Greetings to all of you. How are you? I hope you are doing awesome!
I am here to discuss an interesting topic: “The evolution of SEO and Growth Hacking”. What do you think, SEO or Growth Hacking? Who is older? Technically, SEO is old. But on the other side, if you understand the gist of Growth Hacking, I might say that growth hacking is even older than SEO.
How is that possible? And why? Keep reading and you will come to know!
The Evolution of SEO
A bit of history
The Dinosaurs existed thousands of years ago. Humans are able to conclude this by research. The main reason for their extinction was climatic changes. So why are we discussing Dinosaurs? My point is that they were dependent on nature or atmosphere. Similarly, SEO or search engine optimization is dependent on the Search Engine.
If there is no search engine, there is no SEO. So the term SEO originated after the success of search engines. The first search engine was Archie. and the first web search engine was Aliweb. After Archie, came Veronica, Jughead, etc. But Yahoo can be considered as a prominent web search engine. It had competitors like AltaVista.
Yahoo was the first search engine to organize the index in a hierarchy. It added informational sites like Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail, etc. On the other side, AltaVista offered unlimited bandwidth and also allowed natural language queries.
Professionalism
Google was earlier known as Backrub. It started selling search terms and led to a new era of search engine business. All this was followed by digital violence. Algorithmic updates took months to complete and webmasters were already playing their tactics. It is known as Black-Hat SEO now! Then can spamming. It is known as spamdexing.
A lot of people started using the Internet with many new things coming up every other day. Emails, online chatting, improved Internet speed, etc. So if the masses were converting to e-users, it was time to do online business!
The need for SEO was felt with the online business. How to sell the product online? How to list it on the top? All this was needed because internet users, as well as consumers, increased every second. Online marketing was not confined to keywords anymore.SEO was now becoming an industry and Google started enhancing localized SEO.
The Evolution Of Growth Hacking
It seems like there is a common rule, “where there are people, there is loads of marketing!” With the advent of social media, everything changed completely. People started developing online communities, groups, etc. So the people who started marketing on social media came to be known as social media marketers.
But then, is marketing only confined to social media? No, apart from social media channels, there are many other things online like forums, video channels, etc. The people who started marketing things everywhere, not just on social media, came to be known as growth hackers.
Growth hackers are interested in marketing, generating leads, reaching out to everyone, data analysis, content creation, business development, designing, etc. They aren’t confined to social media. They can be a part of a marathon to promote the product/service and they can be a part of an online discussion as well! Their goal is “Growth”. So this is how growth hacking came into existence.
Rollback Time
Now let us get back to the question. How is growth hacking older than SEO? If the concept of growth hacking is to market the product/service in any way, then it existed before search engines! People are marketing their products in different ways since time immemorial.
I believe that anyone who approaches others in an innovative way to represent a product/service is a “Growth Hacker”.
We have discussed the evolution of SEO and Growth Hacking in the shortest possible way. Definitely, there is more to it! But discussing such facts and information fascinates me. Is it the same with you? If yes, I am waiting for your comments. Till then, have fun!
