The pace of change in search engine optimization (SEO) continues to accelerate. It’s quickly evolving beyond the usual tried-and-true tactics to a more sophisticated and audience-centric discipline. Consider a few posts from recent weeks:
The Moz blog did a useful before-and-after comparison of the layout and format changes to SERPs. As they point out, marketers simply need to pay attention and fine-tune their tactics:
A few dozen marketers complaining about the new design is not going to sway their decision. At this point, the decision is 98% made, and it’s made based on Google’s goals and Google’s data. The best you can do is try to assess how these changes impact your bottom line and adjust accordingly. Don’t waste your time shouting at the wind.
Meanwhile, a post over at MarketingProfs nicely summarizes how keywords are now the means to revealing user intent, why many past SEO practices simply don’t matter as much, and how writing for users is more critical than ever:
The words surrounding your keywords are now more precisely interpreted. The search engine is better able to discern the relationships between words and thus the context and the user’s intent, delivering a much more relevant search result.
What do all of these changes mean for content strategists and writers? On the Confab Events blog, James Gunter outlines what it means for our profession:
SEO is not dead. However, SEO has shifted away from a full-time specialty to a set of skills, principles, and best practices that good content creators need to know and apply in order to be successful on the web.
The last word goes to Christopher S. Penn, who issues a challenge to anyone who’s tempted by SEO tricks:
Do what’s unique. Do what’s hard to replicate, hard to scale, hard to automate. And every proposal, pitch, or offer you get that says they have an easily automated system to do X, you now know to be a trap just waiting to happen.
The evolution of SEO can seem overwhelming at times, but many resources can help. As one example: If you’re near Sundog’s Fargo office, join us for an upcoming content strategy meetup featuring a panel of SEO experts.
