What’s An SEO person’s Job?

I live by a few different mottos in my life, depending on which hat I’m wearing at the moment. As an efficiency expert, my motto is: Perfection Is The Enemy of The Good. As an SEO, my motto is: It’s Who You Rank For, Not What You Rank For. As a regular human being interacting with my fellow men, I live by this: When You Are in The Service of Your Fellow Men, You Are Only in The Service of God (Book of Mormon).

Let me explain my SEO motto. I’ve been quoted before about SEO dying. I still believe that the industry as we know it will be dead in about 1.5 years. So my vision of what SEO will morph into will revolve around marketers being able to target very specific groups of people with their marketing message; whether on a social network, a search engine, an app, a game or what have you. If you take that a step further (because we’re pretty much already there to a certain degree) you should be able to target individual people where ever they are online.

And the job of an SEO will turn into ‘ranking’ their content #1 for the exact person on Facebook who is looking for their product/service. Someone on Google who is searching for ‘Death of SEO‘, and comes across a Forbes article ranked #1 for that phrase and finding you. Someone in the App store looking for the top productivity app, and ranking that app really high through reviews, downloads, and other social like signals.

So hopefully now you understand a little of what I mean when I say ‘It’s Who You Rank For, Not What You Rank For’ because I’m trying to take the focus away from just targeting keyword phrases (which at least 50% of the time don’t let us know what the searchers intent even is) and focusing more on getting your (great) content in front of the right consumer where they are, whether socially, organically, mobilely (made up) and so forth.

Photo credit: Hubspot