In a recent interview with Geoff Lord of habazar.com he was asked if SEO marketing was a thing of the past.

Critics of search engine optimization (SEO) say that if it is not dead now, it will be dead soon. This is simply not the case. The current circulation of information says that search engines are shifting away from traditional SEO, in order to focus on higher quality content. There is no shift away from traditional SEO; it will need to work side by side with good quality content from now on to compete for higher rankings in search engine results. All of this simply means that quality of the content, rather than solely the little details that aid in bad content, will aid in ranking better in search engine results. Those that believe the naysayers are wrong trust that high-quality content is important, but not more important than proper SEO, and that the two must work cohesively to provide quality content that will rank high

SEO isn’t going anywhere soon.

Even though the whispers are generally false, they do hold kernels of truth. While SEO  isn’t dead, over the years, elements of it have either died or evolved into something totally new. As a result, outdated SEO tactics can now actively kill you.

Obsessing Over the Number One Spot

So many websites focus all of their energy on obtaining the number one spot on Google. Yet, ranking number one doesn’t have the strong correlation of increased website traffic it used to have.

Your click-through rate can be optimized via a compelling meta description and enticing headlines. If there’s a featured snippet box ranking above you try to improve the structure of your content and directly answer the question posed in the search term; this will increase the likelihood of your content being chosen for the featured snippet box

The proclamations that “SEO is dead” have become so widespread that they’ve spawned a list of related—but much weirder—keywords and questions. When I sat down to do keyword research for this article, I came across some strange suggestions:

This is the point where people who like to read about SEO sigh. Yeah, Google has changed its algorithm. Google’s Panda and Penguin and Hummingbird updates made it so that keyword stuffing and spammy link building don’t work anymore.

The days are fading of people typing their searches into Google and trusting anything it spits back at them. This has people searching in new ways. Facebook’s move to step up its search options poses the largest threat to Google’s market share. When users search for something like a new restaurant or movie, they want to see the opinions and behaviors of people they actually know and respect. Google was too slow to adapt this trend and so it now has to either catch up or get left behind. Consumers are more likely to care what their friends’ favorite restaurant is than what restaurant is on the first page that comes up on a local Google search.

So, it’s April 6th, 2018 and SEO is dead… again… One of the oldest cliches on the internet, SEO being dead is about as old as search engine optimization. As Google rolls out its latest update (May Day, Caffeine, The Farmer Update, the latest Panda tweak, Penguin, the EMD update, Penguin 2.0, Hummingbird – whatever), people are cheering the death of SEO right on queue. Any quick search for the term “seo is dead” or “is seo dead” will quickly bring up results from both sides of the argument, though you’ll notice those who argue against this supposed death of SEO populate a larger portion of the top search results. I can’t imagine why…