SEO is always evolving, and staying ahead of the curve is imperative if you want to continue to rank well.
SEO changes at an astounding rate. In the last five years, we’ve gone from an old-school, keyword-based, simplified search engine world to one that is dominated by semantic understanding, highly complex domain authority calculations, and artificial intelligence programs designed to seek immediate answers. What will the next five years hold for the strategy?
- Desktop searches will disappear. The trends are clear. Already, mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches in popularity, and that momentum shows no signs of stopping. By 2020, desktop searches will be limited only to the tiniest minority of searches, and people who perform them will be seen with the same level of obsolescence of today’s Internet Explorer users.
- The Knowledge Graph will take over. Google’s Knowledge Graph today is adept at retrieving basic information in response to specific queries—such as listing out the distribution and production information of a movie. By 2020, it will rapidly expand to a point where it takes over 90 percent or more of all searches.
- Competitors will emerge. We think of Google as the only worthwhile player, but by 2020, the field will diversify. Facebook is developing its own search functionality, Bing is getting better, and DuckDuckGo is rising dramatically in popularity. Add in the fact that antitrust organizations are trying to break Google up into smaller pieces, and the answer becomes clear.
- Websites won’t be necessary. Today, Google is looking to third party sources as much as it is direct websites for information on your business. By 2020, it will rely almost exclusively on those third-party sources, rendering a website (and therefore, onsite SEO) almost unnecessary.
- Content needs will change. Today, you can get by with a basic written onsite blogging strategy. In 2020, your content strategy will need to be far more intensive and far more diverse, incorporating many mediums and many external sources.
While some people are predicting the death of SEO altogether in the next five years, personally, we don’t see that happening. SEO will evolve, and might evolve dramatically, but it won’t ever really go away. Even if we’re someday introduced to a new means of retrieving information or seeking destinations—beyond typical search engines—companies will still need a way to be the most prominent entries visible, and therefore, SEO will in some way still exist.
