I believe it's rather stagnant and it really depends on your expectations. When I started in 2010, there were plenty of jobs available, and getting paid pretty well. Now, the jobs are scarce and the pay is not as great. But, if you're willing to learn and work hard then there is still hope for you in this industry. The people who are hurting the most in this industry are those who thought they could spam Google with low-quality content then rank #1 on Page 1 for a competitive keyword phrase without any backlinks. I've seen so many people fail at that.

website optimization is the new rising star. The industry isn't dead and it will only get better once we get over this Panda thing.

Yes, I think it is. It's been suffering from diminishing returns for years. People have figured out how to game the system and this has resulted in Google constantly changing their algorithm to try and stop it. This has led to a situation of an arms race between SEO professionals and Google. A lot of the things that SEOs have traditionally focused on (links, duplicate content, etc) are no longer as important as they used to be. This means that SEO has become quite stagnant. There are very few companies that can afford the SEO services of a company like SEOmoz. We may have to see if the industry will survive (my guess is yes) but that it will have to adapt to new technologies to do so.

SEO isn't dead because just about everyone needs it but it's changing and I don't think people realize this yet. It used to be all about links (backlinks) but besides just better link building, i.e. better outreach, there's now a world of content marketing.

People are coming to sites for the content they produce. People will stay on your site and consume your content if it's very valuable to them. This is a great pillar of Google's algorithm now. They measure how long people stay on your site and if you're producing good content people will stay longer, consume more pages, and visit more often. The more they do this, the higher you rank in search engines because you're providing great value to your visitors/customers. That's why SEO is not dead but it has changed in amazing ways over the past decade. It used to be that it was bad for your brand to be in the top 10 searches on Google... instead, that's where you want to be.

Because the companies have found a way to produce better content which people are visiting more often and consuming more pages. This is the new rising star of SEO. There are also other strategies like influencer marketing and social media marketing, which work great in conjunction with SEO Company in Ahmedabad. I think it won't change much for a while since there is so much growth potential left in these areas. It's not dead yet! You can still make good money, but it's harder than it was 10 years ago because people have figured out how to game the system.