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February 7, 2022Is SEO Dead? SEO is Dying According to 3 Charts
Search engines, and particularly Google, have heretofore served as the gateway to the online world.
Nobody could find anything on the web without previous knowledge of a domain or access to a search engine.
Traditional advertising could help you get the name of your business and the URL of your site in the eyes of the public, but the only way to get traffic from web visitors who hadn’t heard of you was to rank on Google for competitive terms.
But is SEO dead and dying?
The availability and diversity of online and mobile technology is starting to chip away at the dominance of search engines on online behavior.
We still use search engines, obviously, or Google and Bing would have gone under by now, but their influence is starting to wane in response to important trends and developments.
eCommerce (i.e. Amazon)
The following graphs “show” better than I could “tell.”
Amazon continues to eat away at Google’s market dominance in search YOY.
Amazon continues its march forward, growing its share of revenue over Google.
Over 50% of product searches start on Amazon, not Google.
That’s a big problem for Google. If you’re a product or eCommerce company doing SEO and you’re not optimizing your search on Amazon, you’re missing out on over half of the revenue opportunities online.
Social Media Ubiquity
Facebook (now Meta) did for social media platforms what Google did for search engines—it was the undisputed king.
Until TikTok, overran both Google and Facebook for overall traffic.
Consumers are fickle and willing to move to other mediums for entertainment and consumption.
Facebook itself is making Google search less relevant as it works to keep users on its platform for a source of news and information.
Consider Facebook’s Instant Articles, which allow certain publishers to post full-length versions of their articles for Facebook users to read, without ever posting it to an external site first. This idea came from the fact that more people see certain articles on Facebook than they see them on the original publisher’s site. This isn’t the only functionality that Facebook has added recently, with new aggregated messenger functionality, “buy” buttons for advertisers, and auto-play videos just scratching the surface of what it’s introduced.
Facebook’s goal here is to present an all-in-one online experience for its users, preventing the need for a search engine to find articles or display content. It’s even planning the release of a digital assistant and search engine of its own, accessible entirely within the app itself. Other social media platforms will likely take notice of Facebook’s shift, adopting new features and add-ons of their own until virtually every social media site becomes an all-in-one online experience unto itself.
App Functionality
Finally, consider how the average user’s online experience has changed over the course of the past decade.
Wireless Internet is available almost everywhere, and mobile devices represent the majority of all online marketing activities. Users are no longer reliant on dedicated devices, wired connections, and web browsers to find the information or functionality they need in any given situation.
If they need a ride somewhere, they can use the Uber app. If they want to identify a song, they can use the Shazam app.
Imagine for a moment that you had an app in your phone for every piece of information or every functionality you could ever need from the Internet. At that point, would you ever return to traditional websites or search engines? Chances are slim. Apps are slowly killing off the “traditional” online experience, including search engines, though there are still opportunities for search to survive in the context of those apps (or in the process of finding them to download).
Digital Assistants
In a way, digital assistants are just search engines that rely on voice-based queries rather than typed keywords. But they’re growing more complicated, more diverse in functionality, and they’re being used in far different ways.
Take, for example, Siri and Cortana. Released by Apple and Microsoft, respectively, these assistants take semantic search to new heights by deciphering the intent behind a user query, studying past behaviors, and ultimately personalizing their eventual displayed results. These results may come in the form of offline files, online websites, raw information, or some blend of the three. They’re killing the traditional search engine because they can be accessed from almost any device, without a specific web browser, and they can present all kinds of relevant information with a simple query. Once sold on this voice-activated assistant, the average user is hard-pressed to go back to the type-and-find method.
Other forms of digital assistants are threatening search engines due to their sheer efficiency; instant answer applications like Google’s Knowledge Graph take a user query and algorithmically find the most relevant information immediately. For example, if you run a Google search for a movie, the Knowledge Graph will instantly generate basic information on that movie such as its debut year, principle actors, and any awards it may have won. With this information, users have less reason to click through to actual websites, limiting the potential traffic a site can generate by ranking high for a given query. In this way, Google is gradually shaping user behavior toward a new kind of search—and a new expectation of results.
Conclusion
Search itself isn’t dying: instead, the way we use search is starting to change and the mediums where consumers access information is always in a state of flux.
The conventional form of a type-based single entry that generates pages of potential link acquisition opportunities is starting to disappear in favor of more complex algorithms, more general forms of search that blend online and offline, new types of online experiences, and new platforms that can do everything we need in one location. If you’ve invested the last few years of your life to a killer SEO campaign, you don’t necessarily have a reason to worry—just be on your toes for the changes that come, and be willing to adapt to this new environment.
He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.
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