I just came across an article entitled, “Bright SEO Career Prospects Could Dim,” which once again has resurfaced my belief that SEO will eventually become ineffective. The decline in SEO utility will ultimately force the majority of website owners to abandon their reliance on Google (for traffic) and look somewhere else. According to the article SEO consultants will see a surge in business over the next 5 years but after that business will plateau and ultimately decline. According to the author the decline will be the result of more educated users and website owners who will just optimize their websites on their own.

I agree that SEO will likely see a surge in business over the next 5 years and a decline after that. However, I disagree as to the reason for the decline. I don’t think the decline will be due to skilled web designers but rather due to the ineffectiveness of SEO. I agree that SEO is not rocket science and anyone can pick up the basics in just a few hours however I think the decline will be indicative of a bigger change in behavior.

Given that search is a very competitive (and crowded) place it will only get worse when the number of optimized websites increases over time. This will lead to an increase in competition that will mean fewer and fewer visitors for optimized sites, in return decreasing the value of SEO. If in 5 years an optimized site can’t guarantee a surge in traffic then SEO consultants can no longer demand their exorbitant fees. Websites obviously still need the traffic but since Google can no longer provide it to them then they are going to seek alternative ways to get that traffic. It remains to be seen whether that means niche search engines, advertising on focused social networks or an entirely new platform??!

I think the disparity between those that are satisfied with Google and those who aren’t will increase over time. Those who remain satisfied with search will be the end user looking for information. He/she doesn’t own a website and isn’t concerned about receiving traffic from Google – he is only interested in finding information when he needs it. Google and the search engines will always satisfy this user with the most relevant source.

The frustration sets in with the website owner who relies of Google for traffic. Over time his website will see a decline in traffic from Google (due to excessive competition) that eventually leaves him frustrated and unsatisfied with Google’s results. This dissatisfaction will ultimately force website owners to be the first group to migrate away from Google. Whether the average user follows remains to be seen but they have in the past. This scenario is not unlike the early days of Google when the more advanced web users fled Yahoo’s directory for Google. As we know everyone else eventually followed.

Not if, but rather when the next migration occurs is just a matter of time.

I just came across a site called Organized Wisdom which calls itself a “human powered health search” service guided by physicians. I find Organized Wisdom interesting because it’s a nice search engine that has come about due to the overcrowding of Google (MSN & Yahoo too) that I believe will be the future of search engines.

Currently when using Google you get a ton of results – some are relevant and others are not. What Organized Wisdom does is weed through all the crap to give you results from (and links to) the best health care information on the internet. Similar to how Mahalo is a “human powered search engine” (DMOZ and About.com sort of too) Organized Wisdom is one too. Though you can argue that a lot of these niche search engines aren’t much different then the early portals which is partly true but they also provide site specific searches that the portals lacked. Of course a lot of these portals, Organized Wisdom too, use Google to do a site specific search. Google is still the best for indexing every line of information on any given website however they are definitely getting overcrowded. These niche portals/search engines can pick and choose which websites are the information authorities and let Google spider and index all the information from those particular sites.

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