SEO has been around for a long time and also changed a lot over the years. Websites are using it intensely for online marketing purposes and in order to make their rankings grow.
Technology evolved rapidly, leading to a growth in online traffic, thus an increase in demand for good websites where people can find what they need.
Companies had to shift their SEO strategies to adapt to the current times. It almost seems like SEO will always be part of our internet experience in some way, never going away, but only slightly adjusting to meet the current trends.
But will SEO still be here in 10 years? If you only just paid for a link insertion service, chances are you are wondering if you will be able to enjoy these services in the long term or whether SEO will go away and be replaced by something else one decade later. This article will give you a glimpse into the future of SEO.
SEO – Is It Still Relevant?
With technology progressing more and more, many internet users are curious about its impact on SEO and whether the future will look the same. In fact, some may even believe that SEO is no longer that popular. But the data shows something else.
Google’s ad revenue shatters that of its competitors, with $238 billion generated in 2023. The numbers have remained pretty steady over the years, with the search engine consistently generating more finances from its advertising segment.
This tells us one thing: SEO is not dead. After all, it would be hard to reach so much ad revenue if SEO was irrelevant.
If anything, as more people find out what a great source of visibility and money Google can be, SEO will gain more popularity. It won’t go away anytime soon.
- The Impact of AI
You don’t have to be a marketing or technology expert to see how much AI has infiltrated various domains in the last few years.
With AI, many individuals believe that this new technology will take over SEO, even calling it “the worst thing that could happen to SEO”.
While artificial intelligence definitely changes the landscape a little bit for all websites and companies looking to advertise themselves and bring in more traffic from search engines, AI will not completely replace SEO, but instead help enhance SEO efforts.
AI may help bring faster results when you are looking for simpler answers, but it isn’t able to go in depth the way a human would. Also, AI doesn’t have the same capability of dealing with real-time results.
AI will help boost SEO in the following ways:
- Allowing marketers to gain a deeper understanding of their customers
- Making previously manual SEO processes faster
- Offering new tools that help improve the optimization and research processes
- Bringing new ideas into the light for marketers
Obviously, the potentially negative effects on SEO cannot be ignored. With AI, there may be an increase of badly-generated AI content for blogs. Lots of marketers will also rely more on AI writing tools and ChatGPT.
Also, some marketers may get the idea that they can do SEO without taking all of the other steps into consideration. AI will not replace SEO, but how you use AI for SEO will greatly influence whether it boosts it or negatively affects it.
What Does the Future of SEO Look Like?
Will SEO still be around 10 years from now? It will definitely be, but chances are it will look different compared to how it does today. Let’s take a look at several aspects that will influence SEO in future years:
- Indexing for Mobile Phones
It’s not a secret that smartphones have now taken over. You see people with smartphones everywhere, from their job to their cooking and more. Phones are very versatile nowadays, with some individuals even using them as small computers.
This is why Google has introduced mobile-first indexing. So, this means that there is also a mobile version that is the main ranking and indexing source.
This will be even more of a focus in the future, as SEO will have to put mobile optimization on top. This makes sure that platforms are user-friendly no matter the mobile device.
- Voice Search
People are beginning to ditch text search for voice search. In fact, a lot of individuals prefer voice search as it’s pretty convenient, not to mention faster in some cases. This means that SEO will also need to change to adapt to this preference.
Basically, SEO will have to pay attention to conversational queries used by internet users when they take advantage of the voice assistant feature. Content has to focus on more conversational characteristics. This means it will have to be structured specifically for answering particular questions, all while sounding natural as well.
- Implementing Artificial Intelligence
AI has become an integral part of the online experience. This includes its role in search engines.
Platforms like Google will need to consider AI’s impact on SEO as well. SEO won’t be replaced. However, Google’s Natural Language Processing and RankBrain algorithms are AI-powered. These algorithms excel at providing a much better understanding of context.
SEO will therefore need to use SEO to gain a deeper insight into people’s intent, preferences, and behaviour.
Also, AI tools will help automate tasks that repeat themselves like optimization, content creation, and keyword research. SEO experts will therefore be able to focus more and more on experimentation, analysis, and planning when it comes to their strategies.
Conclusion
SEO is shifting, but it will not go away. It’s hard to predict what the internet will look like 10 years from now. However, SEO will remain a crucial part of our experience with search engines.
This will be true even as AI continues to rise in power. SEO will need to change to adapt to new trends. These trends include mobile phone indexing, voice search, and artificial intelligence.
Even so, we can rest assured that SEO will remain strong in 10 years.