Link bait title? Perhaps. Yet, after much thought, research and consideration of our day to day client processes, we’ve come to the realization of a simple fact: seo marketing really is dead. It’s been in the death throes for a while and optimizers have just been too busy to see it.

Before you jump up and down and throw things in disbelief, outrage, read on. We ask that you consider first the argument we’re going to share. If you still don’t agree when we’re all done, then by all means, let the rotten veggie throwing and the food fight begin…

Seo marketing as it once was

Originally, back in about 1996-97, submitting sitemaps and urls was the way to go. After all, search engines just weren’t that quick at indexing, and were happy that webmasters wanted to help. Originally, “Optimizers” needed to fill in the meta data – including the much debated keyword meta tag – to point the search algorithms on their New Zealand Business Fax List ay in terms of relevant indexing. Don’t get us started on keyword density…

The point is, search engine optimization marketing or just “Seo”, really did market to the search engines, as the name implies. Filling in meta data, for the most part, wasn’t about being click friendly. Submitting site pages certainly had nothing to do with the user. To the untrained eye, anything that passed the google test was acceptable; to the trained marketers and optimizers, we knew relevance would stand the test of time.

However, seo – at the down and dirty base of things – is about ranking, not conversions. Conversion worries are for the marketers. Seo gets you the magical word: traffic.

The growth of seo in marketable skills

From site submission and meta stuffing, the seo industry has grown in leaps and bounds. Not only in the sophistication of the strategies, but also in the EF Leads wide range of things an optimizer might delve into, such as:

Technical optimization
On page optimization
Link building
Digital asset optimization
On any given project, an optimizer might deal with html coding, writing marketable, optimized copy, defining link-building strategies, assigning digital asset guidelines or all of the above and more.

The addition of social factors.