FAQ: How and why is SEO evolving?

All the classic tricks to get sites ranking higher, faster are becoming increasingly more costly, because:

  1. Sites already at the top are increasingly well cemented, often reaching such popularity that their continued growth in reputation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so long as they stay mildly relevant.
  2. Tricks to beat those at the top are becoming increasingly ineffective, because:
    1. They are more easily detected as unnatural and ignored.
    2. They are less valued by algorithms, as engines are better at using more direct & reliable user satisfaction signals instead.

This is the direction search engines have been moving in, gradually, for decades, and they are nearing the point of perfection now.

Keywording and linkbuilding are becoming increasingly less effective, compared to real relevance and genuine user satisfaction which is getting increasingly easy for search engines to detect. The internet is only a few decades old, remember, and AI has come on a long way recently.

The SEO industry is slowly but surely being replaced by a combination of general accessibility (for crawling), real relevance (for indexing), and general marketing tactics (for ranking). It won’t be long before there is nothing unique to SEO aside from the way it simply merges other disciplines together, and an awareness of how to use each search engine’s own user console.

Suites like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, YouTube Studio and Amazon Seller Central will soon be seamlessly integrated with paid search suites for frictionless up-selling while residual demand for organic search services is consistently stumped and alternative channels are hastily explored.

There’s still time

There is bound to be strong residual demand for traditional SEO for many years to come, even when supply is rarely able to meet demand, just as people are still using keywords meta tags – anyone who’s not an SEO expert will simply have no reason to think anything’s changed. And so long as demand for SEO exists, SEO London will be here to hold your hand.