The answer to this question is No.

Ever since search engines became the dominant way internet users find information, products, or things to do; there have been pundits who have predicted the end of search engine optimization (SEO). The first known person to state that SEO was going to die was Richard Hoy who published an article titled “Search Engines are Dying” on November 10th, 1997.

While Richard was the first, one of the most famous statements of “SEO is Dead” was made by a self proclaimed guru Jeremy Shoemaker aka “ShoeMoney” in 2005 but in his blog post he states that he got the idea from millionaire Jason Calcanis a year earlier at an SEO conference.

Ever since then the statement “SEO is Dead” has become a sort of inside joke in the SEO industry. Each time a new technology emerges that might be used by consumers more than search engines, a pundit will publish a blog post, article, or video claiming that ‘SEO is dead’.

This unfortunately often misleads small business owners, CEO’s, CMO’s, and young marketers entering the field into believing that they don’t need to worry about search engine rankings or SEO at all.

To answer the question “Is SEO Dead?” periodically we perform research to see how the market is behaving. Our work doesn’t focus on the usage of search engines by consumers, but instead we look at metrics that might indicate demand from the business world for SEO services. The thought is that if SEO was dead or dying we would see a reduction in demand metrics for SEO and an increase in demand metrics for a competing form of digital marketing such as paid social, social media, ppc, content marketing, etc…

Our most recent version of this research was published in November of 2017. That research showed that searches for local seo services on Google are continuing to increase year over year. In that research we also examined Google Trends which showed SEO trending far higher than other forms of digital marketing.

You can read that research here: SEO Is Not Dead, Not Even Close

So is SEO dead?

The answer to that question right now is an unequivocal NO

Beyond the Question of SEO’s death

Just because SEO isn’t dead, that doesn’t mean that other types of digital marketing have less value or that SEO is a must have for your business. Consumers on the modern web are increasingly using a large array of platforms to inform their decision making. Many product searches start on Amazon, Pinterest, or Instagram before the consumer ever makes a search on an engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Informational searches might start on Wikipedia or YouTube, app install searches are most likely to start on Apple’s iOS app store or Google’s Play store, and local searches might start on Facebook, Yelp, or Instagram.

Some Research on Non-SEO Channels

Research over the past decade has shown consumers willingness to use various other platforms to inform their decision making process. If you understand consumer psychology, that means before a purchase or contact with your business is ever made, a consumer might use content or information on non-search engine platforms to determine if they even want to visit your website to consider doing business with you. This comes in the form of reviews, recommendations, or simple consumer preference on what platform to start their journey on.

Here is some of that research.

According to a survey by Adeptmind in March of 2018, 46.7% of US based online shoppers went to Amazon first to search for a product compared to 34.6% going to Google first.

Also in March of 2018 Pinterest reveled in a post that they get approximately 2 billion searches each month on their platform and 97% of those searches are unbranded.

In September of 2016 Instagram released a study stating that 60% of their users learned about a new product or service on Instagram

A 2013 study by noted SEO Joe Youngblood discovered that 73% of social media users researched a local business after they noticed a friend perform a ‘check in’ on social media.

Examples of possible successful non-SEO approaches

There are plenty of websites and apps that find success while ignoring SEO best practices at first, leveraging the power of other platforms to first build their business before turning their attention to SEO. The trick is finding the right mix and fit for your business. Here are some hypotheticals to show how SEO may not be necessary to drive profits (at least at first).

If you are selling a product for example with a really high profit margin, you can dig into that margin a little more to run paid ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and even Amazon to push sales. As your sales come in you can adjust your ad buys and move some budget to SEO, content, and link building.

If you are running a YouTube channel and hope that your channel might take off and you become the next Ryan’s Toys or Pewdiepie, simple YouTube SEO tactics will help get your videos more views over time, but building a social media audience through paid and organic efforts is likely to pay quick dividends.

If you are running a local small business you might rely on platforms such as Home Adviser or GrubHub to get your sales going before taking some of your profits and investing in SEO.

If you’re promoting a mobile app you might use app install ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google and use PR to get your app brand more notice from possible users. Honey, a browser extension for online shopping, used a similar approach and sold for $4 billion in 2019.

Google’s Evolution (and Bing’s)

For their part Google knows that consumers demands and preferences are changing. If you’ve used Google at all in the past few years you might have noticed the search results are a lot more interactive, more information is being displayed without requiring a click to a website (so called “zero click searches), and Google is offering more and more ways for consumers to take action with a business without ever leaving the engine (what we refer to a Task Completion Engine).

Bing has largely followed suit and it appears most major engines in the world will soon offer similar functions and features, providing a more integrated experience with their search results and other product. This is problematic for websites that rely soley on SEO traffic as it means Google and other engines are working to take more and more of that traffic for themselves in hopes of driving higher margins on a per user basis. Once a large volume of SEOs and web developers discovered this was Google’s long-term plan, many began calling on businesses to diversify their approach and use more than one platform. The problem is that diversification is expensive and time consuming and the other platforms are also actively working against businesses in their own ways.

As Google continues to evolve they may start to look more like South Korea’s Naver and less like a search engine the way we know them to be. Naver requires nearly all content to be hosted by Naver themselves and only displays content from the web when they have nothing on their advertising, blog, or video hosting services. For businesses in South Korea this means largely paying Naver to reach people. Facebook’s News Feed algorithm and increasingly Instagram’s also work in a similar fashion, favoring their own content over almost everything else.

Conclusion

SEO may not be dead, but it is also not always necessary, at least when first starting off. Know your own strengths and weaknesses and how the market looks and you’ll be able to make that determination on your own. If you start off ignoring SEO know that you’ll need to do a lot of work later on to fix issues once you start paying attention to it.