Will SEO die?

Hummingbird changed the future of search.

It made people predict the end of SEO. It prompted content producers to adopt a new mindset that will benefit the end-user.

But if keywords are still showing on Google’s first page, it’s an indication that they still matter.

Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, said that less than 15% of the ranking equation is wrapped up in keyword targeting. Instead, he suggested focusing on offering unique value, rather than unique content, which is what SEOs tried to achieve before.

However, it would be wrong to say that targeting relevant keywords in your content is no longer useful at all.

Keyword research and targeting have actually become easier, because with Hummingbird. You don’t have to worry about obeying a certain keyword ratio. Instead, focus on searcher intent.

For example, why would someone search for “small business CRM tool”?

• Does the person want to buy a CRM tool?
• Is the person looking to read some honest reviews?
• Is the searcher a beginner who doesn’t even know what CRM stands for?

What the Hummingbird algorithm change really did was stress to us the importance of knowing the reason behind a particular keyword and creating content to meet that need.

This means that keywords are still important, because without them, you can’t know the searcher’s intent.

Several authority platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and others, rely on keyword targeting to meet users’ needs.

t’s almost impossible to find exactly what you’re looking for, except by using keywords to search. According to Brian Dean, “Keywords are like a compass for your SEO campaigns; they tell you where to go and whether or not you’re making progress.”

As you know, I’m playing the long-term entrepreneurial game, instead of just trying to get a quick buck out of it.

It’s the same with SEO. Some people are in it to make a few grand really quickly, others are in it for the long haul.

If you want to work SEO like a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll probably end up doing what’s called black hat SEO.

This type of SEO focuses on optimizing your content only for the search engine, not considering humans at all. Since there are lots of ways to bend and break the rules to get your sites to rank high, these are a welcome way for black hat SEOs to make a few thousand dollars fast.

Ultimately this approach results in spammy, crappy pages, which often get banned very fast, often leading to severe punishment for the marketer, ruining their chance of building something sustainable in the future.

You might make a few grand this way, but will continuously have to be on the lookout for search engine updates and come up with new ways to dodge the rules.

White hat SEO, on the other hand, is the way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience, trying to give them the best content possible and making it easily accessible to them, by playing according to the search engine’s rules.

SEO is not what it used to be. You can’t just pop up an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well.

These days you actually have to build a good website, write high quality content that solves peoples’ problems, build thousands of links and get thousands of social shares.

At KISSmetrics, we’ve created a total of 47 infographics. An infographic on average costs us $600, which means we have spent $28,200 on infographics in the last two years.

Within the two-year period, we’ve generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains, all from those 47 infographics.

From the social media perspective, in the last two years, the infographics have driven 41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes.

If you decided that you want to buy 2,512,596 visitors, it would cost you $125,629.80 if you paid 5 cents a visitor. If you bought 41,142 links from a service like Sponsored Reviews at a rate of $20 a link, you would have spent $822,840. And that wouldn’t even give you high quality links. We naturally got our links from sites like Huffington Post and Forbes.

If you want to buy 41,359 tweets, it would cost you $82,718, assuming you paid $2.00 a tweet. It would also cost you an additional $41,718 if you paid $2.00 a Like.

In total, if you were trying to game Google and get the same results as we did at KISSmetrics, you would have spent a total of $1,072,905.80. Now, that’s a lot of money, especially if you compare that number to the $28,200 we spent on creating the infographics.

The big difference between content marketing and paid SEO

There is one huge difference between paying to do all of the things above and spending the money on content marketing. Can you guess what it is?

Nope, it isn’t the price difference of $1,047,705.80. Guess again…

Content marketing doesn’t get affected by algorithm updates, while paid SEO does. Search engines can tell when you provide value, and in the long run, that’s the kind of stuff they want to make sure stays high in the rankings.

So, instead of investing in short term solutions that may increase your overall rankings and traffic, invest in the long term solution of content marketing.

In conclusion, SEO is here to stay. But it is moving more and more towards delivering what Google wants by creating epic content and less towards “gaming the system.”

Over the last few years, I’ve tested a lot of different types of content and found that certain types produce better results than others.

• Detailed content – short blog posts tend to get fewer links than detailed, thorough content. Don’t try to replicate what Huffington post does by producing hundreds of new pieces of content each day. Instead, focus on quality.
• Digestible infographics – if you can make complex data easy to understand in a visual format, you can get millions of visitors to your website.
• Social profiles – a key requirement to a successful content marketing strategy is owning powerful social profiles. Make sure you build up your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’ll need them to spread your content.
• Collect emails – make sure you have email opt-in forms in your sidebar and leverage pop-ups to collect even more emails. If you have a solid email list, you can always email it every time you publish a new blog post or content piece. This is an easy way to kick-start the virality process.
• Be consistent – if you can’t publish content on a regular basis, no matter how good your content is, it will be tough to get a good ROI out of your content marketing. Make sure you publish content on a regular basis.
• Headlines matter – no matter how good your content is, if you can’t write attractive headlines, no one will read your content. Learn how to write good headlines.