Image credit goes to www.portent.com

The launching of Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) to assess websites’ ranks has scared web-developers and SEO recently. There have been continuous debates online about the death of SEO. The quote above spiced up the debates even more. Having done my own research and talked to some SEO professionals, I came up with one conclusion: SEO is not dead, it’s maturing and becoming a more fair practice. SEO has been always an evolving process in response to the ever-changing internet market. What the experts call “social content replacing SEO" is no other than what SEO is evolving to. SEO old practices do still matter.

I was really sure about this until I analysed how a leading digital agency applied SEO on their websites using 2 different tools: Power Mapper and SEO Workers.

The results were absolutely shocking.

Power Mapper Assessment

Power Mapper assesses websites by looking at errors, accessibility, compatibility, privacy, SEO, standards and usability. It specifically points out specific pages with issues.

AKQA: 5 out of 10 web pages with SEO issues (worse than average)

AKQA's integration of social media and the website is impressive. The site also has a lot of internal and external links. However, a lot of pages are missing meta-tag descriptions and keywords. Also, some links don't include the most relevant keywords in its descriptions.

SEO results

AKQA scores the highest for its own brand name on Google and Bing. However, the site isn’t on the first page of both search engines when we type relevant keywords s.a. digital, digital agency, online agency, innovation,…. you name it.


What does the competitor do?

To answer my question, I assessed another digital acency's website, Koozai, which has high visibility on Google, The website is always listed on the first page of Google when we type “digital marketing agency” or “digital agency”. Apparently, Koozai implemented all Google search engine guidelines perfectly. 

I believe that the reason why AKQA doesn't fully apply old SEO practices is simply because they don't aim to achieve high search engines scores. People in the industry already know their name; online brand awareness is not their main goal.
So, good old SEO isn't dead. At least not yet.

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Youtube, the 2^nd largest search engine behind Google, is often overlooked by many marketeers these days. While the frenzies about website SEO on Google, Bing and Yahoo are everywhere, only few people pay much attention to video SEO on Youtube. A big mistake for digital marketeers. If you want to be successful in digital field, you’d better know how to apply SEO on Youtube.

•  Youtube is the 2^nd largest search engine, outperforming Yahoo and Bing
• Every minute, there are 35 hours of content uploaded on Youtube
• Brands with optimised videos are 50% more likely to be put on Google 1^st page listing

Create a portfolio of videos around the same content and use similar keywords.

Make videos with long shelf contents and high replay value In plain English, your videos have to be relevant and timelessly needed by people.

Optimise your keywords and playlists Optimise your playlist using the most searchable keywords relevant to your content. Choosing keywords on Youtube is a bit tricky as they are different than what searched the most by people on Google. So how do you choose? Use https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool to analyse which keywords work the best.

Leverage Youtube insights Youtube insights is a powerful tool to see which video works and which does not. In this way, you can continue using the approach that holds people’s attention the longest and avoid using approaches generating low traffic.