A few charts from Google Trends over regarding a few search terms within the industry
Past 12 months of searches for “link building”.
Looks pretty stable.
What about over a longer time period?
Looks like it peaked in 2012, and now back to 2009. Seems stable the last 12 months though.
Content marketing seems to be the latest buzzword, but surely that’s a word only the gurus use?
But whatever happened to “social media marketing”, surely that’s old stuff right now and no one searches for it?
Nope! Social media marketing is kicking link building’s ass. But don’t they know that links = higher rankings in the Google results page. Well perhaps people have a perception that social media is far more important than ranking in Google. That may or may not be the case, but for what people are actually searching for. For “social media marketing”, computer says yes.
So does that mean the fragrant and effervescent social media department are crushing the Ben Sherman shirt wearing SEO types?
SEO for the terms of these charts still beats all the other terms into the ground? Does this mean that it’s not dead. Of course it does, but you never thought that anyway, did you?
Does this mean that you should pile everything into SEO and let the social media marketing department more time to play on Snapchat? Probably not, there may be an issue with SEO being highly definable whilst numerous other terms could be used for social media marketing and content marketing.
What I think it does mean is that the SEO engineer should be secure in their employment, ensuring them to invest further in their wardrobe of Ben Sherman shirts.