SEO Is Dead. Re­ally, Now.

For the av­er­age small busi­ness SEO isn’t a vi­able mar­ket­ing op­tion anymore.

It has been one of the cheap­est ways to bring leads to your web site for about 10 years.

For those who didn’t take ad­van­tage, the win­dow of op­por­tu­nity has closed.

Van­ished.

Poof.

Gone for­ever.

Google wants to END SEARCH by di­rectly show­ing vis­i­tors what they are look­ing for.

Google rather keeps vis­i­tors on their own prop­erty in­stead of send­ing them to your web site. Search re­sults pages are in­creas­ingly filled with Google gen­er­ated content.

The tech­nol­ogy to have a ma­chine un­der­stand and an­swer search queries is in its in­fancy. Once Google’s ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence makes a quan­tum leap , tra­di­tional search re­sults will be history.

The web is dom­i­nated by a few large pub­lish­ers who didn’t play a big role 10 years ago.

Google mas­sively fa­vors au­thor­ity sites and news sites over small busi­ness sites.

A new web site can’t catch up in a rea­son­able time frame. Or with a rea­son­able amount of work.

Con­tent mar­ket­ing for SEO is futile.

The amount of con­tent pub­lished each day is in­sane. Mak­ing a dent in search based on adding even more con­tent is a Sisyphean task.

The back links you hoped to gen­er­ate with dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent are un­der in­tense scrutiny by Google.

Whether a link will help your site or not has be­come unpredictable.

The SEO in­dus­try wig­gles in fran­tic at­tempts to re­de­fine it­self and, by usurp­ing con­tent mar­ket­ing, get­ting an even larger piece of the pie (which isn’t so tasty any­more). Small busi­nesses will soon find that SEO agen­cies aren’t de­liv­er­ing on their promises as re­li­ably as they once did.

That’s why, for the av­er­age small busi­ness, SEO isn’t a vi­able mar­ket­ing op­tion anymore.

Those hop­ing for free leads from Google will have to turn some­where else.

To­mor­row we’ll mourn the death of an­other dear friend …