Anyone who wastes their time with search engine optimization today will be one of the losers tomorrow, because SEO is dead. It is time to realize that tomorrow's online marketing does not include search engines.
One question right at the beginning:
Why have the search engines jumped on the AI bandwagon so quickly?
- Is it because AI is "smarter" than a human author?
- Or because it's trendy and as an innovative company you have to follow the trend?
- Or maybe because AI has so much potential that you can't afford not to use it to make more sales?
All wrong.
And a little fact on the side: Google has been using AI for DECADES to improve the quality of its search results. So AI, especially in the search engine market, is certainly not fresh coffee.
The real reason for the increasing use of AI in search engines is:
Search engines have realized that user search behavior has changed. Users want answers IMMEDIATELY and no longer want to click through lots of websites.
More and more search engine users no longer want to visit websites and search for information themselves, they want the right answer immediately, directly on the search results page. Manual website research should only be optional.
You probably know this yourself...
How often have you ended up on a web page that's several thousand words long after a search, even though the actual content you're interested in is only a few paragraphs, sometimes even just a few sentences.
It is an imposition to consume such content, if only because of the time factor.
The priority of search engines is shifting more and more to the immediate gratification of the user and less to the free provision of available web resources in the form of web content.
Those who can provide the answers quickly will win, all others will be the losers.
I am not writing this text because I want to be at the top of the search engines for certain terms, but because this text is helpful for my current and future readers.
I wouldn't invest another minute in search engine placement today because SEO is dead. Anyone who relies on it as their main source of visitors will ruin their business.
Today's SEO – a gamble for yesterday's naive
I am constantly creating new websites and I am always amazed at how long it takes for search engines to take the content of a new website "seriously".
Nowadays, it often takes more than a year for a new website to get its first stable visitors from search engines. This means that you have to work on your website for a whole year before you can see if you are rewarded for your work.
If you're unlucky, after a year you'll find that nobody needs your website and the search engines simply ignore it.
Anyone who only does SEO for marketing purposes and wants to earn money with it is simply crazy. Why? In business, only results count. The results are inquiries from prospective customers and sales.
Now you stand there as an SEO marketer, create great content for many months and after more than a year you have to realize that you don't even have a hundred visitors per day on your website, although you have already published numerous valuable content/subpages on your website.
The problem?
Every single piece of content on the website has to start from scratch and build a reputation with the search engines before it can get visitors/readers.
And this reputation building process takes months and sometimes years!
In today's business world, however, we don't have that time. In that time, you're already making good money with your business or you're already broke.
Should we still create blogs and content?
Since SEO is dead for marketers, it's legitimate to ask whether content should still be created. And here the answer is clear.
Yes, you need to create content, because really you should be doing it for your users and customers, not for the search engines. Search engines should no longer be seen as the main reason for creating content.
However...
Anyone who comes up with the brilliant idea of starting a blog today to get free traffic from Google and co. will not be able to achieve impressive results in most cases.
I'll just mention three terms:
- Sandbox, where all fresh websites and content end up and can play there for a very long time.
- AI, because thanks to AI, anyone can now create tons of content on any topic.
- Competition, because everyone wants to be at the top and unfortunately there are only 10 search results on the first search results page.
Create content and bring readers from other sources, for example paid advertising. Delight readers and gain loyal readers and customers.
But the SEO experts say SEO works...
...and I say that the earth is a square.
Sorry, the SEO experts are lying - all of them.
SEO experts earn their money with SEO. Of course they're not going to saw off their own branch on which they've built a golden nest for decades.
The SEO industry is a BILLION-dollar market.
Even the search engines are getting so desperate that they themselves are giving TIPS on how to rank better with them, just to motivate new volunteers to jump into the SEO box and diligently create content for search engines.
Some even go so far as to openly recommend enhancing your own content with certain measures such as link building in order to achieve better rankings.
Why do they do this?
Because they make their money from the poor SEO faithful.
The SEO practitioners create content for them, and the search engines use that content not only to feed their AI engines, but also to directly display ads in the search results that match that content.
Anyone doing SEO today is a victim of the big SEO lie.
In this situation, you will hardly come out a winner, but only lose your time and a lot of money.
In the worst case scenario, this can lead to losing your business.
What can we marketers do without search engines?
There are many ways to survive with your online business without relying on search engines, most of which require other platforms, i.e. websites.
For example, I like to combine paid click advertising and email marketing to get stable traffic and revenue. These are very simple systems that make me money.
- You look for a platform that has the largest possible user base, be it Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram or whatever they are all called.
- You check whether there are ways to redirect users from the platform to your own website, whereby your platform is a website, even a simple landing page is sufficient.
- You create a marketing plan in which you define who your target group is and what content you can use to reach them, in order to finally lead them to your own platform with a clear call to action.
- You make sure that you either convert the users on your platform into money immediately or warm them up through a process of any length to make them more receptive to an order.
- You optimize the small system that consists of the above steps until it runs optimally and efficiently and ultimately helps you generate stable revenue.
It is worth noting that on many platforms you can find tools to use the platform directly to build a professional system. On YouTube, for example, you can build a community of followers and achieve very stable viewer numbers and revenue.
On Facebook, groups can be created that can also generate recurring revenue.
You only need to build up your own presence on the respective platform once and can benefit from this work for a very long time. Nevertheless, I would recommend using your own platform at the right time, preferably a blog or email system.
Conclusion
Anyone who relies on content marketing today no longer has to regard search engines as a cornerstone. Search engines have become irrelevant in content marketing.
Those who rely on content marketing today can completely dispense with search engines and see results and sales faster as a result.
Do you need a search engine to:
- reach an audience of millions on Yoututbe?
- build a large following on Facebook?
- get millions of views for your visual creations and countless clicks on links on Pinterest?
No.
There are now so many platforms, each with hundreds of millions of users, that you can not only choose them over search engines for marketing purposes, but also get faster and better results.
We content creators and marketers, who made search engines successful in the first place, need to rethink.
Search engines hardly bring us any benefit anymore. They are no longer worth our time and effort. We need to evolve and offer our content to those who truly value it and are willing to help creative people reach just the right audience.
R.I.P search engine optimization.