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As 2020 gets rolling and SEO is bigger and more important than ever, it seems like the right time to look back to see where it originated. Today, SEO is probably the most powerful way to market a business. With the ability to reach more customers and potential customers than ever before, SEO’s power is harnessed daily by multinational corporations, mom and pop shops and every kind of company in between. The history of SEO and where it originally came from shows just how far it has come and offers some hints about how to better think about it in 2020 and the years to come.
SEO’s Beginning
The first recorded usage of the acronym “SEO” is dated back to 1997. So, it seems like we’ve had the term around for more than 22 years as of this writing.
Of course, that actually predates the creation of Google and many of the other search engines that we depend upon today. Instead, the search engines we had (including even Yahoo) essentially functioned more or less like actual directories — not like online directories that you might find today, but rather, the sort of directory you might find on the wall of a particularly large store or mall.
Some business owners realized that their companies weren’t as prominently placed in the directories as they should be. From there, the idea of SEO (even as it was called many other names) really took off.
A ‘Yellow Pages’ For The Internet (And More)
The Yellow Pages (if you don’t remember) was a large book, given out for free, that listed just about every business in the area. Some companies paid for extra-large ads to be placed more prominently in the Yellow Pages so that they could be found easier by potential customers. Then, contact info for participating companies was listed in alphabetical order.
If you look carefully, in many ways, that’s not dissimilar to how Google works now (minus the alphabetical order). The difference is that, in addition to paying for the ads, you also can take action to make your company more attractive to rank higher. Google, after all, like all of the search engines, is also a business. It wants people to use its search engine to find the best of what they’re looking for. If Google (even as mighty and powerful as it is) puts companies at the top of its rankings that aren’t doing right by customers, then those customers are going to consider using other search engines.
So, Google has a vested interest in making sure that the companies at the top of its search rankings truly are the best at what they do. Following this logic, if you’re truly great in your industry, then you want to take advantage of SEO. If you’re already doing SEO, then you want to make sure that your business is up to snuff, too. To focus entirely on one at the expense of the other isn’t a viable strategy anymore. As SEO grows, it becomes more and more necessary to keep up with both.
In the future, it seems, SEO will be more important than ever. Just in the last few years, Amazon SEO, apps SEO and more have become a part of the online marketplace. For many companies, these are just as important (if not more so) than more traditional forms of SEO. Just as businesses adapt to their market, SEO adapts to better help businesses.
The Origins Of SEO Are All Around Us
Depending on where you’re reading this, look outside. If you’re in an urban or suburban area, you might see billboards for certain businesses, or ads on bus benches, bus stops, that kind of thing. I live in Los Angeles, so I see this all the time, but there are many other kinds of offline advertising native to your area, no matter where you are.
The ads in your area, for any kind of business, were chosen for a reason: They’re put in areas where potential customers might see them. Maybe you see ads for attorneys, restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers and so forth. It’s also likely that, at the bottom of each of these ads, you see a website, too.
Beyond whenever someone actually said the magical acronym “SEO,” this is perhaps the real beginning of SEO: meeting potential customers where they live. Instead of putting up a billboard or an ad at a bus stop, SEO does this online. That said, I’m willing to bet that every single one of those companies also has an SEO strategy. They have the billboards; they have the offline ads. And in all likelihood, they use SEO, as well.
That’s the main lesson, perhaps, that SEO’s history can teach us about the future: It’s just one more tool. Sure, it’s a powerful tool, but it’s not the only one. It’s probable that the billboard ads for those companies match the SEO — in terms of artwork, sure, but also in terms of tone and brand. SEO builds on what already exists so as to give you more business in the future. So, as we move to the future and see what comes beyond SEO, remember that SEO will always be with us, just like billboards and other kinds of ads.
