Matt Cutts, director of Google’s web spam team, answers the question “Will SEO still exist in 5 years?” You can see his full response below.
How many hours a week does SEO require?
If you think of SEO as an investment, one of the important questions that comes to mind may be scope of engagement. The answer to this question is essential for any business, whether you are looking to hire a specialist or outsource work to an agency. SEO comes with many labor related costs. Therefore, estimating the required labor time per week gives you crucial information about the profitability of this channel for your business. To save you the trouble of consulting multiple agencies, along with 75 industry experts, we’ve put together research that answers this question.
Most experts (59.7%) agree that SEO requires on average between 4 and 15 hours of work per week. Depending on your current state and desired results, in some cases SEO can take upwards of 15 hours of work per week. It is also common for SEO to require more work up front at the beginning of the project.
Rachel Stephens, Customer Behavior Analyst and SEO at Totally Promotional
“I think two trends are shaping the future of SEO. Search engines are getting better at determining quality signals from actual users rather than keywords, site structure, or any other signals. In some verticals, organic results will be less coveted, as paid results will dominate CTR.
However, the checkout will work more like organic and will not go to the highest bid, but to the highest bidder with a great user experience that matches the searcher’s intent. Overall, if you want search engine traffic in the next 10-15 years, you’ll need a great site and a focus on user experience.
What is SEO?
So, first things: what is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines can find it more easily. Specifically, the goal of SEO is to make your website rank higher in search results for certain important keywords. For a dentist, it could be “dentist in Chicago” or “dental implants near me.” If you have an online retailer, it could be “buy candles online” or “best running shoes.”
“SEO will no longer take the lead from online marketing to underpin all other online strategies.”
I already said it there.
This is what others are saying about the future of SEO. I’m not sure I agree with everyone.