The Future SEO: Boardroom edition

Whenever we speak about something’s future, we’re doing something called extrapolating. By definition, figuring involves extending existing data or trends to assume the same procedure will continue. It’s a form of the scientific method that we probably use every day in our own lives, quite reasonably, too: the summers will be hot, the downtown traffic will be bad at 9 AM, and the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

But how can we look into the future of something as complex and ever-changing as SEO? As with all cases of hindsight, we are clear on how SEO began and how it has transformed over time. We see the inefficiencies of SEO in its infancy and how advancing search engines have altered the playing field. The catch is this: how can we surmise the future of SEO without having access to all the mysterious algorithm specifics that Google holds?

The answer is simple: we have to extrapolate.

I’ve seen SEO from the boardroom perspective for more than 20 years. I’ve seen the old days of keyword stuffing from the semi-modernization of the late 2000s to the absolute beast that Google has become now, in the 2020s. Given that, where do I think SEO is going in the not-too-distant future? Here are some thoughts on that.

User intent will remain crucial.

One aspect of SEO that is essential right now and will become more vital as time goes on is user intent in search queries. It’s an old-fashioned view to think that Google still cares much about exact-match keywords. Maybe 15 to 20 years ago, getting keywords precisely right in your content was a huge deal. Google matched queries to corresponding word strings in range and then served the best of that content to a user. Today, optimizing for exact-match keywords is a futile effort, as Google now understands the intent behind every query, and it’s only going to get better at it as time goes by.

If you recall Google’s BERT update from late 2019, you’ll remember that this was the change that allowed Google to comprehend the context of each search query or the meaning behind the words themselves. And the latest Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update adds further depth and dimensions to understanding search intent. No longer does Google look only at the words “family attractions.” It knows that that query references children’s activities, fun activities, and generally lighthearted and innocent events. And all of that came from two words. How did Google do it? Its consistent algorithm updates have allowed it to think like a human. All of this is to say that user intent must be part of your keyword and content strategy in the future when doing SEO.