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Comment by zenincognito | Hacker News Reader

SEO agency owner here. Have been in the agency game for over 15 years. For whatever it's worth, here are my 2 cents.

Business is booming. Not exactly dying as indicated here in the HN circles because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve. SEO is still the number one opted channel by most ecommerce stores because keywords like "red party dress" or "green shoes" are still immensely more valuable and bring ton of revenue every day.

Ofcourse, Google is trying hard to monetize every little real estate but still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.

The other aspect of this the "paid ads" also immensely valuable to advertisers. We have people spending 3 million dollars a month on paid ads returning 8X ROAS. Google & FB are still the most lucrative channels for ecommerce.

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I never thought that SEO was dying, quite the contrary, I think a lot people learned how to game Google. That’s one of the reasons why I think helpful results on Google are dying (the other reason is ads, of course).

> because obviously HN crowd is much further ahead in the curve

Do you actually think this or is this just a polite way of saying lots of HNers are out of touch?

I'm not the OP you replied to, but there's a scene from the movie the big short that really punched the understanding into my head:

Michael Burry: I may have been early but I'm not wrong

some exec: It's the same thing!

I believe that a lot of HN posts are probably "right", but they are so far in the future and so non-applicable to day-to-day life, that it's indistinguishable from wrong. For example, everyone predicting Google is going to end - yeah all great companies eventually come to an end - if you want to be insightful, you actually have to be on time with it.

To wit: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Or in another case, there's a political scientist, whose name I don't currently remember, who's made fun of for predicting 9 out of the last 5 recessions. Sure, he may have predicted the ones that happened, but a broken clock is also right twice a day. Your predictions aren't worth much if you can't avoid false positives.

EDIT: [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/01/predict-nine/]

HN (and futurists in general) tend to significantly underweight inertia.

People hate change, and absent a catalyzing event or order of magnitude advantage, it will take a decade for usage patterns to shift.

E.g. Kagi over Google

Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches.

Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others?

Firefox had tabs.

Chrome had faster javascript. (Although moreso substantial free marketing on highly-visited webpages)

That's the sort of thing it actually takes to shift users.

> Most people don't know and don't care.

Yet. Time is the enemy of ad-supported business models.

> Time is the enemy of

Time is literally the enemy of everything. The universe will experience heat death. The sun burns out. Nations will fall. You’ll die of old age.

The assertion you made is actually the most milquetoast safest prediction that anyone can make about the ad business and it’s obvious to everyone.

The thing that actually matters is “when?”

"Man drinks like that, and doesn't eat, he is going to die."

"When?"

> Most people don't know and don't care. Search is the thing that pops up and they type into. You can even change that? To what? There are others?

So we’re all still using Yahoo and Altavista?

I think that's their entire point - it took many years for Altavista and Yahoo to die, and Yahoo isn't even dead yet in some markets (see: Japan).

Google eclipsed their capabilities >25 years ago and yet some of them are still kicking around. Inertia is a very strong thing.

Yahoo! Japan isn't related to anything outside of Japan: the brand was bought by SoftBank a while ago. Also, I've never heard of anyone actually using it for search, though maybe older people still do (the same people who use fax machines at home...). Everyone I've met uses Google.

No the internet population at time of Yahoo was X (say 400 million desktop PCs) about year 2000. Then google started to gain ground and from 2000-2010 internet population went from 400M to 4Bn - and even if every yahoo user from 2000 stuck with yahoo they were just 10% of users - and those users defaulted to google (partly actual defaults, partly fashion, partly here is how you do a search")

> E.g. Kagi over Google > Kagi could hypothetically be 25% superior in all searches.

The difference is the business model. Except for a small minority of people in tech and with disposable incomes, the majority aren't willing to pay for Search.

So if Kagi wants to increase their adoption they would need another business model. Advertising (in one form or another) is the easiest one.

I’m not sure the problem is the business model. Bing has the same business model as Google and has been trying hard to get some traction, even integrating ChatGPT, to no avail.

Google is a verb, it’s the default, it’s the internet. Two whole generations grew up with it being their portal to information.

There’s nothing Kagi can do to dethrone Google, unfortunately. Its only hope is to carve a niche for itself and cultivate it.

They could build a phone operating system and hardware ecosystem, make themselves the default on that, and then pay their competitors billions to also choose them as the default? /s

> Google is a verb, it’s the default

Hence, the lawsuit ;)

I’d say that some HNer predictions will inevitably turn out to be right, but you can’t necessarily tell which ones, at this point.

To the specific topic: Even if users predominantly switch to AI assistants for search (and there will always be search because users want to find stuff), the search will still be based on an index over third-party data, and the third parties will still be trying hard to optimize that data to be more prominent in applicable searches.

Great point! I think it all depends were you are on the X-Axis of the Amara / Englebart law of technology prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuL0MGJMbp8

In this case, HN posts may be predicting the portion of the exponential curve further to the right, but in fact, we probably still have a long ways to go in the trough before we reach the point the lines cross.

You want to be early, just not too early.

For trading, obviously if Michael was 2 days early, that may have not been enough time to arrange the contracts he did. 2 years early means paying premiums while explaining to investors why you are doing this weird thing that everyone else in the world disagrees with.

It reminds me of a MinuteEarth video that the sweet spot of disaster prediction is around 2 days before. Shorter and it's useless, longer and you can't really evacuate people for it.

Politely, and with due respect, I consider myself "out of touch" for most things that I don't do on a day to day basis or those that are NOT my livelihood.

You can’t be ahead of the curve without thinking things that are very different from the current reality.

That said, a lot of different thinking ends up not going anywhere. Only time will sort out the difference.

I will say I agree with the above comment about the current viability of SEO. It’s still very effective. Google is still very heavily used.

One thing to keep in mind is that while organic search might be slipping, other things are slipping at least as much. The slow death of 3rd party cookies is eating away at ad network efficiency. Organic social media reach depends increasingly on influencers, which is a highly fractured and opaque marketplace (inefficient at scale). Email is effective but getting email addresses remains difficult. Trust in press and institutions (aka earned media) is way down. It’s hard out there for marketing!

The SEO industry has been the big winner from the crapification of Google. No surprise there

The whole thing about Google selling search terms to the highest bidder is exactly why it doesn't work for me as a user. I want the thing I'm looking for in my area with the best quality and best price. Usually the shops that pays the most for the search term are nothing to do with that.

I've stopped using Google altogether for things I want to buy. I only search directly in the shops now.

But that's how monopoly works.

> SEO agency owner here

Could we speak? I run a bootstrapped company for more than two decades and [natural] SEO explained part of our growth. Nowadays it is not working as expected after trying a lot of stuff and agencies. It feels like we can write articles all day without moving the needle except peaks sharing in Reddit that go down quickly.

It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics. I understand we are in a niche market but we have real work that differentiate for the few competitors.

A 30' call will work. Are you available?

> It seems like I need to apply a giant budget to move those metrics

The plan is working.

I unfortunately watched first-hand a company come up with a mediocre "app" that had barely any content. Think short-form content and random videos moderately glued to some topic written by a bunch of low-wage "content writers".

This company then picked a biggish ad-spend budget, spent it on Google, FB and other ad companies (digital agencies). And the users just started rolling in over the course of months. The increase in users, let them "monetize" by convincing "sponsors" to "pay" for content on this new "platform", which netted them a big chunk of profit and more money for more ad-spend which made more users come.

Next up, they will brand and sell this platform which has "X-millions of users", even though most are one-off users, barely any repeat or long-term users, etc.

It's like some sort of endless shit-peddling cycle driven by marketing, and it was frankly disgusting to watch from the sides. Their stated goal was actually noble, uplifting, etc. But all they ended up doing was building a "herd" of users that they could monetize and use for marketing other projects, and helped no one except for their global brand, and their owners.

Sorry about the rant.

In summary: Yes, just get an ad-agency and pay them to help you get users. At least you have a valid product I assume and genuine value to provide in exchange for money.

> we can write articles all day

So you’re the reason why search results are spam nowadays

I took a quick look at the sites in your profile. Guessing CoinFabrik is the one you care about? If so, you need more links.

> still a ton of keywords don't have any advertisers at all. Optimizing for these has been the number#1 revenue maker in the past 3 years.

The more Google trains its normal users that “generic queries will get you spoon-fed generic-ness, so you have to be specific to get what you want…” the more valuable placement on long-tail keywords will become. People aren’t going to stop searching, they’ll just hate Google more when doing so. And they’ll begrudgingly adapt.

The SEO industry will be fine. Startups that naturally breathe long-tail SEO will excel. Incumbent advertisers will see keyword costs rising across the board, though, and perhaps pass costs to customers. That’s not inherently a bad thing - but there’s a lot more to the debate there than just this aspect.

> Business is booming

I can believe that. But it also has the equivalent of stage 1 or 2 cancer.

I'd be surprised if business wasn't booming. SEO is not a one-time cost. Google continuously changes the algorithm for search results and agencies stay afloat due to this.

Paid ads on the other hand are pretty much set-up once and you feed in the ROAS to Google and they optimize on that. With Performance MAX, users have even less control.

OP's response is akin to a shovel seller saying business is good when people are saying the gold has run dry.

SEO still isn't dying, but low DR niche sites built for Amazon commissions and display ads, where the owner & writers have little- to no domain expertise, have been holed below the waterline by Google's latest updates. Correctly so IMO. From what I've heard, ecommerce, small business SEO etc. are unaffected.

As a SaaS / data vendor in the space, I can confirm.

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