Is SEO a Dying Industry?

Every year we hear some whispers from a corner of the marketing industry that SEO is dying. SEO is not dead—even though people have been saying that “search is dead” since the 90s. But do you know that the SEO industry is 65 Billion Dollars? And this industry is growing consistently year by year. 

Today Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic when talking about internet traffic and digital marketing. It is the practice of improving your ranking and increasing organic traffic of online content that you upload on your website. 

Why do people say SEO is dead? 

According to a study, most site owners nowadays need a shortcut. They don't follow the traditional path. New site owners cited "increasing brand awareness". While we know that google reports users clicked on the 1st link is probably 32% and on the second link on an average its 17% and its 2% on the remaining links up to 12.

And from the last few years, we have seen that a lot of websites are growing and going viral like Instagram in 2016, Snapchat in 2018 and now TikTok is at the peak in 2019-2020. They are getting more engagement and new site owners are getting attracted to there ads strategy. But it's not a long term process. You can't run an ad on a social media platform for long as it will snatch bucks from your pockets and we don't know about ROI from these platforms.  

Past, Present and Future of SEO:-

SEO's Past : 

"In the beginning..." SEO was all about technical best practices and manipulating code. Around 1995 people built many sites and mirrored sites. Then with time, all search engines changed their algorithm. In 2004/2005, finally google hit the game in Search Engine optimization. It penalized black hat techniques by which it was becoming a strategic advantage for a lot of organization.s. SEO became a tool for branding, marketing, and sales. 

This is where it got interesting. SEO became more relevant to all business strategies. People find interest in SEO experts and a lot of companies popped up like Moz, SEMRush, Keyword Estimator, WordStream, and KWFinder.

The Present of SEO: 

That' s where we are. Let's talk about a city in the US to give you an overview of SEO market

Markets in Arkansas are very saturated. I have seen 80$ per click view in "SEO services in Arkansas" in AdWords and people are paying for it just to get a few leads in their funnel. 

There are 600 million blogs on the internet as of 2020 and around 32 million blogs have a keyword SEO in it. It's a huge billion-dollar industry. As of data, 40% of SEO consultants are seeing less than $41 million in revenue and at the same time, 10% of them are getting less than $50 million/annual in revenue. 

Future of SEO :

Now that's what we are worried about. It's hard to look into the future as day by day, revolutionary things are going on while some smart minds are working on it. According to Experts SEO is going to change and evolve, as we are handling more business on phones. If phones are getting smarter than SEO, Search engines are also going to be smart. However, SEO - Search Engine Optimization will likely continue to grow in popularity, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future.

Factors for everlasting SEO growth :

• More internet searches
• More users
• More outlets or search engines for visibility
• Decreasing the power of traditional ads
• Increasing SEO civilization

Well if there are positive signs of its growth then there are some signs which show that the popularity of SEO will not grow in an earlier manner :

• Competition and cost
• Knowledge graph and visibility decline
• Alternative search modes