Episode 45: SEO in 2022: Is It Still Relevant?

Transcription:

Devin: 

You’re listening to Digital Marketing Mondays. Each week, we bring you new and exciting content from around the marketing industry and help give you, the marketer, insights into what’s happening. We’ll offer our advice and share some takeaways to help you develop better strategies for your marketing. Ideally, this will also help you improve your ROI as well, so with that, let’s tune into this week’s episode. Hey, Hans. 

Hans: 

Hey, Devin. I got a question for today. The question is, does SEO still work? When I started this business, SEO was the biggest topic of all when it came to digital marketing. I thought maybe we would chat a bit about where we’ve come from and where we are today, and does it still work? Is it still worth investing in? I guess is really the key question. 

Devin: 

Yeah, and it’s certainly a super interesting topic because, as we know, search is becoming much more local to your device, and it’s also becoming much more holistic than I think just a single search result page. The days of only searching inside of Google and trying to find a specific article or headline are dwindling at this point. A lot more people are trying to search natively on whatever device they’re on. I think, obviously, Apple has a big advantage here with their hardware and the amount of devices that are out in the wild now, and people using native Apple Search to get to specific results. That’s something to keep in mind, but what’s interesting is the types of information people are looking for is changing as well. 

There’s a pretty big discussion point in the SEO world right now around optimizing for terms that include Reddit in the name because people are trying to have a search query like, “What’s the best cat food?”, or whatever it happens to be and then adding the word “Reddit” to the end of it because they now look at the Reddit results and the comments that people are making on Reddit. They don’t want to see other corporate blogs or articles about the sponsored cat ads that people have on their cat website. I think it’s super interesting that folks are really trying to get away and becoming far more allergic to kind of blog posts or articles these days even, because it’s not always genuine content. 

I think there have been bad actors out there that have left a really sour taste in people’s mouths, so now we’re trying to look for more of that social proofing. I don’t have any friends that own any cats. If I did get a cat, I would need to go look it up somewhere to figure out, what’s the best cat food? I’m not going to go necessarily lean on an article because it’s probably sponsored or has affiliate links or- 

Hans: 

Biased, yeah. 

Devin: 

… very biased. 

Hans: 

Yeah, yeah. 

Devin: 

I think there’s definitely something interesting happening around content and relating to social grouping. I certainly don’t think search is dead fundamentally. We all have curiosity and we’re going to continue to search for things forever because we just can’t hold all the knowledge in our heads that we want to, but the dynamics of search are going to continue to shift. We’re going to see far more opportunities for brands to be able to make sure that they’re holistically presenting themself in the best way possible. 

Hans: 

Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. You just touched on one of the trends that people used to do and what they do today. The one you just touched on is the fact that people who are entering search queries into an engine like Google are better educated about how this works and how to get at their results. When people used to do, I’m kind of dating myself here, but when I first started putting ads on Google, you could not access Google from cellphones. Cellphones weren’t internet connected. They were devices that you could talk to people on and maybe take some pictures and that was about it. It was on a laptop or a desktop. That’s where the search results appeared. 

The other trend is that this is becoming a multi-device kind of world. People do searches on their television sets. I mean, it’s all over the place. Phones being now the leading platform for doing searches on because that’s what you have with you when you’re out and about. That’s another thing. I used to do presentations on the evolution of search, and I used to do a search query and every few years I would screen grab what came up. In the early days, Google started showing ads down the right-hand side of the page, but only in a narrow strip. The main part of the page was all organic listings on the search results page. 

Then, they added some ads at the top and at the bottom. The trend here is that over time, the real estate on a search results page that is dedicated to advertising has gotten nothing but bigger and bigger. I remember the days when people were horrified and said, “Oh, people are going to get turned off by this. They’re not going to want to use search engines because it’s too much advertising and not enough organic data.” People got used to it or adjusted to it. Google has enforced rules about advertising that makes advertisers stick to good quality copy and relevant keywords that they focus on and target. You can’t get away with doing sloppy ad work anymore. People used to think, “They’ll just take my money.” No, they won’t, they’ll shut you down. 

We should also say that there’s sort of two general categories of searchers. There’s people who are looking for information and answers to things, and there’s people who are out actually shopping, who are actually looking to buy something or sign up for something and pay money. The info people tend to trend more toward the organic listings than the shopping results or the ads. Then, for those people who are looking for information, Google has been scraping pages. We did a podcast a few weeks ago about this trend of possibly remunerating people whose content gets scraped by the search engines and displayed on the search results page. They do attribute it, they do provide attribution and provide a link back, but they’re taking your content and putting it up on their search results page, so why do I need to click-through to your website if the information’s already there? 

Those are some of the things that kind of impact the utility of SEO as a way of generating leads and driving sales. I think it’s gone down, and honestly, I think we’ve come to a place where if you really want to do and do it right, yes, focus somewhat on SEO, but you also have to do some advertising if your objective is to generate leads or generate sales. What do you think? 

Devin: 

I think it’s important to actually think about these companies and look at their revenue and where they’re actually generating money and try and look for more global trends. To distill that down a little bit further, when you look at Google and some of their profit and loss statements and the information that they’re actually putting out, what’s very clear is that they are ambitiously growing their search ad business or just their advertising business as a whole. That’s obviously a huge net, wide, encompassing. They make a lot of money from a lot of different networks, including even YouTube and display ads and search. But I think what’s clear is we also see a trend of these cost-per-clicks that are just continuing to skyrocket. 

As you’ve alluded to, back when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth and you could first just buy an ad for one cent and Google, that’s what it was- 

Hans: 

I’m not that old. 

Devin: 

… right? Yeah, okay. Sorry, not that old, but nowadays, you’re hard pressed to get clicks under $5, and that’s even continuing to rise. Certain verticals like universities and colleges could be paying upwards of 40 to 50, or even competitor campaigns, same thing. They could be 40 to 50 dollars a click. We’re seeing these trends of advertising continue to become more expensive. 

That’s obviously how Google continues to fund themselves and their own party and keep the happy times going. That is in my mind one of the leading indicators that things will just continue to get more expensive on the advertising side. They’re going to come up with new and inventive ways to make money from advertising and, therefore, I think overall, that may diminish potentially the organic search experience or change behaviors, as exactly what we’ve been seeing with more folks that are trying to go to Reddit results specifically to find answers. I think it’s- 

Hans: 

Well, that’s- 

Devin: 

… important to think about usership as well. A few years ago, Google was in the 90 to 95% dominant players for search. What’s clear now is we have so many more options to be able to search by. YouTube is- 

Hans: 

Second there, yeah. 

Devin: 

… the second largest search engine in the world. Bing is actually on the rise, given the number of people that are downloading Edge, and Bing is the default browser now. DuckDuckGo; there’s all these other smaller players, but you also have to take into account the things that aren’t currently trackable or even within the same sphere. 

As an example, Apple’s native search function, which can get you to results and Google search result pages without actually even having to go to Google to make the search. Or, any of the voice-activated assistants, Amazon Echo, where you could just say something and they’ll order your products or they’ll give you the search results or listen to the podcast without even ever hitting a search page. The days of solely trying to optimize content for a single search or a single result are starting to dwindle. 

It’s still extremely important, marketers, so don’t take what we’re saying because we’re just discounting search completely. Certainly, the most important thing that marketers need to be thinking about moving forward is, how is your brand presented online? Is it all thoughtful? Is it exactly what you wanted to say? Are you showing up within the results that really matter for your business? And in some cases, are you paying for the right results? Or are you producing the right content organically to show up for the results? Which both are still effective, you just need to be thoughtful about your strategy. 

Hans: 

That’s a great lead-in to our next podcast, which we’re going to talk about things that you need to do in SEO or that are worth doing, and we’re going to talk about what those things are, how to best keep your powder dry, and invest wisely in the process in areas where it can still make a positive difference for you. We’re going to talk about that next time, so good intro for that. Thanks, Devin. 

Devin: 

Thanks, Hans. Thank you so much for tuning in. We really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to engage with our content. Whether you’re watching on YouTube or subscribed on our podcast apps, we appreciate you taking the time. Make sure to leave a comment down below and let us know any feedback that you have for us. We’re always watching the comments and engaging in any way that we can. If you find this content useful, also make sure to subscribe or give it a big thumbs up. We appreciate it. Thanks so much.