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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#81

Post by wslh »

zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

> SEO agency owner here

Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly.

It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I understand we are in a niche market but we have real work that differentiate for the few competitors.

A 30' call will work. Are you available?

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#82

Post by snowwrestler »

preommr wrote: post #50
zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

You can’t be ahead of the curve without thinking things that are very different from the current reality.

That said, a lot of different thinking ends up not going anywhere. Only time will sort out the difference.

I will say I agree with the above comment about the current viability of SEO. It’s still very effective. Google is still very heavily used.

One thing to keep in mind is that while organic search might be slipping, other things are slipping at least as much. The slow death of 3rd party cookies is eating away at ad network efficiency. Organic social media reach depends increasingly on influencers, which is a highly fractured and opaque marketplace (inefficient at scale). Email is effective but getting email addresses remains difficult. Trust in press and institutions (aka earned media) is way down. It’s hard out there for marketing!

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#83

Post by soneca »

zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

I never thought that SEO was dying, quite the contrary, I think a lot people learned how to game Google. That’s one of the reasons why I think helpful results on Google are dying (the other reason is ads, of course).

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#84

Post by hiddencost »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

Try Eater.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#85

Post by theturtletalks »

ranting-moth wrote: post #75
zenincognito wrote: post #25

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents. Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bri…

> Business is booming I can believe that. But it also has the equivalent of stage 1 or 2 cancer.

I'd be surprised if business wasn't booming. SEO is not a one-time cost. Google continuously changes the algorithm for search results and agencies stay afloat due to this.

Paid ads on the other hand are pretty much set-up once and you feed in the ROAS to Google and they optimize on that. With Performance MAX, users have even less control.

OP's response is akin to a shovel seller saying business is good when people are saying the gold has run dry.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#86

Post by MarkusQ »

> I began to think that the reason I found them

> endearing and not evil was that while many had

> made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed

> significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff

> Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers

> to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up

> to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke,

> beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm,

> frantically pulling levers behind the scenes

> but ultimately somewhat hapless.

Translation: they were "endearing" because, instead of actually trying to build something, they just made piles of money ruining things for everyone else. Sure, they're parasites, but at least they aren't (god forbid) _productive_.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#87

Post by jh00ker »

gretch wrote: post #60
preommr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head: Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong some exec: It's the same thing! I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicti…

Great point! I think it all depends were you are on the X-Axis of the Amara / Englebart law of technology prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuL0MGJMbp8

In this case, HN posts may be predicting the portion of the exponential curve further to the right, but in fact, we probably still have a long ways to go in the trough before we reach the point the lines cross.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#88

Post by pclmulqdq »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works.

The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#89

Post by prmoustache »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #78
smeagull wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.

Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before , and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records wi…

I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#90

Post by okdood64 »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.
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