About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
While this might seem like a click-bait title, I promise it isn’t and that there’s some real substance with this topic.
I’ve been in digital marketing for nearly 20 years and involved in SEO for most of that. When I first started doing SEO it seemed like there were sensationalists posts all the time declaring that the newest update or thing that happened was going to be the death of SEO. It is funny now to look back at how many times it “died” or was supposed to die.
Each time something new came out that was proclaimed a threat to it, SEO adapted and evolved. That includes when every animal-named algorithm update dropped. Or, when Google Analytics took away keyword data. Or, when voice search launched. None of those were the cataclysmic event predicted. I can say the same about web3 and blockchain.
I’m not saying all of this in a defiant way or to say that SEO won’t ever die. The constant in this industry is change and that’s a big part of what drew me to it and keeps me going. The emergence of AI is definitely as big of a game changer as there has been. However, for all the hype, it hasn’t killed SEO yet. In fact, I’m on the fence on whether I think SEO will finally die or if it will evolve again.
What I can tell you is that something that isn’t going away is the fact that there are companies out there that want to be found by their target audiences. So, whether we see generative search kill the traditional organic search results or they stick around in a diminished role, there’s still going to be someone out there who is looking for information and authorities (like you!) who want to (and deserve to) be the ones to answer the question or be the source of the information.
If SEO becomes a dated term and is left in the past, or if it becomes a bigger blanket term for being found via AI as well as search algorithms, I’m here for it and ready for the next big industry shift.
Check out my full article on the future of SEO and why it’s not dying on Search Engine Land.