Unless that funeral is being live-streamed on Snapchat or Periscope. If you're on the cutting edge, you better start paying attention.
Now, I'm not trying to be coy or just attack SEOs the way John Oliver seems to have it out for social media experts, but let's get one thing clear: SEO is dying because of how millennials are now using the mobile and social web.
The Old Ways Are No Longer The Best Ways
If we were discussing a sound Internet marketing strategy ten years ago, we were singing the praises of SEO, contrasting it to paid (old media) advertising, and bestowing the virtues of long-tail keywords on anyone within earshot. Those times were downright magical because of their simplicity. We knew that content was the name of the game because we could essentially optimize endlessly on our websites and eventually we'd show up in somebody's search results for whatever we were selling. We religiously espoused "Content is King" to anyone who still used a Blackberry, hoping to impress them with our command of phrases like "backlink", "Alt tags" and "meta data".
Some of us were even savvier and learned how to game the system by building entire businesses around producing as much content as humanly possible just so we could litter the search results with our websites. As time progressed, Google caught on, going primal on the web by releasing a slew of animal-named algorithm updates ranging from Panda to Zebra. With every update, SEOs were heard from the hills warning anyone that would listen, "Be sure your website is ready for Google". Like the ominous nightly Hunger Games cannons, forums would be littered by the casualties of war the day after each update. "I'm no longer on the first five pages!" they'd shriek in the distance.
All the while the savvy marketers laughed and laughed, since we long realized that Google was just another traffic source and we didn't put all of our eggs in one big "Do No Evil" basket. One that millennials didn't even spend most of their time on.
We were awakened because we've become SEO agnostic and because our target market has become search engine agnostic. We've learned that the key to being great marketers is to do whatever it takes to stay in front of our customers, and that means going social and mobile.
While Google may be the world's most trafficked website, much of that has to do with its default search position in many browsers. The problem with Google search marketing has always been that once the user goes to Google, they're going somewhere else, and chances are if we were going to reach that same user they'd have to initiate contact. This led to smart marketers doing everything they could to build their email lists, which is great, except for the fact that email open rates are relatively low, and competition for that inbox grows with each new device and messaging platform being adopted.
The Best Ways Now Consider The New Devices
If we were courageous enough to look past Google, we'd obviously have to consider Facebook first. According to a quarterly earnings call in 2014, the average user spends 40 minutes a day on Facebook. That's actually more time per day than the average American spends on pet care, and you know how obsessed Americans are with their pets. This is time being spent by users liking statuses, favoriting celebrities, following interest pages and sharing stories they find interesting.
(Image retrieved from http://siliconangle.com - credit)
Think about it: for 40 minutes a day, consumers are engaging in numerous trackable actions. They are sharing all of their interests, their interpersonal relationships, and even their traveling habits. This is the kind of data that advertising agencies and even the great David Ogilvy would have given a vestigial organ to garner.
Not only are these people spending so much time on one traffic source, but they're doing it from their mobile devices. That means that they're actively interacting with the fastest-loading, most mobile-friendly websites they're encountering. They're also downloading whichever apps are being recommended to them by friends and family, and... advertisers who are targeting them based on their relationships and interests.
Let's not forget about Facebook's family of apps, which includes WhatsApp and Instagram. While many people remember that Facebook purchased WhatsApp for an obscene ($22 Billion) amount of money, most people don't know that WhatsApp actually has more messaging traffic on its app than the entire SMS global network on a daily basis (WhatApp had 800 million active users in April 2015). As for Instagram, it's become so ubiquitous that it's spawned an entirely new genre of "professional models" and brands that make money simply off of charging to promote something in a post. Instagram alone has over 300 million monthly active users and is growing at a double-digit rate.
Facebook has recognized that the future is in mobile media and so should you.
Millennials Prefer Apps to the Mobile Web
If you stop and ask a Millennial to find an interesting restaurant, they'll probably use Yelp before they use Google. If you ask one to catch a ride, they're more likely to use Uber before Googling "Taxi in Los Angeles". If they're looking for something to do to kill time, they're more likely to open the App Store than to Google something to do. The reason is simple: the native mobile experience is better through apps, and various apps do specific tasks better than their mobile web counterparts.
Therein lies the difference in philosophy that needs to occur in marketers moving from an SEO-first (desktop driven) world to a social/mobile-first universe. A marketer's goal doesn't have to be to get as many people to their website as possible, but to simply acquire as many eyes to their message as possible. That's something that can occur over different platforms and varying devices, as explained by BuzzFeed's founder and CEO Jonah Peretti.
In 2014, BuzzFeed decided to adopt the philosophy of building out marketing assets on other people's streams, which isn't much different from how SEOs would create tiers in their link-building strategies.
As marketers, we can't afford to depend on one traffic source (that was designed in a desktop-driven universe) when our target market is now using multiple devices and various social media platforms for news. From Twitter, to Instagram, to Periscope, to Facebook, to Snapchat, the only way we can make sure we're around for the long haul is to adopt as many platforms as possible and to build assets over all of them.
Am I saying to ignore SEO altogether?
Heck, no. Just recognize that traditional SEO is dying a slow death and Millennials are too busy looking at their phones to even notice.
Comment below and share with your friends with those apps you love so much!
Sources:
The Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304384104579144130305277324 NBC News: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/average-american-spends-40-minutes-day-facebook-n164046 Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-23/heres-how-much-time-people-spend-on-facebook-daily Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-20/whatsapp-s-founder-goes-from-food-stamps-to-billionaire The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11340321/WhatsApp-overtakes-text-messages.html Jonah Peretti Interview: http://recode.net/2015/03/16/buzzfeeds-new-strategy-fishing-for-eyeballs-in-other-peoples-streams/
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