By: Stephanie McCredie, Contributing Author
When the economy is taking a massive blow and businesses are suffering the effects of a financial crisis, we see organic website traffic and conversions drastically reduce in most industries. It’s during these times that our Search Engine Optimization procedures need to become an even more critical element of our digital marketing investment.
If your competitors are pulling back the reins, tightening their budgets and reducing their efforts, their Google ranking is about to suffer and it becomes an opportunity for you to seize. Whenever a website drops in rankings another website is going to move up. This could be your website, if you remain committed to learning new SEO techniques and strategies.
For years, digital marketers have fought to reach the coveted #1 ranking in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) but now the goal has shifted above this #1 position. Google now answers a huge volume of search queries with ‘zero-click search results’. For example, the answer to a searcher’s query is displayed in Google’s search results themselves, right at the top, eliminating the need for the user to click and move away from Google to another website. Examples of these are Featured Snippets and Knowledge Cards.
According to Statista, “as of the second quarter of 2019, 49.76 percent of U.S. Google Search users were able to solve their queries on Google’s web search engine without clicking further, while 5.98 percent of searches were directed to other Google Sites such as Google Maps and YouTube. Non-Google sites accounted for 40.42 percent of organic post-search clicks”.
This makes it hard for content creators and SEO professionals who rely on organic traffic, only leaving them with a 40% opportunity of gaining organic clicks to their own websites.
So, an economic downturn is not the time to scale back our digital marketing efforts but a time where we should commit to learning and focus on tweaking our SEO strategies and invent new ways to stay abreast with the ever-changing landscape of Google’s SERPs and possibly reach above a #1 ranking.