We rely pretty heavily on Google, but some of their decisions of late have made doing SEO more difficult than it used to be. Which organic opportunities have been taken away, and what are some potential solutions? Rand covers a rather unsettling trend for SEO in this week's Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about something kind of unnerving. What do we, as SEOs, do as Google is removing organic search traffic?
So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they've sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year. So this has been on a steady incline. There's always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they're receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder.
Some scary news
Things like...
- Aggressive "answer" boxes. So you search for a question, and Google provides not just necessarily a featured snippet, which can earn you a click-through, but a box that truly answers the searcher's question, that comes directly from Google themselves, or a set of card-style results that provides a list of all the things that the person might be looking for.
- Google is moving into more and more aggressively commercial spaces, like jobs, flights, products, all of these kinds of searches where previously there was opportunity and now there's a lot less. If you're Expedia or you're Travelocity or you're Hotels.com or you're Cheapflights and you see what's going on with flight and hotel searches in particular, Google is essentially saying, "No, no, no. Don't worry about clicking anything else. We've got the answers for you right here."
- We also saw for the first time a seasonally adjusted drop, a drop in total organic clicks sent. That was between August and November of 2017. It was thanks to the Jumpshot dataset. It happened at least here in the United States. We don't know if it's happened in other countries as well. But that's certainly concerning because that is not something we've observed in the past. There were fewer clicks sent than there were previously. That makes us pretty concerned. It didn't go down very much. It went down a couple of percentage points. There's still a lot more clicks being sent in 2018 than there were in 2013. So it's not like we've dipped below something, but concerning.
- New zero-result SERPs. We absolutely saw those for the first time. Google rolled them back after rolling them out. But, for example, if you search for the time in London or a Lagavulin 16, Google was showing no results at all, just a little box with the time and then potentially some AdWords ads. So zero organic results, nothing for an SEO to even optimize for in there.
- Local SERPs that remove almost all need for a website. Then local SERPs, which have been getting more and more aggressively tuned so that you never need to click the website, and, in fact, Google has made it harder and harder to find the website in both mobile and desktop versions of local searches. So if you search for Thai restaurant and you try and find the website of the Thai restaurant you're interested in, as opposed to just information about them in Google's local pack, that's frustratingly difficult. They are making those more and more aggressive and putting them more forward in the results.
Potential solutions for marketers
So, as a result, I think search marketers really need to start thinking about: What do we do as Google is taking away this opportunity? How can we continue to compete and provide value for our clients and our companies? I think there are three big sort of paths — I won't get into the details of the paths — but three big paths that we can pursue.
1. Invest in demand generation for your brand + branded product names to leapfrog declines in unbranded search.
The first one is pretty powerful and pretty awesome, which is investing in demand generation, rather than just demand serving, but demand generation for brand and branded product names. Why does this work? Well, because let's say, for example, I'm searching for SEO tools. What do I get? I get back a list of results from Google with a bunch of mostly articles saying these are the top SEO tools. In fact, Google has now made a little one box, card-style list result up at the top, the carousel that shows different brands of SEO tools. I don't think Moz is actually listed in there because I think they're pulling from the second or the third lists instead of the first one. Whatever the case, frustrating, hard to optimize for. Google could take away demand from it or click-through rate opportunity from it.
But if someone performs a search for Moz, well, guess what? I mean we can nail that sucker. We can definitely rank for that. Google is not going to take away our ability to rank for our own brand name. In fact, Google knows that, in the navigational search sense, they need to provide the website that the person is looking for front and center. So if we can create more demand for Moz than there is for SEO tools, which I think there's something like 5 or 10 times more demand already for Moz than there is tools, according to Google Trends, that's a great way to go. You can do the same thing through your content, through your social media, and through your email marketing. Even through search you can search and create demand for your brand rather than unbranded terms.
2. Optimize for additional platforms.
Second thing, optimizing across additional platforms. So we've looked and YouTube and Google Images account for about half of the overall volume that goes to Google web search. So between these two platforms, you've got a significant amount of additional traffic that you can optimize for. Images has actually gotten less aggressive. Right now they've taken away the "view image directly" link so that more people are visiting websites via Google Images. YouTube, obviously, this is a great place to build brand affinity, to build awareness, to create demand, this kind of demand generation to get your content in front of people. So these two are great platforms for that.
There are also significant amounts of web traffic still on the social web — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., etc. The list goes on. Those are places where you can optimize, put your content forward, and earn traffic back to your websites.
3. Optimize the content that Google does show.
Local
So if you're in the local space and you're saying, "Gosh, Google has really taken away the ability for my website to get the clicks that it used to get from Google local searches," going into Google My Business and optimizing to provide information such that people who perform that query will be satisfied by Google's result, yes, they won't get to your website, but they will still come to your business, because you've optimized the content such that Google is showing, through Google My Business, such that those searchers want to engage with you. I think this sometimes gets lost in the SEO battle. We're trying so hard to earn the click to our site that we're forgetting that a lot of search experience ends right at the SERP itself, and we can optimize there too.
Results
In the zero-results sets, Google was still willing to show AdWords, which means if we have customer targets, we can use remarketed lists for search advertising (RLSA), or we can run paid ads and still optimize for those. We could also try and claim some of the data that might show up in zero-result SERPs. We don't yet know what that will be after Google rolls it back out, but we'll find out in the future.
Answers
For answers, the answers that Google is giving, whether that's through voice or visually, those can be curated and crafted through featured snippets, through the card lists, and through the answer boxes. We have the opportunity again to influence, if not control, what Google is showing in those places, even when the search ends at the SERP.
All right, everyone, thanks for watching for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.
Great analysis and tips, Rand. Your first tip was to focus on branded search... but when it comes to small-medium businesses, there's a limit on how much brand search-demand one can produce. Are you saying that google search will eventually become an engine made only for entities/businesses we already know of? Where does that leave the whole discovery process?
At the Google Ads level pretty much.
No - I think people will continue to search Google for all kinds of things, but Google themselves will keep working to take larger shares of search queries for themselves (or to answer them quickly, right in the results, without requiring a click or website visit).
I agree with the point that a small or medium-sized business will have limits for budget and resources in generating brand search, but I wouldn't say that stops them from potentially producing huge growth there if they do something interesting/innovative etc. I can think of quite a few small to medium sized brands that have more name recognition than larger companies in their space. The challenge is that many of those brands are led by people who are very good at generating marketing and publicity - it's harder for small brands to be able to afford to pay for a top level consultant or agency.
The only other constraint is if a small or medium-sized firm is limited by geography. But in that case, as long as they've covered the right area, then growth will be limited anyway unless they expand...
That's the same question that was going through my mind, when I was reading your post! I'm a very small taxi business and it has gotten harder and harder to get traffic to my website to the point I'm going broke!
Keep at it! SEO produces long-term rewards and your competitors will probably give up in the meantime. Google, however, probably won't.
That's Why Google Earn money through their Adwords , But If you Focus on your Content and Do Proper Local SEO, You will definitely gets Organic Traffics
Amit,
I think it has become harder and harder for smaller brands to really stand out in any kind of search. This is especially true with small brands who face lots of competition form other small brands in large cities. How does one build name recognition in NYC as an acupuncturists when any given building may house 3 or 4 practitioners with the same address. Then these small businesses are facing the Google Possum filter. And in some cases brands without websites are showing up in the three pack over highly optimized websites.
Adwords maybe the only way to get attention in this scenario.
The challange is for SEO's then to tell this to the clients and not worry of loosing them. What to report on then, for GMB- impressions (this should decrease because I found on the maps that the link to website isn't always there!), GMB dashboard for views (a test showed stats on the GMB dashboard are incorrect) the suggested channels social, youtube don't fall under organic traffic
Yeah - reporting on search volume and what the SERPs look like for your branded queries, along with where and when you show up for queries that have few clicks but lots of searches. I think a lot more reporting on what the SERPs show is gonna happen in the future, as clicks become a less indicative measure of performance and visibility in Google.
Rand, fantastic WBF with clear intuitive recommendations. Your points about Google encroaching on key demos really helps us adjust to the ongoing new normals. Also, your shirt choices are always something to anticipate! #aheadofthecurve
:-) Thanks Scott! Gotta bring the fashion to the whiteboard
No one does it like you, Rand! I've been taking notes! :)
Get outta here! You've been rocking the whiteboard B :-)
As a SEO analyst the fact that recent changes Google has made has made it hard for websites to rank scares me a bit but on a second thought I see a lot of opportunity here for growth. Because as SEO gets more challenging true meaningful strategies are now needed to optimize a site rather than just link building and basic on page. SEOrs really need to understand the nature of a client’s business, work on their buyer’s persona & understand their clients Goals. I am a big fan of Point #2 & #3 you highlighted under potential solutions. Local businesses (LB) really need to setup up and take full advantage of Google My Business (unfortunately I don’t see many LBs doing that). With point #1 i.e. demand generation, I am bit confused about how that strategy will unfold for small businesses. This would mean a lot more investment from their end on building their brand equity and brand awareness, but some businesses don’t really have that kind of funding. I mean yes, they can implement aggressive social media strategies and take advantage of GMB but that will still be very challenging I feel. Maybe a bit more information on how we can generate demand for small businesses be helpful!
I feel we can also focus a lot on the kind of keywords we target. I had a client who was in a very competitive market place, we optimized their site for some really targeted, long tailed keywords which didn’t have very high search volume, so the traffic didn’t really go up drastically but the amount of conversions & the kind of CTRs the site received was incredible.
I own and operate a small one person taxi service. These changes in google have pretty much crushed my business! On top of the Ubers and Lyft! I'm down to pennies in my bank account, so leaves me with nothing to work with to get help! I'm at a loss!
Welcome to the machine Lady7taxidriver, and the new era of corporate consolidation. Google made $1 billion investment in Lyft. So I doubt they care too much about your situation. I would try to form strategic alliances with local businesses, offline.
I am only asking this question out of my sheer ignorance for the livery service industry but what are the differences between being independent and working for uber or lyft? How does your bottomline compare?
You are spot-on with the organic listings being squeezed in favor of the Google's PPC listings, featured snippet, perpetual accordion, links to top media sites and YouTube promotions. All that leaves a precious few organic spots and you better have a high domain authority to make the cut!
My guess is that "Content Creation" with an emphasis on "Content Syndication" and "Content Amplification" will become the de rigueur promotional method as businesses and marketers learn how to generate awareness and demand without Google.
Love this Rand. It just goes to show SEOs should never get comfortable and have a narrow focus (keywords and links). An SEOs role is to be open minded and continuously adapt strategies to how Google is improving user experience.
Thanks Rand, Totally agree with using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram to help in optimise content and traffic back to website. There are other social media platform which are really helping such as:
Thanks for this list! But here is the problem I run into when I go to these sites, my knowledge of how to set my site up in them is minimal, yet getting someone to do it for you, cost money, I don't have! Yes, your article pretty much tells what these changes have done to my very small business! So, saying all that! Where can I get help!
The piece on generating demand for branded queries rather than just product-based ones is particularly interesting here. It sounds as though it'll be more important than ever to have a strong brand in order to succeed (rather than just having a well-optimized site -- and ideally, having the strategic, technical, and creative sides all working together cohesively). Perhaps it's possible that brand exposure through things like answer boxes can still deliver some value too, even if it's difficult to measure, and CTRs are diminished?
Great WBF as always. There's plenty here to chew on.
Thanks, Rand! Totally confirms data on our end, too.
Can you please share your data source confirming the drop in total organic clicks sent?
Yup! I published the results (via Jumpshot's clickstream data) here: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-jumpshot-2018-data-... and here: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-data-how-googles-or...
Hey rand. Tanks for a great post!
Targeting brand+product is getting harder due to Amazon being more and more visible on these keywords. What role do you see Amazon have in the future SERP landscape
BR
Jonas
Amazon is still pretty small compared to Google (Amzn is around 2% of all searches, Google around 85%) and they're staying stable, but not growing that percentage the last couple years. I do think in some sectors, Amazon is very important for retailers/ecommerce sellers, but outside those fields, it's less salient.
Great Analysis!!!! I also saw a similar trend in organic search for the site I was managing couldn't find the reason for many days. I figured there are certain generic keywords my site used rank 1 or 2 is now not ranking at all instead I saw some image ads. Now I know why the rankings dropped. Thank you for the information
People need to speak up and get the FTC to correct Google’s place in the market.
Yelp and TripAdvisor are trying to do just that with the "Focus on the User Campaign."
To me....the leadership at Google is the issue and that starts with the CEO.
I've seen grant money get dispersed in my community by Google for entrepreneurship.
In order to receive the grant money you have to be an immigrant and a minority.
Sounds like a description of the CEO.
I can't ever imagine running a grant for entrepreneurship in my community that requires people to match my origin or ethnicity. Maybe a grant for underprivileged areas, but certainly not one in which a person’s ethnicity is assessed.
That is small example, but I think speaks volumes about the self-righteous attitude of the individuals running Google.
A very interesting article for SEO, Many times we detect changes in google and we have to spend days and days studying it to find out why. These articles help us greatly to reduce our research.
Great topic Rand! I have found that being well-versed in PPC and Content Marketing have not only helped my expertise grow as an SEO, but are also great options to fall back on when offering solutions to clients, depending on the SEO opportunity available. It will be interesting to see if Organic Search Traffic will continue to drop or bounce back overall though. Solids tips and insight, and glad to see you back for a WBF!
Google is not the only one source of traffic. Youtube is my second favorite search engine. And it's easier to rank videos than websites in google.
Rand, by all these gated searches and search cards etc are google effectively taking our homework ( in this case in the form of webpages / content), scribbling out our name and claiming it for their own? And then stopping users getting to the actual page? and if they are planning on removing organic traffic would they not suffer with regards to their ad revenue? Or is all this tailored for "ok google" and providing a more friendly search result for voice commands etc? Love Whiteboard Friday BTW, James, UK
Very good points here. You can't ignore this "trend" anymore. Google is increasingly trying to cut out the middleman - that is us - website owners.
Demand generation and diversification of traffic sources are helpful but I'd also heavily focus on audience building - that is making people regular visitors and subscribers.
Try to become as independent as possible from third party sites and services when it comes to visitors. Make sure people have reasons to return to YOUR site as often as possible.
It is Good. When SEO is more and more Difficult in the future, then Google can produce right quality answers for everyone who comes at google and search information.
How come we are not talking about "Google is being evil now"...
From the search engine, Google is now aggressively moving into the businesses which were exclusive to its clients until few months ago.
I guess it paves the path for a new Google or Google (s) that don't integrate backward into the value chain.
Well, for some reasons indeed this is Google Era, and Google is King of Internet. All we need to do is complies with any regulations that Google release.
Hi Rand! Thanks for a really informative and thought provoking Whiteboard Friday. I agree with Namrata about the challenges to local and small businesses that all the rapid changes with little to know warning from Google as far as they're concerned. In many cases, they're just rapping their heads and marketing strategies around having someone create and optimize their website and content for how Google SERPs used to work, and even with basic GMB listings, they have been unaware or unsure of how to use them. Some have been taken advantage of because of lack of understanding and awareness of how Google listings and GMB work and that it's free.
I think for agencies as far as how we appear in organic search ourselves, we are definitely going to need to leverage all 3 of the solutions you talk about and agencies who haven't branded their products/services are going to have to do that and are going to have to also employ branding strategies. In addition, we have to optimize for other search ares like you say in your point #2 and we must look at optimizing existing content for voice search and answers/featured snippets like you say in point #3.
We're also going to have to both educate small businesses about how to optimize their GMB listings as well as why it's important and smart agencies will have to expand their GMB local listings services to include pakages that include optimizations, and monitoring of clients' GMB listings. I think the more areas of online marketing an agency that serves the small business and local business markets can have service offerings in and branded, proprietary products that help those small and local businesses compete with the larger companies, the more successful they'll be.
Local businesses and small businesses must definitely use your #2 and #3 strategies or hire an agency to provide services that do that for them.
All the changes can either seem scary or they can seem like exciting opportunities to adapt and innovate new solutions and strategies. This week's Whiteboard Friday perfectly communicates that. Thanks again Rand and Moz!
100% agree that on the local side of things, this is an even bigger deal with Google subsuming all maps results to take the click directly to Google's listing rather than the business' website (which, IMO, is monopolistic/anti-trust behavior, but Google's unlikely to get sued for it given their substantial political donations).
I agree with your take on Google's behavior, and with the repeal of net neutrality, this is even more unlikely.
I found your content very interesting, and I believe there is a tool from Google that can boost small brands, so that the brand term begins to be more sought after: The Adwords Display Network. I'm having some results in the last months, because I created a display campaign with my brand, I put in highly regarded channels. Result: in the search network, I paid around U $ 1.00 per click, and on the display I am paying U $ 0.05 per click, and in addition, the number of searches with my company name (Gauchaweb) has increased more than 10% in the last 3 months. Worth the comment. Hug.
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You mentioned that for Expedia, hotels.com is tougher for them ... but its toughest for the hotels themselves, because Expedia, booking.com, hotels.com, tripadvisor are bidding on their brand search and taking away brand traffic. They also dominate seo results for "hotels in xyz" So its 3x tougher for independent hotels seo
What do we do as Google is taking away this opportunity?
You can figure out ways to organize and fight back. Google, taking away opportunities is getting beyond ridiculous. It’s not only SEO but PPC as well. Look how they are trying to automate every aspect of paid search campaigns.
Look at something like DMOZ, it worked so well that Google used it as a supplement. Then it got corrupted and died. However, the purpose of creating a directory with quality websites was a noble one.
WE need a workable alternative, but of course this will need a complete buy in from everyone. A nice no index tag or at the very least a redirect from Google traffic, saying sorry we are currently protesting Google and the reasons why. It is a nice dream.
Without content to be displayed Google is pretty worthless. You make the content and you just smile as Google continually takes away these revenue generating opportunities.
Says the person doing internet marketing before google was online. I guess if you are new to Internet marketing you don’t know any better.
It just seems to me that all the changes taking place are not in our clients best interests but in Google’s self interest and I imagine since they are a publicly traded company, I should expect that. You start messing with their bottom line you will get their attention. 100's of Billions ok its a monumental task for sure!
Sorry grumpy Friday and I am fighter.
Great video. I ways love the way you explain things in simple ways.
Tip1: If a person search for branded query then we have better chance of generating traffic. But unfortunately competitor can bid for those terms to steal the traffic. So to avoid competitors from ranking most of companies are paying for own branded queries via PPC. What is solution for this issue.
Infact I did a search for Moz in mobile device and see the top fold is MOZ official ad. Now MOZ is paying for those users who are already interested and they are looking for them. The purpose of PPC was to generate new users for our business but now Google is charging to get those users who are looking for us.
Best example I would like to share my personal experience from my side it is "Query Demands"
What it means?
Let's say Godaddy is very popular web hosting company as we all are familiar and they are investing more and more in commercial ads so they can easily make more customers by enticing their ads than their competitors.
But later what happens, exiting customers lately decide to leave Godaddy (maybe after 1 or 2 years) because user got extremely fed up with their services and now want to switch to new hosting so user will go to Google and will search "Godaddy Alternatives" .
I knew that happen in the future so I with my team created content in 2015 at that time keyword volume was only 100 and right now 700.
We are now at #1 position (HostingPill), Google sends us worth traffic to my article that converts also well.
This is the formula I had used in the past and now I am seeing positive result in Google.
BTW, Rand great explained!
Thanks for helpful content Rand Fishkin. I agree with you! Google removing organic traffic it's not bad for get organic traffic. I think Google SERP solve WH question that people question, for this reason People more addicted using Google search for any topic. If people need more information then people must click article.
Thanks again Rand and whiteboard Friday!!
When Organic Traffic removed by Google, its mean SEO is no more, and we have to consider to make a proposal for Advertising. Actually this is nuts.