SEO is the worst ever (it’s still your best marketing channel)

Here are two ideas that can be true at the same time: SEO offers worse returns than ever. SEO is still one of the best marketing channels.

SEO has indeed changed:

Talk to the site owner and you even hear some whispers, and some companies lose 20-40% of their monthly clicks from searches. ^{1 2 3}

Including some of them from research companies such as Gartner, it is not too exaggerated.

This sounds like the end of SEO. Which marketing channel could lose 20-40% of its return and still guarantee energy and investment?

OK: SEO.

SEO has always been Such A stupid profitable marketing channel, even today, in AI search for the end of the world, SEO is still still The best marketing channel.

When I first started selling content and SEO services about fourteen years ago, the main pushback I received was that it sounded too good to achieve. In hindsight, maybe they have a point:

• This is predictable: You can usually make decent growth forecasts and estimate traffic growth with some accuracy. That’s – and it’s still tough.
• It actually improved over time: A one-time investment in content or link will result in Better As time goes by. This is very different from the linear input output of paid advertising. SEO is an asset with complex value.
• This is precise: use Keyword researchyou can target specific people at specific moments, and almost all of this guarantees a stable visitor to your business.
• Its entry barrier is very low: You can start with small increments. Some links or blog posts are still beneficial without the cost of setting up a lot.

There are other marketing channels that can even closure These benefits?

SEO is an affordable and complex asset that can depend on the main growth engine of your business. Therefore, SEO has become a nearly global marketing channel used by small businesses and post-IPO giants through B2B and B2C. Too good, too cheap to ignore.

Actually, SEO is so Many companies only engage in SEO to profit from the traffic they generate. Member marketing thrives, what we now call “On-site reputation abuse”. SEO transportation becomes the end point, not just a means.

Interest in searching for “member marketing” peaks in 2023.

Today, the generated AI has obviously changed SEO. Companies can easily use thousands of mediocre blog posts spam search results, while Google can easily skip the middleman and use AI to directly answer searchers’ queries. AI also increases the supply of SEO content and reduces the demand for it.

AI is swallowing clicks from information search. In our study, we found that 99.2% of the intent of triggering AIO was “informative”.

Here is SEO Monkey Paw: We can create SEO content almost for free, but it’s hard to get clicks from it now.

Some people quickly cried about the “death” of SEO, but I think of these changes in a different way: SEO is downgraded to Common Marketing Channels very good one. All marketing channels have pros and cons – Now, SEO has gained some cons to complement the ridiculous amount it has always had.

Importantly, I don’t think most companies will lose too much from these changes. Even in the world of AI overview and AI-generated content, all the huge benefits of SEO remain – despite some modifications:

• SEO traffic is still predictable…But we should lower expectations for “good” performance.
• SEO investments will still generate more value over time… A little slower than before.
• SEO is still accurate… But we will have more competition to attract the same audience.
• SEO still has low barriers… But the best outcome will require more money and skills to achieve.

Clicks may drop. But for most companies, SEO will remain one of its biggest growth drivers. They still want to deny that competitors monopolize the lucrative SERP. They still want to be the biggest player in the smaller search landscape. The strategies that worked at the time still worked to a large extent: content, links, technical SEO.

SEO may contribute less to the bottom line, but will still contribute and will generate a considerable return on investment. (This may not be a question at all: Who says LLM traffic won’t have a higher conversion rate and contribute more to revenue than traditional search traffic?)

It’s early on, but our research has found that almost all of the sites have received recommended traffic from LLMS attributable. It is not a long time to think that referral traffic may have a higher purchase intention than “traditional” SEO traffic.

It will also be difficult to build a business on monetized search traffic alone. Member marketing is harder than ever. But this should also be expected. Member marketing is a form of arbitrage, and all arbitrage opportunities are temporary. The window for easy profits is closed.

In many ways, we exude unhealthy and unsustainable expectations of SEO and learn to see it as a marketing channel, not magic money. The era of Easy SEO is over and now we have to work harder to earn the same disproportionate results.

I’m fine with this and I think you should do the same. Or as Alex Birkett said LinkedIn:

I agree with this – “SEO is too easy for too long” – actually thinking it’s great not to be the case anymore. Do we really want to spend our prime day in our careers, publish the ultimate guide and push links to drive vanity traffic? Not me.