engaging with your internet marketing content.
If you’re still pursuing the failed internet marketing policies of the past, then your site is likely still feeling the sting of the Penguin and Panda updates. And you’re likely still trying to figure out how to regain your traffic with internet marketing tactics. You can use SEO to do so, but you’ll want to pay attention to the shift in focus. Read further so you can find out how SEO is still a viable piece of internet marketing today.
SEO Has Adapted within Internet Marketing
Every year someone declares SEO is dead and there’s a lot of flurry in the internet marketing industry. Customers wring their hands in fear and SEO specialists scramble to see if their internet marketing efforts are still viable. On site SEO and off site SEO tactics are still used on a daily basis to propel content to the first pages of search engines and into the hands of users. Let’s examine the ways in which SEO is still a viable piece of internet marketing:
- Optimized content brings traffic to your website. In the past, internet marketers discovered the more you stuff your content with keywords, the higher your content can appear in search engines. This led to spammy content light and keyword rich articles written solely with SEO in mind. With the 2012 updates to Google’s algorithm, this loophole was closed. But optimizing your internet marketing content with valuable keywords didn’t die. What died was the keyword stuffing, not the value of inserting valuable keywords naturally into your high quality internet marketing content. This tool remains viable and still brings traffic to your website with natural SEO tactics. Optimized content for internet marketing brings a staggering 14.6% conversion rate versus the 1.7percent conversion rate of outbound leads.
- Public relations has adopted SEO to bring more high quality links to your website. SEO operates by building link profiles and optimizing your internet marketing content. Today, public relations practitioners have discovered that they can extend the life of their press release and provide these valuable links by adopting an SEO approach to public relations. That’s not to suggest your business should start spamming the internet with junk press releases as an internet marketing strategy. The days where that worked are long over. Instead, today’s public relations has provided a huge boost to internet marketing by providing valuable links to your website. This is done by inserting links with natural anchor text into your press releases and providing keyword rich content to boost your internet marketing and draw more traffic to your website.
- Social media has become a tool of SEO. The 2012 algorithm changes have adopted to provide more personal and valuable results to internet visitors. Using social media in internet marketing has become extremely popular because brands now estimate it accounts for 40% of their website traffic. Search engines now proudly display social media results higher in search results, valuing social media shares. This has become a new form of SEO whereby businesses create content that is both valuable and keyword rich to attract higher search engine results and higher traffic to their website.
Internet Marketing Has Changed to Value Symbiotic Marketing Techniques
The key to a great internet marketing campaign is to realize that your internet marketing now requires multiple strategies working to support one another. SEO has not died as a part of internet marketing, but has been reimagined in order to work symbiotically with other internet marketing tactics such as public relations, content marketing, and social media. The combination of these efforts continues to bring companies huge internet marketing gains and continues to show that SEO is still alive and kicking. If your business is looking for larger gains from your internet marketing, you may want to try inserting some SEO into your other internet marketing tactics.