So having wrapped my head around SEO and having produced a strategy
for our group project in this area, it was with ironic amusement that I read
this week that I am already out of date.
“You should be delighted to hear, if you haven’t heard yet, that the
old-fashioned concept of SEO is deader than last week’s sandwich,” crowed Erik
Sherman in a piece in INC
magazine. What a pity! I’d just got it all worked out!
So what’s the new thing? OAO or online audience optimization.
Sherman is happy about this, as he believes that OAO will help entrepreneurs to
remember what is important – “making a connection with an audience.” The bottom
line here is to know your customer, know what their like, and care. Sherman feels that SEO allowed
technology to get in the way and made us forget the only what to win is to
“focus on customers.”
I decided that I should search a little further. It turns out that
the question of whether SEO is dead gets asked often and is a “very heated
topic to boot. There are plenty of folks in the industry who say it’s alive and
well, and plenty of others who think it’s on the way out,” according to Jason
DeMers at Forbes (read more here).
So perhaps this is just another fad?
Well, a more interesting and quantified take by Eric Enge at Search
Engine Watch suggests not. He says: “The last few weeks have been amazing. Google has made some big
changes and they are all part of a longer term strategy ….In short, Google is
doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from tactical SEO behavior and
toward a more strategic approach.”
Enge lists out 6
major changes at Google that should encourage marketers to think more
strategically rather than tactically (i.e. less about page rankings and
keywords, and more about content and audience engagement). Of course, we’ll
need to do both in the short term, but a system that helps ensure corporates
focus on their main purpose – good products, innovative marketing campaigns and
engaging brands – seems more valuable to me than trying to game tech platforms
with ever-increasing lock-downs and tool revisions!
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