Will Google turn the natural search landscape upside down in 2021? I doubt it. Although change is inevitable, you can survive or even gain an edge with a little vigilance.
But don’t expect any relief from the merciless trend of organic results moving way down the search engine results pages (SERPs). Like any good content marketer, Google is focused on the needs of its audience – searchers.
Eager to produce relevant results, the search engine constantly enhances its technology and relies on artificial intelligence to support results. Google’s BERT, for example, focuses on natural language processing (NLP), including searcher intent and the context of search queries.
Fortunately, marketers still see traffic from Google and other major search engines. Organic searches accounted for 53% of website traffic in 2019, according to BrightEdge data. I don’t expect that number has changed much since 2019.
Some SEO low-hanging fruit is almost too low. It makes you think you don’t need to try to earn better rankings that generate more traffic.
Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it a few years ago. We’re sharing it now because choosing the right KPIs and measuring your content marketing activities are so important to the business.
Editor’s note: You may have missed the original version of this article when CMI published it in 2016. Search engine rankings continue to be important for SEO so we’ve updated the post to include some fresh examples.
