The Evolution of SEO

I’ve been an innocent bystander within the SEO community for over 10 years now. Rather than being directly involved in hands-on website optimizations, I stood by and watched from the sidelines, observing the trends and progression of the industry. I’m constantly in awe of how this community is so focused on helping one another grow by means of educational resources and advice, so today I want to offer my hand out too. 

I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life but digital marketing and SEO in particular always had me fascinated. I was lucky enough to work closely with industry experts, such as my co-founder Marcus Tandler and together with some incredible people, we grew our business. We started as a small SEO crawler named OnPage.org. Over the last few years, we have significantly expanded our platform to include aspects of SEO, Quality Assurance, Performance, Accessibility, Compliance and Sustainability, making up Website User Experience (WUX.) A few days ago, we announced our shift from just being an SEO platform, to being the leading platform for website user experience (WUX) in the future.  

Remaining in this almost “outsider” position has given me a totally unique perspective. I can observe the happenings without being too attached or blinded by nostalgia. Out of the many observations that I’ve made and one that I have already discussed with several SEO peers, is that SEO teams have a vast amount of power, but that power is simply not being utilized enough. 

Today I’m opening up to share my thoughts on why I think this is, and what we can do to resolve this for the good of our industry and marketing strategies as a whole. 

Problem 1: The term “SEO” has wrongly gathered a bad reputation in some circles

Search Engine Optimization can be traced back to as early as 1997, when Danny Sullivan (now a Search Liaison at Google) launched the SEO dedicated publication Search Engine Watch. Yes, this term is now 24 years old, let that sink in!  

Usually, SEOs were webmasters hell bent on getting their hobby blogs or affiliate sites ranked highly on primordial search engines as quickly as possible. Some of these webmasters deployed shady tactics that tricked search engine crawlers into believing that a page was more relevant for a query, which involved practices like keyword stuffing, cloaking (showing a different version of the page to search engines), and even adding white text on a white background that users couldn’t see. 

All of these tactics are well and truly dead since a long while thanks to the development of better algorithms and spam detection systems by search engines like Google, but shady tactics can still manifest in different forms. What is referred to by some as “Black Hat SEO” still lurks on hidden forums and private groups, where a seldom few discuss new inventive ways of cheating Search Engine systems for the good of their business plans. Being detected by Google’s systems results in a penalty which publishes websites and often removes them from organic search until the bad behaviour has been cleaned up. 

Some strains of Black Hat SEO have also evolved into “Grey Hat” which is playing by Google’s rules, but only promotes strategies that are for Search Engine gain. Whereas it’s not as detrimental as Black Hat can be, Grey Hat still has its faults that result in very short-lived gains at best. 

I know for a fact that these manipulative tactics are few and far between. We do not need to be afraid of penalty-inducing, manipulative tactics when employing SEO specialists or an agency, as the majority are sincere and hard-working folk. We should be more aware of the pejorative effect this had on the title as a whole.  

Good SEO is not spammy or manipulative or working just for algorithms. Good SEO creates useful resources and strengthens onsites experiences to satisfy the goals of searchers. But due to its bad past, SEO still unfortunately leaves a bad taste in the mouth of some.

Problem 2: Search Engine Optimization implies that we only optimize websites for machines

For already so long, Google has been working towards an AI-first approach to evaluating and ranking content. They employ means to assess content like a user would and therefore always aim to rank what is most relevant and high quality to their human searchers. 

How exactly do they do this? Well, we can’t know for sure but Google has provided us with clarity on certain methods used to evaluate a website’s authority, and we know they additionally use explicit and implicit feedback as well as Quality Raters (humans who rate search results based on a vast collection of guidelines and basically evaluate is algorithms work). 

With this evolution in how Google sees and ranks websites based on the experience it delivers, the role of the SEO has also fundamentally changed. No longer focusing on keyword rankings and building websites for search engines, but now focusing on satisfying user intent and creating an optimal UX. Google has begun using the term user experience more and more. For example in their Core Web Vitals documentation, they clearly state, “Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of any site on the web.”

It’s nothing new to say that all the “optimizing” and iterating through improvements should be done completely for your website visitors, and not for the search engines. So why are we still called Search Engine Optimizers? Well there have been several attempts to change this slightly archaic phrase, but none have been widely adopted so that’s something I want to push too ;)

Problem 3: SEO Teams are siloed and therefore not equipped to be providing the business impact they should be

It’s the same old issue that SEOs do not receive the resources they need in order to make a solid improvement to the websites they work with (and therefore the business impact is even more difficult to obtain and measure). This is largely due to the fact that the SEO’s success relies on a strong collaboration with other teams. If that connection is weak or non-existent, the whole process falls apart. 

Classically, SEO teams resided within the marketing department. It makes sense: organic search is a traffic channel, so it’s obvious to place them with other traffic-driving channels. 

But in being situated so far away from product, UX design, and tech, the SEO team becomes a mystified annoyance who are left to fight for support, even when they raise issues that are massively hindering the website’s growth. 

When we provide workshops and sparring with our customers, we help advise them on detrimental website issues or strategy deficits that result in lost traffic and conversions. Despite being thankful for our assistance, a lot of our customers have the same feedback: it’s increasingly difficult to get the technical resources required for these improvements, no matter the proposed impact. 

Of course, we help to enable these customers with ways of better proving that business impact (see our BCG study) but the problem stems again from their position, or lack of, in the organization. In order to ensure fulfilment of their optimizations, the SEO team needs to work closely with web developers, UX designers, CRO specialists, performance experts, and more.

A good SEO manager should be more like a product owner or a project manager in the regard that they evaluate all current situations and needs, use their expertise to create prioritized plans, advise dedicated specialists on what to implement, and report back to key stakeholders. 

Are those the only issues? Nope

To avoid rambling, those are the three main issues that I found myself and others experience with the classic SEO term. Of course, there are more! SEO is often being mystified and misunderstood, interpreted as an optional after-thought, seen as a way of just stealing traffic from others, a practice only involving “link building”, and… I could go on for days! 

SEO has quite a bad rep, but that’s a crying shame considering all the huge benefits it brings. 

So how do we resolve these? I don’t have all the answers but what I do have is an eagerness to encourage this discussion among you all. My proposed solutions won’t fit every organization or need, they won’t be the answer to every problem, but I am wanting to kick start this conversation with what I believe to be necessary. 

As SEO evolves, so should the title

What’s in a title? Well, hierarchical wise, titles shouldn’t mean much. However, a mindset shifts when the title does. Responsibilities and focuses change, as do external appearances. To the outside world, “Search Engine Optimizer” can seem almost manipulative whereas a “Website Quality Optimizer” may have exactly the same responsibilities but it sounds like a way more helpful profession. 

That’s why myself and many others now believe that it’s time the SEO team name (and job title) needs to adapt with the times, to reflect on our responsibilities of creating better websites for humans. 

There are many suitable options for this evolution, but after close consideration my favourite team name suggestions are:

• Website UX 
• Web UX
• Website User Experience
• WUX

I think “Advisor” or “Expert” are optional additions as a job role (e.g. Web UX Advisor) which can be replaced with your existing hierarchy titles, but I think that they associate well with the SEO’s role of collaborating with other teams. What is most important is the aspect of Website UX seeing as this encompasses the primary requirement of contributing to stronger onsite experiences for everyone.

And I know, “SEO” has a good ring to it and that’s partly why it stuck around for so long. It sounds snappy and I know that changing the title won’t happen overnight! But this is a change that's necessary for the industry to grow and WUX also has a very good ring ;-)

Grow the expertise of your team 

Renaming the SEO team’s title won’t change its proficiencies overnight, that’s why it’s highly important to understand what knowledge deficits and strengths there are, to learn what the best next steps are. 

To ensure a smoother evolution into this more powerful team, try to appoint specialists for each focus area. These advocates can push along strategies and get other team members up to speed with that topic. By all means, encourage experts from other departments to get involved too! Your UX designer can brilliantly teach your WUX team on their workflows, how they evaluate user feedback, what they test, and more.

Here are the four focuses we believe are most important for the Website UX team to advocate.

Search Engine Accessibility

• ensuring a website is technically capable for search engines to analyse and understand the website’s content. This focuses on crawlability and indexability of the site .
• These tasks require a strong connection with product, web design and web development to ensure the required technical fixes are properly implemented and tested.  

User Accessibility

• contributing to a more accessible web for different disabilities, ages, devices, and network connections.
• whereas experts on this topic could reside within other teams, this topic can and should be supported by SEO / WUX. 

Authority Management 

• managing the brand’s authority from a digital perspective, such as creating high quality content pieces that resonate with the audience and locating new platforms to be present within. 
• This requires a knowledge of (or connection) with content creation and digital PR, as well as the involvement with any brand marketing experts.

User Engagement

• Evaluating and promoting the user-centricity across all aforementioned areas and determining status and steps to improve. 
• Works together with UX and CRO teams on feedback evaluation and testing, as well as web performance teams 

This general list of competencies should provide no shocking revelations - user engagement, accessibility, performance and authority topics are nothing new to the SEO’s repertoire. I would additionally advise you to consider where further expertise is required and how it can be improved, to keep empowering your team continuously.  

Locate and resolve internal bottlenecks

As previously mentioned, many SEO strategies fail because there aren’t enough dedicated resources available to move website iterations and growth tactics along. There could be many reasons for this, such as poor internal communication, lack of expectation management, no set goals to report, and so on. 

It’s high time to address these issues internally and provide solutions that encourage better communication and collaboration in the long run. This could be driven by changing the placement of your Web UX team to be better integrated within the most relevant department, or it could simply involve encouraging better communication across departments (e.g. attending sprint reviews, hosting educational lightning talks, and so on).

Either way, you need to first communicate with your team to understand what is getting in their way of organic greatness. Find those out, and work out how to remove these potential blockers. As we work closely with businesses and organisations to help them evolve, we will share our learnings on what works best in terms of development and strategic planning. 

Final Thoughts

So again I ask you, the SEO community, what do you think? Has the term SEO had its day as a title? Are we not at the point of needing to give us a new, more accurate title to reflect our renewed focuses? 

These thoughts have been brewing up for quite some time, and I know that I’m not alone. Whether your SEO team has an image problem, a lack of priority, or something else, it’s way overdue that we all try to come together to revolutionize this industry and make it into what it deserves to be. For so long, we’ve been advocating for building better and higher quality websites that resonate with users, so it’s only right that our reputation matches that.