For a long time, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was considered as the only answer and solution for any product wanting to use the digital world for marketing. It’s surprising to hear experts say SEO days are over. How will this affect product marketing?

Recently SEO expert Jill Whalen announced she’s ending her SEO career wrote: “Finally, however, Google put their money where their mouth was with their Panda and Penguin updates. At last the only real way to do SEO was what I had been espousing all along. And it’s a beautiful thing! Today’s SEO blogs and conferences are bursting with SEO consultants talking about how, when you create amazing websites and content for your users, the search engines will follow. This “means, my friends, that my work here is done.”

Consider these

• Lack of Quality Content

If you know that the only way to market your product through your website is to have quality content why don’t you just publish good content? The trick is not to build artificial links to mundane content but rather share interesting, wellwritten, well-produced content that people really want to read, connect or interact with. People recommend specific content as the most relevant information on that topic, as a result, when someone searches, Google sees relevancy and naturally rewards a particular site.

• Social Media

More and more people are using social media to find websites to visit. The search engines are well aware of this, and are incorporating many social indicators into the way they rank sites. SEO experts will need to properly implement social media marketing, which will not only drive traffic from the social sites, but also help improve the rankings in the SERPs.

• Target Audience

We should go back to the basics. We should be thinking about our audience and what we can do to benefit them. At the end of the day, they’re the people purchasing our product, right? And we need to convince them. So the thumb rule is that in 2014, it will be the audience who will decide the popularity of the particular product, definitely not the SEO.

• Mobile Phones

The top three positions on a search page matter even more in mobile world since the digital shelf gets really small on mobile devices. In fact, according to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, a drop to the first (below paid ads) position can result in a conversion plunge of 90% or more! This means that your SEO campaigns need to take into account click-through rates and search volume in the mobile realm. The other big difference is that mobile users do not want to scroll. So this will surely affect the SEO and subsequently, the product marketing as well.

• Discovery

Lastly, SEO is about matching intent with discovery. The very nature of search is about discovery and SEOs need to master it. This means looking beyond the keyword and to the other ways in which users discover content from Google and other search platforms.

For example, Google+ and Google Now, AppStore recommendations and how Open Graph meta tags influence presentation, shares and clicks. So if you still want to boost your results or wish to market your product successfully, then undoubtedly you are better off paying for a Google or Facebook ad than an ongoing SEO strategy.

Source: www.productleadership.in