Mourning the Death of the SEO Dream

Recently came accross Tony Verre's post "The SEO Dream is Dead. Or is It?". In his post he suggested that the days of an "SEO Only" shop are gone. in his words:

"Personally I think SEO is a lot more than just keywords and links, and that it is the core to building a great website that produces great content and converts. Something I’ve said for a long time now, an SEO must be capable and fluent in everything search marketing. Specialties are dead for the consuming public. They want one-stop-shops that can combine SEO, paid search, social media, and conversion optimization to create aggressive strategies. Whether they listen or not is a question unto itself."

My comments were entirely in agreement

"Much appreciation for your thoughts. In the few years I've been running our small company, I've learned that SEO is only the beginning of a truly effective online marketing strategy. SEO is simply an introduction to an interested audience. Attraction, engagement and conversion (not to mention an infrastructure that can  actually deliver a quality product or service) are no less critical just because you're the first foot in the door. The same mentality was responsible for all the "AAA plumbing" and excessive "A" businesses that thought they would game the yellow pages' use of alphabetical listings. SEO provides an advantage, but as I said, its only the beginning."

I had expressed a related concept (although not as elegantly worded;) in a prior post entitled SEO is Only the Beginning, where I suggested that professional SEO's needed to have a much more comprehensive, integrated approach, so as not to waste a perfectly good search position by not being able to engage or convert visitors (see the post "When Search Engine Rankings Aren't Enough").

What resonated most with me about Tony's post was the growing recognition that SEO is no longer the silver bullet it used to be (or at least we wanted to believe it was). I truly mourn the death of the salad days of SEO, where a days work made a week's income. In that way, I do recognize the death of SEO.

The SEO is dead, long live the SEO.

Source: http://www.deepripples.com/blog/mourning-the-death-of-the-seo-dream

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