SEO is the sin­gle most effec­tive chan­nel for con­sumers dis­cov­er­ing your brand, goods and ser­vices when they come look­ing. As we will read lat­er SEO is now also about reach­ing out to con­sumers and tastemak­ers.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly the acronym SEO stands for search engine opti­miza­tion. Let’s keep the focus on “opti­miza­tion,” as that is where the debate begins.

Today we can all agree that SEO involves search engines. We don’t all agree what “opti­miza­tion” entails; for some it refers to tech­ni­cal tweaks to a site, for oth­ers key­word research and data han­dling; oth­ers are inter­est­ed in build­ing links; and then there are those who are inter­est­ed in earn­ing a range of sig­nals that search engines reward. Equal­ly, there are many who would con­sid­er SEO to be a blend of all or some of those things.

I sug­gest think­ing of SEO as “search engine objec­tive”. Even if experts in the field have dif­fer­ent approach­es to get­ting the results the end sto­ry is about those results. If your objec­tive is to ben­e­fit more from search engines – with­out pay­ing for traf­fic, by doing well in the nat­ur­al search results – then you will be inter­est­ed in SEO. Those dig­i­tal mar­keters with SEO skills are, con­ve­nient­ly, also known as SEOs.

SEO Is An Expertise

Today the fol­low­ing state­ment is con­tro­ver­sial, but I believe it to be true; SEO is an exper­tise lay­er of social media.

Let’s push aside the fact that social media is in itself an incred­i­bly broad top­ic in dire need of sub-divi­sion and exper­tise there­in. Let’s look at the core issues.

Social media is about engag­ing with an audi­ence in such a way that that engage­ment ben­e­fits your brand. SEO is about engag­ing with an audi­ence in such a way that the search engines respond and that ben­e­fits your brand.

In oth­er words, to be effec­tive at SEO you need pret­ty much all the skill sets of a good social media pro­fes­sion­al, and then some.

Tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions are still impor­tant for SEO. Yes, true, in 2015 (as was the case in 2014) the amount of web­sites that the search engines could make nei­ther head nor tail of is a small per­cent­age.

At the time of writ­ing the text includ­ed in “click to appear” ele­ments in non-AJAX sites is being down­played by Google because the search engine wish­es to do so and not because the search engine is unaware that that text is there. It still takes tech­ni­cal SEO knowl­edge to know that Google behaves in that way and which types of text are in or out of scope of that judg­ment.

Right now, Google is high­light­ing sites that per­form well on mobile devices with “mobile friend­ly” labels on mobile search­es. This effect click-through rates and traf­fic from the largest, and grow­ing, chunk of search. Want a piece of that? You will need to talk to a tech­ni­cal SEO.

It will like­ly be SEOs with tech­ni­cal skills that will notice when Google exper­i­ments again. Any good SEO will tell you that Google exper­i­ments all the time.

Outreach And Engagement

I said at the start of this arti­cle that SEO in 2015 is about reach­ing con­sumers. This is the hard part.

SEO projects have two types of audi­ences to con­sid­er, over­lap­ping groups if you’re lucky. The first group rep­re­sents those peo­ple who are or could be cus­tomers. The sec­ond group are those con­sumers who might be per­suad­ed to talk about, share, or oth­er­wise engage with your brand.

We care about this sec­ond group of con­sumers because search engines look for the sig­nals they pro­duce; edi­to­ri­al­ly giv­en links from one site to anoth­er being the most well-known of them.

A post dis­cussing how this sort of “sig­nal earn­ing” can be achieved, espe­cial­ly with links in mind, would be anoth­er 1,500 words. But for the pur­pos­es of a clear def­i­n­i­tion of SEO in 2015, and that how that con­trasts to SEO from 2005, let us go with one exam­ple.

I would argue a form of 2015 style SEO, one designed to engage with an audi­ence and earn edi­to­ri­al­ly giv­en links and brand men­tions, would include cre­ative PR stunts. Such an activ­i­ty might not be appro­pri­ate for your first audi­ence type – your poten­tial and actu­al cus­tomers. Brand­ing mat­ters as well.

Here’s an exam­ple: hire two stu­dents to wear fuzzy goril­la suits, with uni­corn masks, wear­ing beau­ty pageant sash­es with the phrase “SEO Now” print­ed on them to climb on stage, between pop­u­lar speak­er slots, dur­ing a high pro­file dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence. This is SEO. You’ll find your goril­la-uni­corns and their mes­sage of “SEO Now” will be tweet­ed, pho­tographed, men­tioned by the live blog­gers at the con­fer­ence and in the wrap-up blog posts after­wards. You’ll get links. You’ll earn links and will give the edi­tors a strong steer towards the key­word phrase “SEO Now” too.

Social media experts and SEOs would both have ideas on how to make the goril­la-uni­corn stunt do well online. SEOs would also have the skills to make sure that any online suc­cess trans­lat­ed to bet­ter search engine per­for­mance.

Dark SEO: Black Hats And The Law

There will be some con­cerns for SEO in 2015 as well. The work­ing def­i­n­i­tion of SEO will still include unsavoury activ­i­ties like “black hat” SEO where­in the dig­i­tal mar­keter bets the rep­u­ta­tion of their employ­er against Google’s abil­i­ty to detect manip­u­la­tion of results.

What’s manip­u­la­tion? Buy­ing links or con­tent with links to fake edi­to­r­i­al cov­er­age is an exam­ple. It will still hap­pen in 2015 and it’ll still be called SEO.

Shades of grey will grow dark­er. For exam­ple, hav­ing rub­bish con­tent – like poor copy­writ­ing – has long been con­sid­ered poor SEO, the sort of activ­i­ty Google and the oth­er engines would dis­like. In 2015 Google being as aggres­sive towards poor con­tent as it tra­di­tion­al­ly is to spam will con­tin­ue and we will see that with links.

Pitch black hat SEO will also con­tin­ue in 2015, sad­ly. This includes the evil of site hack­ing, hid­ing stuffed links in the design of exploit­ed sites in order to trick search engines. The def­i­n­i­tion of SEO now includes web secu­ri­ty.

We can also expect reg­u­la­tors to be more inter­est­ed in the def­i­n­i­tion of SEO in 2015 as well. There is grow­ing con­cern on the behav­iour of blog­gers on the top­ic of dis­clo­sure. In the UK there have been prime­time TV news cov­er­age of the Adver­tis­ing Stan­dards Author­i­ty warn­ing vlog­gers to dis­close when they’ve been incen­tivized by a brand.

The more com­mon prob­lem we’ll see in 2015 are brands and agen­cies incen­tiviz­ing blog­gers to write about and link to sites and the blog­gers fail­ing to dis­close this. Blame is shared between the blog­gers not know­ing the rules and those agen­cies and brands who are hap­py to encour­age the behav­iour. This will be an issue for the FTC or ASA look at and it is pos­si­ble a seri­ous case will stray into the realms of bribery laws.

Is SEO DEAD?

In 2015 some­one (OK, prob­a­bly at least a dozen peo­ple) will claim SEO is dead. This hap­pens every year. As long as peo­ple search online, there will still be SEO. After­wards there will still be SEO skills.

That said, the word “dead” itself becomes a good acronym for mod­ern SEO:

D = Data

E = Engage­ment

A = Audi­ences

D = Dis­cov­ery

• Data refers to issues like key­words, search fre­quen­cies, inte­gra­tion with paid search, affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, and oth­er dig­i­tal dis­ci­plines. Data informs con­tent strat­e­gy, mea­sures suc­cess, and iden­ti­fies oppor­tu­ni­ties.
• Engage­ment is how brands and site own­ers begin to earn their search engine rank­ings. Search engines want to see which sites and brands experts and tastemak­ers are rec­om­mend­ing. If you build it – they won’t come. If you have rub­bish cus­tomer ser­vice – peo­ple and algo­rithms will notice. Engage­ment ensures peo­ple notice your brand strength.
• Audi­ences are those con­sumers who will enjoy your con­tent and inter­act with your brand. We’re all pub­lish­ers these days. Any pub­lish­er needs to know who their audi­ences are, needs to know what their audi­ences enjoy, and what their audi­ences rec­om­mend.
• Dis­cov­ery is the art of being found. SEO in 2015 might include lit­tle splash­es of paid media pro­mo­tion in order to put the right con­tent under the fin­ger­tips of the right audi­ence. Dis­cov­ery is also about mark­ing con­tent up in the cor­rect way, tech­ni­cal SEO skills again, so that it looks good and is easy to find on social net­works like Face­book, Pin­ter­est, and Twit­ter, as well as earn­ing the most pos­si­ble num­ber of clicks from wher­ev­er it ranks on search engines.

So, in 2015 SEO will be about your search engine objec­tive and DEAD is how you might go about approach­ing it.