SEO Marketing Is Dead, Is Dead! Long Live SSOM

Link bait title? Perhaps. Yet, after much thought, research and consideration of our day to day client processes, we've come to the realization of a simple fact: SEO marketing really is dead. It's been in the death throes for a while and optimizers have just been too busy to see it.

Before you jump up and down and throw things in disbelief, outrage, read on. We ask that you consider first the argument we're going to share. If you still don't agree when we're all done, then by all means, let the rotten veggie throwing and the food fight begin...

SEO Marketing As It Once Was

Originally, back in about 1996-97, submitting sitemaps and URLs was the way to go. After all, search engines just weren't that quick at indexing, and were happy that webmasters wanted to help. Originally, "optimizers" needed to fill in the meta data – including the much debated keyword meta tag – to point the search algorithms on their way in terms of relevant indexing. Don't get us started on keyword density...

The point is, search engine optimization marketing or just "SEO", really did market to the search engines, as the name implies. Filling in meta data, for the most part, wasn't about being click friendly. Submitting site pages certainly had nothing to do with the user. To the untrained eye, anything that passed the Google test was acceptable; to the trained marketers and optimizers, we knew relevance would stand the test of time.

However, SEO – at the down and dirty base of things - is about ranking, not conversions. Conversion worries are for the marketers. SEO gets you the magical word: traffic.

The Growth of SEO in Marketable Skills

From site submission and meta stuffing, the SEO industry has grown in leaps and bounds. Not only in the sophistication of the strategies, but also in the wide range of things an optimizer might delve into, such as:

• Technical optimization
• On page optimization
• Link building
• Digital asset optimization

On any given project, an optimizer might deal with HTML coding, writing marketable, optimized copy, defining link-building strategies, assigning digital asset guidelines or all of the above and more.

The Addition of Social Factors

When social came along, you may have been one of the ones who began using it as a marketing tactic or a campaign strategy. However, many people considered it a fad – much like SEO when it first started. Several optimizers scoffed – unless they paid attention to the search patents.

Personalized search made things a little more difficult. How do you rank a client's site across everyone's personalized results? Some SEOs again scoffed – they ignored it, based on the thought process of:

Yeah, sure, but how many people sign in to Google?

The real fly in the SEO ointment came when Google's powers that be admitted the search engine uses social signals as a ranking factor. We, professional SEO specialists everywhere, could no longer ignore that search was changing, and that social would play a big part in the future.

Google Plus comes out and, although it remains to be seen how many non-geeks will choose to use the social network, a lot more people grabbed a Google account. To use Google Plus you have to be signed in, and guess what – your results change depending on your social graph.

As well (although not in actual timeline order), the Android passed Apple in the smartphone race, snagging 33% of the U.S. market in early 2011. The mostly commonly visited type of site (77%) is a search engine, and those with an Android use Google. To use an Android, you have to have a Google account. Put all that together, and you get personalized search for 33% of the U.S. market.

The Winds of Change

Seems like we SEOs had better expand our minds and face the reality that times, they are a changin':

• Personalized search is here to stay
• Personalized search is about relationships
• Link building (the good, sticky, won't get your site banned, won't disappear within three weeks, kind) is about relationships
• Relationships are about being social
• Social is a ranking factor (even if personalized search is turned off)
• Ranking isn't static (positions change based on: location, data center, signed in/signed out, social graphs)

Can you still market yourself as an SEO provider without being deceptive? Of course you can. However, if you're not willing to accept that your efforts (without considering social factors) won't do as much as they once did, you're doing yourself and your client a major disservice.

SSOM – SEO Part 2

It's clear, at least to us, that SEO has evolved way beyond its original form – when it was bright and shiny and new and easy. It's more expensive than it once was, due to the amount of skills needed to perform the list of tasks, as well as the economic rule of supply and demand. It's definitely more complicated than it once was.

So where does that leave us? Well, relevance is still a key player, but then, so is relationships. Therefore, we end up with a conglomeration of steps that no longer fit under the broad term of search engine optimization. We're left with something like SSOM – Social Search Optimized Marketing. Okay, so the title needs work....

The steps:

1. Technical SEO – Define and resolve technical issues with the site, such as:

• Canonical
• 4xx and 5xx errors
• 3xx codes
• Duplicate content
• Broken links
• Slow site performance
• Non-indexation of URLs

2. Key Terms/Competitors Analysis – Analyze and define competitors / relevant key terms

3. On page SEO – Define and resolve on page issues, such as:

• Empty page titles/meta tags
• Relevance of site content
• Quality of site content

4. Content Development – Define targeted, relevant content strategies

• Develop quality, targeted, relevant content
• Develop company-based content creation guidelines, which include:
  • How titles will be written (for SERPs and on page)
  • How meta data will be handled
  • A set of foundational topics
  • A set of secondary topics
  • A set of tertiary topics
  • How bios will be written
  • How URLs will be handled. Examples:
    • Short
    • Stop words stripped
    • Hyphens, underscores or pluses, etc. as word separators

5. Digital Asset Guidelines – Define how the company will deal with digital assets, such as:

• Set up guidelines/checklist to handle PDFs, such as filling in document properties
• Set up guidelines/checklist for other types of documents, such as Excel files
• Set up guidelines for optimizing videos for upload and hosting on YouTube or other video sites

6. Link Building Strategies – Define how link building programs will be handled

• Develop link building guidelines, including:
  • Type and quality of potential linking sites (for outreach linking)
  • Internal linking strategies
  • External linking strategies
  • Anchor text guidelines
• Define whether local optimization is viable and, if so, where to develop accounts, such as:
  • Google Places
  • Yelp
  • Yellow Pages

7. Social Strategies – Define how social outreach programs will be handled

• Develop social guidelines, including:
  • How business profiles will be set up
  • Should employee personal profiles be connected to the business site?
    • If yes, should the business site have a disclaimer that employees’ views do not reflect the views of the company?
  • Define how links will be handled when sharing on social networks. Example:
  • Using only tinyurl, bit.ly, etc. to shorten links
  • Hash tags to be used when posting on Twitter

8. Reputation Management – Define how the company's online reputation will be managed and tracked, such as:

• Through social mentions
• Through monitoring sites
• Through alerts

SEO is Constantly Changing

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, and – we think – outlined throughout, SEO has changed from its beginnings to encompass a variety of tasks, skills and so on. In fact, it has changed to the point that SEO no longer aptly covers all the ins and outs of the industry.

SEM doesn't cover it, because SEM points more towards paid advertising. Internet Marketing doesn't cover it, because it's too broad a term. So, after all this, the question we pose to you is – assuming we've made our point – what would you call the new SEO?