In short, no! The internet is full of pundits predicting on thing or another, and lately it seems to be the fashion amongst certain people providing SEO services in the UK and elsewhere to prophecy the death of organic search. We can see where they are coming from. The internet is increasingly social. Where an organic search on Google, Yahoo, or some other engine used to be pretty much the only way of navigating through the enormous expanse of the wild internet, new paths are emerging.
The web is increasingly social so is search engine optimization, but more about that in another blog). There are now many ways of finding the right page. Services like Wikipedia are moving into place as major information providers, more trusted than smaller and more anonymous websites, and many people are going straight there rather than arriving through a search engine. Recommendations are increasingly important and social bookmarking sites with inputs from real people are providing alternate navigation resources. Anyone offering SEO services in the UK or anywhere else should naturally take these trends into account.
However, there is no real doubt that search engines (and organic search engine optimization) will be with us for the foreseeable future. Google delivers more than 30000 searches per second on average. That is a staggering number of queries in anyone’s estimation.
Whilst Google still takes the lion’s share of the organic search market, the last year has seen Bing make significant gains and the new partnership between Yahoo and Bing might bring more changes. Navigation through social media is certainly on the rise and smart people will pay it plenty of attention when they plan website marketing campaigns, but it won’t challenge organic search for the information-gathering crown for a few years yet- if it ever happens!
