Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #60: Why SEO Won't Die

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to Episode 60 of your favorite marketing podcast, Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. Michael, how you doing?

Michael Utley: Good. Doing great. Happy Friday.

Chris Raines: Happy Friday to you. Michael, I don't know if you heard the news, but SEO is dead. I saw it.

Michael Utley: Yeah, yet again, it is not dead.

Chris Raines: I saw a clickbait headline that said SEO's dead, so it must be really dead this time. I love the... 'blank' is dead. If you want to get clicks, all you got to do is write article that 'blank' is dead [crosstalk 00:00:32]. Email's also dead. If you-

Michael Utley: We're not going to take time to pull it up on the screen, but the billions invested in SEO just goes up every year, and it always has and always will.

Chris Raines: Obviously SEO's, not dead. SEO will probably never die. And we're here to say... Give you five reasons why SEO won't die. It's like email. Email is like the cockroach of online marketing. The death has been predicted so many times, and it just keeps on like a cockroach in nuclear war. But we're going to give you five reasons why SEO won't die very likely in the near future, and probably won't ever die. Michael, why don't you take the first one here? Five reasons.

Michael Utley: Yeah. SEO rests between two competing forces that balance each other out. There's a balance between access to information and search engine priorities. This is kind of a weird idea that I want to get out there, but I've been reading Alan Greenspan's History of Capitalism. What Alan Greenspan argues in this book is that the reason capitalism is safe in America is because anytime regulation creeps up, creeps up, creeps up, suddenly you have this wave of response of deregulation. There's essentially a perfect balance in his book. He's not saying perfect balance, like we've got it all figured out, but there's a perfect mechanism at play that balances out, that keeps some regulation happening, but keeps it in check from overwhelming the economic engines of our various industries that make up our GDP.

Michael Utley: Kind of thinking about it metaphorically, this is how search engines work. Think about a search engine that just has the places that they've decided are either... The ones that are kind of the good guys, or the ones that are their favorite ones like maybe just the ones who advertise. Well suddenly, if you're trying to find a phone number for a place down the street that you know is the new cool restaurant that you're trying to go to, and you want to make reservations, or you're trying to find the link to get a table reserved. If it's not on their platform, because they're not an advertiser, or they said the wrong thing, guess what? You're going to some other search engine. Inevitably, it's going to be a balance between access to information that's out there that reflects what's happening in the world, and the search engine's priorities. When we got into doing SEO, we've been in business for 10 years, a lot of people early on thought, "Hey, do we have to advertise also to do better in search engine rankings?"

Michael Utley: We were able with a clear conscience to say no, because we always sensed that we could work in Google with SEO, because it was sort of a walled off garden of no, these are the organic results. There have been some studies that would say, yeah, if somebody sees an ad and then they see the organic results, that's two impressions. That organic result is going to perform better. That's a little bit of a different issue. What people are asking about is, does Google game the system to benefit just their advertisers? The answer is, I don't know. But, if an internet ever happened where we just had a ratcheting of ratcheting up, and organic became a protected walled system, they would be really vulnerable to competition. Because anything anybody's searching for and they can't find it, it's just going to poke a hole in that balloon.

Michael Utley: So, SEO's never going to die. SEO is a balance between businesses that have their own priorities and are creating search engines, and the need and the demand for all of the information. Google wants to organize the world's information. Guess what? They're just trying to keep up. In reality, people, the market, wants to organize the world's information. It starts that by having access to the world's information. That means all the information. You can't have, the [crosstalk 00:04:15] one bakery down the street excluded and be the search engine.

Chris Raines: Yeah, and that demand will always be full. Even in places like China, where they block off huge portions of their... People are still accessing that. They're doing VPNs, poor browsers, and all that kind of stuff. So, even very powerful government entities that try to kind of manipulate that... The demand still is met.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and it's the Jurassic Park principle, life finds a way.

Chris Raines: Life finds a way.

Michael Utley: We might call that the Goldblum Rule. With search engines, it means that search is always going to lend itself toward less regulated, less controlled factors. Those are the buttons we're there to push. It's content publishing, inbound links, everything we do to do SEO. Why don't you take the next one?

Chris Raines: Number two reason why SEO won't die is, the things that make SEO work, the organizing principles of how, in search engines rank sites will... Those things that are here now, will continue to be here. Here's the three things. SEO is web architecture, offsite factors, and the actual content on your site. Website architecture will always be here. That's how your site is organized. Google looks at how your site's organized, how it interlinks together-

Michael Utley: How well it works.

Chris Raines: How well it works-

Michael Utley: Page speed.

Chris Raines: Those will continue to be a factor in 10 years. Websites will continue to have architecture. Certain things will take preeminence over other things. There will be ways in which they work that are either user-friendly or not user-friendly. Right? That'll change. What is user-friendly or not will evolve and change, but it'll still be a factor.

Chris Raines: Offsite factors. Google wants to know how reputable a site is, how many other sites are linking back to that site. That's why backlinks are so important. That will continue to be a factor. They will continue to look at sites and say, I know what we think about this site, but what do other people think of this site. Right? Is it getting lots of links from other sources that we know to be reputable? If so, then we're going to raise... That will always be the case. The internet will always be an interconnected network of websites. That's what it is. When it stops being that, it stops being the internet. That will always be the case.

Chris Raines: Three, content. It's the beating heart of SEO. People have questions that they want answers to.

Michael Utley: Problems will always exist. There will always be human problems that need answers.

Chris Raines: Exactly. People will always have... And the searches will proliferate more, and more, and more, as new technologies arise, as new trends come up people are going to Google, best area rug for downstairs den. There's going to be a place there... And Google is always going to... And other search engines are always going to have to decide who answers this query about the area rugs for dens in the best way. And if you're a rug seller, local rug seller in Baltimore, that could be you.

Michael Utley: Yep, and those fundamental realities, they frankly have been running for, we're coming up on 20 years.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so-

Chris Raines: Back to your demand thing, people will always have things that they need answers for, need help with. There will always be people like you, if you're a business, to help them answer that. So, those three things, website architecture, offsite factors and links, and content will always be here. As long as those are the key components of SEO, SEO is going to be around.

Michael Utley: Three very stable pillars that have longevity for being relevant for SEO.

Michael Utley: Next up, new devices are changing voice search. Voice search, and then eventually I guess we'll have neural search...

Chris Raines: Just think about it and then...

Michael Utley: Yeah, think about it, and then scroll through some results. These are fundamentally, always going to be new technologies. We're always going to have new combinations of hardware, and configuring hardware with the entry of the data. I did a search yesterday in my car. I have a truck, I was driving. I wanted to know something. I used voice-activated search. I was just doing a quick search to get something-

Chris Raines: [inaudible 00:08:28] been using Siri, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah, I was using Siri and I got a result and, it was okay. The experience wasn't very good. It was kind of rough. You got Apple talking to F-150, and using CarPlay and it was... It did a thing

Chris Raines: And then Siri talking to WolframAlpha, or something, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah, and it did a thing, but there's always going to be a lot of work to be done to understand these things. This expertise, I'm willing to predict, is never going to reside within the organizations that are doing their primary business. I don't think there will ever be an oil change shop, or an oil change brand, with a thousand locations that will say, "I think we need to develop in-house expert for understanding something like the minutia of what's happening today with voice search." I think you're always going to have areas of expertise that are needed to be brought in. Even if it's on a consulting basis to train somebody, or just provide the content.

Michael Utley: It's an industry that's rich with innovation, not because of necessarily a change in the fundamentals of people, and problems, and content, but because the mechanisms that are between those two things are constantly changing. We have seen a lot of changes over the last few years, and people also ask... Content being dominant in the search results page on Google. A lot of that is the influence of voice search. New devices are changing voice search. That's just an example of a larger category, but change is a constant. So, SEO's not going away. We're always going to be figuring out how to work today to connect people and answers.

Chris Raines: Number four. We actually hinted at this on the last one, but we'll take number four here. Search volume is increasing, so complexity is increasing. People will always have new questions. I mentioned in point number two, but in the future, what are people going to be searching in 10 years? How to avoid accidents in my flying car or something like- [crosstalk 00:10:44].

Michael Utley: People have been predicting flying cars for years. That probably will never happen-

Chris Raines: There's a model out there working. The point is, as technology develops, as new trends develop, as new societal patterns develop, there will be a cont... There's always a continual need for new content out there. Michael, you have a client that does janitorial services.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: There are searches that are happening right now that did not exist 18 months ago.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Raines: How to-

Michael Utley: How to clean COVID out of the air in an office.

Chris Raines: That search did not exist, could not exist 18 months ago. Or however long you do the... I'm doing the math wrong. But the point is...

Michael Utley: Two years ago-

Chris Raines: As new things develop, new viruses develop, new technologies, all this stuff. There will continue to be an insatiable need for new content on the web, on the internet that answers people's questions and solves their problems. Because of that, it's the volume increasing, and the complexity's increasing of the search content, the queries. SEO will always need to be... There always need to be an organizing principle over who answers this question the best. Right?

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And that's what SEO is.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and I think that right now, Google, they're doing their best, but really they need publishers. What we might call people with websites, publishers. They need publishers to sort of deliver things in a certain way, just to work with Google. It's not enough to have a website. You also have to understand how it connects and it's getting more complex, not less complex.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: All right. We'll wrap up with this. SEO won't ever die because businesses find it converts better than ads. I want to back up here a half step, we're pro ads.

Chris Raines: Yeah. My company does ads-

Michael Utley: Your company ads-

Chris Raines: I love ads-

Michael Utley: I do ads. We do SEO, [crosstalk 00:12:38].

Chris Raines: But here's the thing-

Michael Utley: I think of it as part of a balanced diet.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Imagine if the entire page, one of Google, was 10 ads. No one would use Google.

Michael Utley: Google right now the pages, in my opinion, are very ad heavy, but those organic results legitimize the path to getting through the ads. Google, without those organic results, is essentially just the yellow pages. And so what they've done... The reason we had the white pages in front of the yellow pages, is it gave you almost a utility since this would be 20 years ago?

Michael Utley: The phone company kept white pages, even though yellow pages were the moneymaker, because the white pages, for a hundred years, were the thing that justified them delivering a stack of paper that was all ads. So, Google has taken the yellow pages model, and basically just weaponized it. What we see is that organic results take longer to accomplish, SEO takes longer than advertising. It's more low-key. There's no big Kaboom that happens when you go live with a campaign. It's more just one toe in the ocean. Ads tend to dominate a lot of the top of the page. The metaphor that we've come up with that we think is really helpful is, it's a combination of hunting and farming. You need both.

Chris Raines: That's good.

Michael Utley: You need your grains and you need your protein. Advertising is good in the sense that you can go and you can turn that dial. You can drive immediate results. So, it moves faster. You can stop it if you need to. Say if you've got a limited supply of something, or if you've got a limited timeframe for something, you can start and stop ads on a dime, really within seconds. Organic results, content-based, SEO-based farming is built up more over time, but it's accretive. With the ads, when you turn off the budget, it zeros out. But with the organic investment, when we establish rankings.. Like we have a website that ranks for, let's just say 10,000 keywords. Well, a few months ago, it was 9,000 keywords. We didn't suddenly get good enough in month 10 to get 10,000 keywords. Whereas in month nine, we're only good enough to get nine. No, no, no. It's that we got a thousand every month. We're accreting and building because we're building up a base of content, SEO.

Chris Raines: If you're building an asset, and added- [crosstalk 00:15:13]

Michael Utley: We're building a business asset.

Chris Raines: Because you pay for it every time, SEO you pay for once. It's like a field. You can grow crop after crop, season after season, on that same field. You still have to tend to the field, but you don't have to go out and buy another field. So, it really is hunting versus farming out like that.

Michael Utley: Yeah, I think that analogy... Chris, thank you for that analogy. I think that is the perfect summation, but the real deep roots of why search engines are not ever going to totally turn their back on those sort of non-ad listings is because they do in a sense legitimize the entire endeavor.

Chris Raines: They know people will migrate to DuckDuckGo, or to Bing, or... So, it's the market at play. They could make 10 ads on the first page, but their market share would go.

Michael Utley: Yeah, and we can talk about it like, "well, you don't know what Google's going to do. They make a lot of changes." No, no, no. What I'm really saying is, this is a business model that's been around for literally a hundred years. Literally a hundred years. That any city that had phones, going back to when phones were brand new. Anytime they were creating a directory, they were trying to get somebody to sponsor and pay for the printing. So, that became the sponsor, but they always had to have those free listings still legitimize the entire batch.

Chris Raines: Yep.

Michael Utley: All right. I'll wrap us up and close this out. This has been Episode 60 of Dodgeball Marketing Podcast, Why SEO Won't Die. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, for access to new episodes, marketing resources, and more. This is Chris, I'm Michael. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

Michael Utley: Thank you.