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Comment by alphadevx | Hacker News Reader

I'm coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd.

Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that's want they want from you. I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.

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If you're in the app/startup world, it can seem that way. However I'm a web developer on Sears's e-commerce team. We focus a lot on SEO still, as the other options is paying money for search placement and traffic, and those payments are no joke. We have major business goals around minimizing the amounts we pay for traffic, so optimizing SEO is big for us.

cool. Now please kindly tell me when is the next sears warehouse sale for the sorel shoes?

This is o true. We get a lot more sales from organic Google search results than paid advertising. It's no joke when you start spending thousands of dollars a day on adwords and still get nowhere near the organic results.

If you compete in a B2B space selling a high revenue product it absolutely still matters. Even more so if you are taking on larger companies with a heavy focus on outbound sales. Everyone is not "doing this". Assumptions like that are way too broad.

Yes search engines make their money from adverts, but without decent organic listings (where ~90% click volume still goes), there's going to be no one to click to ads. It's a fairly simple mechanic.

SEO is likely depreciating gradually as Google gets better at 1) devaluing link spam and 2) accessing and assessing website content for its meaning, but it's unlikely to ever be perfect at doing either.

Appreciate the thought, but disagree quite heavily - I think the "dirty hacks to help you rank #1 overnight!" are gone (and even this is debatable for short term gains, just not viable for long term business strategy), but SEO is alive and well and will be for quite some time.

I think trying to rank for "car insurance," for example, as a new company is a fool's errand with how much work it would take to overthrow one of the big guys, but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands (if not millions) of other relevant monthly searches you could go after while you grow a business.

I dabble in SEO quite a lot because I see return on it (B2B SaaS company), and it's still relatively a wild west. Things are always changing, and it pays to be on top of it.

"SEO" is starting to lose it's term.

People should be focusing on building sites right, not relying on dirty hacks to get their sites indexed of using Javascript etc.

You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time.

Or you know, go to BlackHatWorld and fall for one of their scams to promises super trusty backlinks that'll rank your site.

> You can actually rank quite well and get respectable clicks if you just build your site well and create a good action plan to actually optimise your site over a set period of time.

So, in other words, by doing SEO right.

If you think SEO is 'dirty hacks', then you obviously don't know SEO.

No, I think that building your site wrong, then relying on using dirty hacks is wrong.

No way, SEO is very relevant. It's still a pillar for inbound marketing. Just for instance, if you're search for the next product you want to buy, there's good chance that you'll visit the top organic search results and buy from there. Big win for the seo optimised site! In mobile apps, it might not seem so appealing, but it's still best if your app shows up in relevant categories etc.

I disagree with you, but I certainly would like to know your reasoning behind this.

Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads. People go to Google for the organic results and sometimes the paid ads are useful for those people. It's still in Google's best interest to provide the most relevant organic results as possible.

Most businesses I've worked with still get more revenue from organic than paid and even if the percentages change, it's mostly from increased paid spend leading to more revenue and not decreasing organic revenue.

> Most people are going to use a search engine if all they get are paid ads.

Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads. They can hardly tell the difference. That's why businesses are paying so much to be on top of certain lucrative search key terms: if they we not getting a return on their advertising spend, then they would not be spending it.

My main point is, even if your website is horribly un-optimized in terms of SEO, if you have a bucket of cash to spend on Adwords, you will still get a tonne of traffic. SEO in this instance is almost irrelevant.

I don't want to get too specific into our paid and organic strategies, but I can say that our numbers don't support that people will be more likely to click on the ads than the organic results. This is for both popular, competitive keywords, and branded.

You main point is valid. You can buy traffic from lots of places and that traffic is often very good. But organic traffic can still make up a big part of your revenue and shouldn't be ignored.

FWIW we are seeing exactly the same. We compete in highly competitive areas, and our paid search ads barely break even these days. Paid search is really tough.

Our organic efforts are much more fruitful.

> My main point is, even if your website is horribly un-optimized in terms of SEO, if you have a bucket of cash to spend on Adwords, you will still get a tonne of traffic. SEO in this instance is almost irrelevant.

I do not agree. A competitor with an optimized page will pay less and rank higher even in the payed result. It is not as simple as the one who payes the most will rank highest, Google has a quality score for Adwords landing pages that will effect your ranking in the payed result as well as what you pay per click.

> Most people will just click on the first few "results", even if they are in fact ads.

Incorrect. Specific percentages vary from study to study, but on average no more than 30% of clicks on a search results page are on ads, leaving 70%+ for organic results.

You can always buy traffic, but it cuts into your profit margins and/or reach.

Remember that SEO is optimization. It can't replace ads, but the more traffic you can get organically, the more profit you can make, and then you'll have more to spend on ads. It's a virtuous cycle.

And success is relative. If you're not doing any SEO, and your competitor does it half-assed, well, then their average visitor cost is going to be less than yours--and that's a competitive advantage.

> I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.

Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts.

> Could you expand on this? I'm interested in your thoughts.

Sure! Here goes...

SEO was supposed to give you a competitive advantage, with your highly-optimized site appearing ahead of your (supposedly) less-optimized rivals in the search rankings. With the majority of above-the-fold space on Google being taken up by ads, those looking for free traffic via organic SEO are really just fighting for scraps.

For the past few years, the companies I have been working with have been competing for rankings on relevant search key terms on Adwords with their rivals, meaning the guys with the biggest advertising budgets wins (and Google wins either way). Organic SEO does not suit Google, in terms of their business model. They want you to pay for placement.

When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites?

It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO. What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?

> When you talk about "organic" links do you mean non-advertising links from other websites like blogs/news sites?

Correct.

> It seems like you get diminishing returns on SEO.

I agree, better to spend the money on ads than SEO consultancy.

> What's the point at which you'd recommended a site stop SEO and try other means of maximizing exposures. What would these other means be?

I consider SEO at this point to be about breaking even with the search engine bots: if your _don't_ do it then they might actually penalize you (e.g. your site is slow, you have broken links, broken redirects etc.), but if you do optimize then they will take benign view of you, but not necessarily a favorable one.

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