In the investment world there's a rule of thumb when it comes to the media. By the time the mainstream media declares something, it has already happened. For example, the slump in the housing market wasn't reported until well after it happened. Similarly, by the time the big media houses report that the housing market has hit bottom, it'll probably have already been there for some time. By now you're wondering what all of this has to do with SEO…
I was poking around Google Trends today and decided to check out the search trends for the term SEO. It turns out that SEO appears in many places that are unrelated to what I as actually looking for. So I tried search engine optimization instead. The trend for the last few years is shown below.
What interested me is that the search volume is decreasing, while the media coverage is increasing. This looks like evidence that SEO has become mainstream in that people are not searching for the generic phrase anymore, while the news outlets continue to write about it as if it was news. Pure speculation of course.
During the same session, I found that social media volume has yet to dip in terms of search volume and the media have been increasing their references to it for the last 9 months. Without a scale on the graph it's hard to say just how popular social media is, but I think it's safe to say that we haven't seen interest in that area peak just yet. From this I would hazard a guess and say that SEO experts should begin to incorporate social media optimization (SMO) in to their work if they haven't done so already. I admit to being a bit behind the curve on this one.
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- SEO. No, not that one.
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