Moaz Butt

In 2020, a little more than 10 years from now, SEO will still exist. As long as people will search something there will be professionals who make search more effective and things more findable. Of course the SEO industry will evolve. It will change significantly more than once. How?

Can we predict the more distant future of SEO beyond guessing the trends of this or next year?

We can try to predict the future. Futurism as in futurology (not the historic arts movement) is a wide spread, indispensable albeit often erring discipline.

Big corporations employ their own futurists who predict future demand before it appears not a year prior to its emergence but years in advance. Government agencies and the military do that as well to be prepared and once a menace appears already have the fitting strategy.In SEO we much too often only react to what big Google dictates us. In 10 years from now the Googlezon dystopia might be reality but as well Google might not exist anymore or become marginal so it makes no sense to guess future Google SEO techniques.

We must take a look at what technology has already been invented and which will be widely available or adopted in 10 years from now to predict what SEO will be like in 2020.We must consider the future generations’ needs. Who will they be, where will they live?We need to address the sociological and economical impact of current developments.This task is of course too huge to fit in a short blog post.

I’m not a proponent of the belief in linear progress which reads something like this: Everything will become higher, faster, better. Things will change, some will be better, others will deteriorate again others will emerge which we can’t imagine now at all.

For this posting to make sense I want to focus on three things in it:

Changed demographics

• Pervasive technology
• Availability of means of production
• Changed demographics: Access for everybody, globally

When 10 years ago, in 1999 I bought my first laptop as a student, the cheapest model by then had cost 5 times as much as the cheapest laptop nowadays costs. This is just a simplified