Google’s John Mueller discusses the future of SEO and if he believes it will never become outdated in the near future. A question was submitted during the Google Search Central SEO hangout on July 2 that simply asked, “What is your vision for the future of SEO?”
Google’s John Mueller believes that search engines will never progress to the point where SEO is no longer relevant. This placed Mueller in the position, since he acknowledges he lacks the ideal elevator speech on SEO’s future.
He addresses a prevalent fear among SEOs: that machine learning would develop to the point where Google will be able to comprehend webpages without any extra optimization.
There would be no need for SEO if Google’s machine learning algorithms could grasp everything about websites on their own.
However, Mueller does not believe that is where the future of search is heading. Here’s the rest of his response.
Although SEO as a whole hasn’t perished, many techniques have. If you continue to use obsolete strategies, you will only see worse rankings and the possibility of fines in the future. We take a look at a handful of the most widely utilised, yet out-of-date, strategies in use today.
SEO, or optimising content for search engines, is still very much alive and well. Old school tactics are no longer in use, while modern ones that focus on how search engines now “evaluate” material are very much alive.
Google’s John Mueller discusses the future of SEO and if he believes it will become outdated in the near future.
A question was submitted during the Google Search Central SEO hangout on July 2 that simply asked, “What is your vision for the future of SEO?”
“I don’t know. Good question. I don’t have that five minute answer on the future of SEO. I think one of the things that people always worry about is everything around machine learning and that Google’s algorithms will get so far as to automatically understand every website and SEO will be obsolete, nobody will need to do that. I don’t think that will happen.”
“… with all of these new technologies you’ll have new tools and new ways of looking at your website, and making it maybe easier for you to create really good content, to create clear structures for your website.
Similar to how things have evolved the last 10-20 years as well where in the beginning you would write your own PHP code and craft your own HTML and it was a lot of work and over time all of these CMS’s evolved where essentially anyone can go off and create a website without having to really understand any of these HTML and kind of like server side basics.”
Why make this comparison?
Mueller sees SEO headed in the same direction. He suggests some of the things we do manually, like writing H1 and H2 tags, may eventually be handled by the website’s CMS.
The future of SEO that Mueller describes sounds like it will largely be automated by different tools.
He gives an example of uploading a webpage’s main content and having the CMS automatically optimize the heading tags.
“And I think that evolution will continue and there will be more and more tools available and you’ll be able to do more and more things in a way that kind of works fairly well for search engines and it’s not that the SEO work will go away but rather it will evolve.
So maybe instead of hand tweaking H2 tags and H1 tags you’ll delegate that to a CMS that makes sure that the most important content is already included as a heading on the page.”
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