Where will SEO be in five years?

One of the best questions to come from my talk in Southampton today was related to the future of SEO. Following on from my point that most people click on the left hand side of the search engine results pages (SERPs) or 'natural listings' or 'free listings', as opposed to the Pay Per Click listings. The gentleman in the audience wondered where SEO will be in five years time? If everyone cottons on the facts that SEO is a good thing and results in great things for their business (more sales, more brand awareness, beating the competition etc) then how will businesses be able to optimise their website and get it to the top of the search results?

This is something that I've seen a lot of in the last few months and was going to write about anyway. Already the competitive phrases all pull up very similar looking results, as most companies start to target the same phrases and use the same techniques (e.g. improving title tags, writing great META descriptions).

An example is shown below for 'chocolate fountains'


As you can see here, nearly every website has the phrase 'chocolate fountains' mentioned twice. This results in the pages looking very similar as the key phrases is highlighted in bold. As all of the websites are highlighted, there is little differentiation between the listings. As a result the user is going to find it difficult to make a decision between clicking on the first listing or the fifth.

It is a not very well known fact that 42% of searchers hit the first result regardless of what is returned. However, if all of the results look the same, will this still be the case? Will people trust Google to still give them the best result, or will they see a page of bold text and results all looking the same and not bother?

I would assume that Google are watching this activity very carefully to analyse the effect of optimisation on rankings, perhaps even to the point where they don't use the bold matching on some occasions.

Maybe in five years time, we might not be even worried about Google rankings and all searches maybe carried out in some other way or with some other company (Facebook? MySpace? Someone else?).

In the mean time though, companies serious about the Internet and getting the best results should look to maximise their returns through effective search engine optimisation. We're happy to talk to any company who wants to do this :)

If you have any views about where SEO is heading or where you think it will be in five years, please share your views with us below.