The Evolution of SEO
Intro
I believe its important to understand search engine optimization’s (SEO) past in order to predict future trends in the industry.
Before we begin, I think its important to keep mind the following facts about search engines:
- PPC ads are typically served in search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Pay per click (PPC) ads are a huge cash cow for search engines, generating large sums of revenue and profit
Therefore, its critical to all search engines to deliver the most relevant results in their SERPs. If SERP quality goes down for a user, they may turn to another search engine. Therefore, all search engines devote huge amounts of resources to ensure they continually deliver up relevant search results, to maintain search volume and continue to generate profits from PPC ads.
In addition, many brands have poured money into SEO to increase high-quality website traffic to their web properties, but have demanded quick results. This led to the growth of “blackhat” SEO tactics, designed to game the search engine algorithms that determine what pages rank in the SERPs. This has led to an “arms race” between some SEO firms and search engines, because search engines want to deliver the most relevant results, while some SEO firms are focused on gaming the system to deliver results for their clients.
The Stone Age (2000–2005)
In the early “naughts”, Google was quickly gobbling up search market share from competitors, because many of the search engine result pages (SERPs) from competing search engines were almost worthless at delivering the content users were looking for. Sponsored ads and results from the search company’s paid properties typically dominated the top results. The line between paid and “organic” (I’ll put these in quotes here because the term was in its infancy) results was very hard to determine.
Google quickly differentiated itself by delivering an unobtrusive experience that was focused on the user first. Adwords launched this era, but was very unique due to their use of Dutch auctions as a model for their bidding platform.
One of the key technologies were “spiders”, or bots that crawled through websites and webpages, using the content to create entries and links for their search engine.
At this point in time, many corporate websites were an afterthought or side project, and many company websites created “brochure” sites. These sites, and some of the technologies of the day were not focused on increasing search engine rankings, creating a huge opportunity for those on the leading edge.
In this age, much of the focus was on the underlying code of the web pages. Optimizing meta tags, W3C compliance, alt tags for images, search engine friendly URLs, and using div> based layouts as opposed to table>s were almost as important as the content.
Google filed their IPO in 2004, and as SEO became a marketing buzzword while search engines spiders increased in sophistication, these code-level optimizations, while still critical, were less of a differentiator for those wanting to reach the top 3 of their targeted key terms in Google.
The Bronze Age (2006–2010)
As SEO increased as a popular way to increase web traffic, and as companies began to realize the importance of the digital channel, the Flash intro met its untimely death (yay!).
AJAX programming technology emerged in 2006 as an alternative way to dynamically present content without having to sacrifice code that could be crawled by search engine spiders.
Meta tags were being used and abused at this point, with many “blackhat” SEO engaging in keyword stuffing meta tags, including invisible keyterms at the bottom of the pages.
The order of the day was “backlink building”. The name for Google’s search engine before it became “Google” was “Backrub”, because of the importance of backlinks as a indicator of the authority (and therefore ranking) of a domain in the SERPs.
Bad SEO firms gamed the systems by building backlinks in “link farms” and comment spamming, and the good ones were expanding out their practices to deliver link building on quality websites as a differentiator for the SEO services they offered.
For web marketers, much of the content created for SEO was syndicated on third-party sites pointing back to the domain they were trying to improve rankings for. Blogger outreach was an important initiative, but there were downsides to creating content, only to provide it to another websites, in the hopes they would publish it in a timely manner, but much control was ceded in terms of the quality of the site that the content was published on, in terms of design, and other content that existed on the site.
In addition, much of the focus was on the “chunking” out the web content into “long-tail” keyterm-focused pages, with each page concentrating all content for that particular targeted key term. This led to a less-than-optimal user experience, as web visitors typically had to visit multiple web pages within the site to gain the information they were really seeking.
The Iron Age (2011-?)
The beginning of this age can be marked by Verizon’s announcement that they would start offering Apple’s iPhone, another step that indicating that the mobile era was upon us. Mobile is more important than ever, with a focus on local SEO, mobile optimization and eventually, responsive design.
In this age, almost all marketers have the benefit of working with a search engine friendly content management system (CMS), that decreased the importance of the coding optimizations undergone in the Stone Ages. However, there will always need to be efforts dedicated to ensuring that the technical and coding side of the websites are taken care of, whether it’s the proper 301/302 redirects, sitemaps.xml, robots.txt, leveraging HTTPs, and other upcoming developments like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).
Marketers began publishing their valuable content on their site rather than 3rd-party sites as Google’s algorithms continued to increase in sophistication. In addition, spiders were getting better at detecting quality, well-written content, requiring the use of talented writers, rather than SEO experts adept at replacing pronouns with proper nouns.
Marketers refocused their efforts on content on their websites, increasing lengths and covering multiple topics on one page, rather than having singularly-focused key term pages. Semantic search pushed the envelope further, focusing on intent, as more and more mobile users use voice-to-text to enter natural language search queries to find the information they are looking for on the go.
Social media replaced the third-party vertically-focused blog sites many marketers leveraged to build backlinks. Now, content must be mapped to the customer journey, to anticipate the questions and concerns your target market may have while exploring the solutions you offer.
Conclusion (is this evolution a good thing?)
In my opinion, yes! The evolution of SEO, the sophistication of the search engines and spiders are a good thing, allowing marketers to quit focusing on search engines, and start focusing on customers. Getting back to the marketers roots, of delivering the relevant content potential customers need to move them further down the funnel.
Who benefitted from what age?
- Stone age — the IT department/professional coders, the folks that knew HTML and programming technologies to serve up web pages that could be crawled easily. Very little of the focus was placed on the potential customers.
- Bronze age –highly-specialized digital marketers, adept at building backlinks, and crawling through key term reports to build out singularly-focused content designed to deliver to a prospect exactly the page they were looking for at the point of intent, without much thought in terms of next steps, vertically-focused marketers were needed to adapt to this rapidly-changing landscape.
- Iron age- potential customers! The search engines have got sophisticated enough to be laser-focused on being a key signpost on the customer journey, as they search for the appropriate solution to address the challenges at hand.
Although its critical to keep in mind the learnings of the Stone and Bronze ages, and its important when creating and optimizing web resources, keep in mind that the customer now (finally) comes first! I see this is liberating to consumers, who can now focus on helping gain awareness, assisting consideration, and driving conversion rates, rather than focusing on shifting algorithms, and technical changes to websites.
