The secret to a successful and resilient business, is to always look ahead and to have a contingency plan for every eventuality. For that reason, you should make it your job to think the unthinkable, and to make sure that you’ve covered every angle.
If you work in SEO then, it’s worth considering what would happen if the main cornerstone of the industry were removed. It’s unlikely to happen any time soon, but if Google were to disappear, how would the industry survive? It’s a useful question to ask which might shed some light on the job you do and the way you do it, and it’s also a fun ‘thought experiment’ that might make for some fun ‘alternative reality’ speculation. So put on your imagination hat and read on…
A World Without Google :
Every search optimiser and webmaster knows that SEO should really be GEO. There is really no competition for Google, with Bing and Yahoo being a fair way behind still. Even if you’re a fan of Bing and believe that it’s the future of search, at the time being it is still following Google’s lead and trying desperately to catch up. When was the last time that Bing changed their algorithms and the internet nearly imploded?
Point is then, that a world without Google would be very different without SEO. It’s fair to say that Bing and Yahoo would step up to fill the void, but it’s likely that neither would have quite the same market monopoly that Google has enjoyed and we might well see more companies entering the fray too.
Seeking Attention!: You can also have a look at the best pictures of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Pricilla Chen. I hope you will enjoy the pictures.
This in turn would be a mixed blessing for SEOs. We wouldn’t have to do everything that Google said without question, because we’d have other options for getting traffic to our pages. That said, we’d need to pick which search engine we wanted to target, or we’d have to try and spread our bet by attempting to appease them all.
Of course this would also represent a huge ‘reset switch’ and there’d be a huge rush for every site under the sun to get to the top of the new biggest search engines. And a lot of other people of course would just give up…
Other Options:
With the search engines in disarray, we might also start turning to alternative methods of finding articles and information. Facebook for instance might attempt to fill that gap in our lives with some form of social search, while we might also see sites like Reddit indexing their articles. Maybe people would even start using link directories again? Hey, in a world where Google is dead, nothing is impossible!
The Industry:
That’s how we’d approach SEO in the new order, and for our own sites it would work well. If you’re in the business of selling SEO however, this would present a more significant challenge – getting people to pay for your service which would now seem less stable than ever. If you think that Google Panda upset the apple cart, then imagine what would happen if the biggest search engine completely collapsed. You’d have a very big challenge on your hands just trying to get people to show interest in SEO again. But as you know and I know – where there’s an internet, there will always be optimized.
