Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them.
Google’s AI-generated summaries of web pages, officially released in May 2024, show up atop its search results pages so search users don’t have to click through to the source website.
A year later, enterprise AI analytics biz BrightEdge reported that Google AI Overviews had generated more search impressions (up 49 percent), but click-throughs to the actual websites dropped 30 percent.
That means AI Overviews is leading more people to use Google Search to find answers to their queries. But those people are less likely to follow search results links that lead to the source website. Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.
Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them.
Google’s AI-generated summaries of web pages, officially released in May 2024, show up atop its search results pages so search users don’t have to click through to the source website.
A year later, enterprise AI analytics biz BrightEdge reported that Google AI Overviews had generated more search impressions (up 49 percent), but click-throughs to the actual websites dropped 30 percent.
That means AI Overviews is leading more people to use Google Search to find answers to their queries. But those people are less likely to follow search results links that lead to the source website. Good for Google. Terrible for the ecosystem of websites that had learned to depend on search referrals for buyers, readers, and viewers.
Kevin Indig, who writes about search engine optimization (SEO), marked the one-year anniversary of AI Overviews with a usability study. Based on data from the 70 individuals surveyed, he observed that when AI Overviews are absent, “outbound click rates rise to an average of 28 percent on desktop and 38 percent on mobile.”
Ahrefs, an SEO site, in April said AI Overviews reduced clicks by about 35 percent.
Citing data provided by SimilarWeb (which SimilarWeb shared with El Reg, Barron’s last week reported that search referrals to top US travel and tourism have fallen 20 percent year on year, while news and media sites saw search-driven traffic drop by 17 percent during that period.
Other categories of website also showed declining search referral traffic: e-commerce (-9 percent); finance (-7 percent); food/drink (- 7 percent); and lifestyle/fashion (-5 percent).
Meanwhile, AI search engine referrals have replaced only about 10 percent of traditional search referral traffic, according to SimilarWeb.
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
The latest indication of this widely reported trend comes from Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, which has been developing tools to thwart bots that scrape web data for AI training.
Speaking on Thursday at an Axios event in Cannes, France, Prince reportedly said that ten years ago, Google’s average ratio of pages crawled to visitors referred was 2:1. Six months ago, that ratio had increased to 6:1. Today, according to the Prince, it’s 18:1.
While Prince did not clarify the breakdown of crawler duties (e.g. indexing, copying data for training, or something else), the suggestion is that AI companies are taking more content and giving less in return.
And that’s allegedly the case for two other AI model makers that have implemented web search, OpenAI and Anthropic.
According to Prince, OpenAI’s ratio of pages crawled to visitors referred has gone from 250:1 to 1,500:1 while Anthropic’s ratio has gone from 6,000:1 to 60,000:1.
As we noted earlier this week, AI crawlers have become a burden for many websites, which end up bearing the cost to serve content to AI firms for commercial AI services.
Despite much ado about the potential for an AI-based challenger to disrupt Google, the Chocolate Factory still controls about 90 percent of the search market, according to BrightEdge. But it’s eating all the cacao beans that made its business possible in the first place.
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to requests for comment. ®
Available as an experimental feature from Google Labs, this new option will help generate a short, 5-minute AI podcast based on your Google Search results.
How to turn on Audio Overviews in Google Search
Credit: Jake Peterson
To access the new feature, head over to your Google Labs page using this link and find the Audio Overviews section. There, you can either enable this feature or join a waitlist, depending on where you’re located. Unfortunately, while this is a global rollout, it’s not happening all at once, as is the case with many new Google AI features.
How Audio Overviews in Google Search work
This new search feature is lifted almost straight from Gemini, which itself got it from NotebookLM. Called Audio Overviews, the original incarnation of this feature let you generate a 10-minute AI podcast episode on any topic, although the new version has a few additional limitations.
When the feature is enabled in Google Search, you’ll see a little prompt to “Generate Audio Overview” while you scroll through compatible search results. Which results are compatible is a bit vague at this point—that’s one of the limitations. You won’t see it for simple questions like “what are some nearby cafés?” but it also won’t work for overly complex topics, like researching investment trends across Asia (where you might be better off using Deep Research tools).
Instead, Audio Overviews will kick in for queries that are somewhere in the middle. Let’s say you want a quick refresher on a Lord of the Rings character, or to know which Japanese knives to get started with when upgrading your kitchen. Just make an appropriate Google search, click the Generate Audio Overview button, and search will kick into Gemini mode. After a wait of about 30-40 seconds, which is considerably less than Gemini’s 2–5 minute wait time, you’ll see your audio overview. It will be about five minutes, tops, so you’ll get less detail than Gemini would give you, but it might be enough for a bird’s-eye view on whatever you’re searching for.
The audio player for your AI podcast will stay put as you browse the results page, and it will show links to its sources as well. And if it’s gotten something really wrong, you can give it a Thumbs Down. As is the case with any AI tool, it’s important to point out that these are based on Large Language Models, which can sometimes hallucinate. So make sure to check the sources that the Audio Overviews feature provides you before repeating what it says elsewhere.
People aren’t friending each other as much on Facebook these days. The iPhone might not feel necessary in a decade. And Google searches on one of the world’s most popular smartphones are declining.
Those were some of the unusually frank admissions from two separate antitrust trials against Meta and Google. It was a rare acknowledgement from tech leaders that the once-cutting edge products their companies were founded on could someday lose their relevance.
Silicon Valley prides itself on innovation, change and a constant quest to find “the next big thing.” The race for relevance is a constant one.
Still, the admissionsunderscore the mounting pressure tech giants face amid new threats from artificial intelligence and new social media apps – and how quickly any product can get left behind.
Apple did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. A Google spokesperson pointed to the company’s public statements, while a Meta spokesperson directed CNN to specific responses from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s courtroom testimony.
The three tech giants helped shape the modern web over the last two decades.
Google’s search engine triumphed in the late 1990s and early 2000s due to its system of ranking results by relevance and importance rather than sorting them by topic.
And Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is largely responsible for turning social platforms into an addictive feed of likes, comments and other interactions.
Fuelling both of those trends was the smartphone, allowing users to access these services from almost anywhere, which Apple set the stage for with the first iPhone in 2007.
The success of those products catapulted Apple, Google and Meta to mega-valuations. But during courtroom testimony, executives indicated consumers are losing interest in some of the very tasks Facebook and Google were initially built for.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, revealed last week that Google search queries on its devices decreased for the first time last month, according to Bloomberg. The comments came during his testimony in the Justice Department’s antitrust trial against Google. (Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in the iPhone maker’s Safari browser.)
It’s another sign that consumers may be shifting to AI chatbots to fulfil some of the duties of a traditional search engine. Market research firm Gartner estimated last year that search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as consumers gravitate toward AI tools.
Google said in a statement on Wednesday that it continues “to see overall query growth in search,” and that includes “an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms.”
Meta, too, is seeing consumers shift away from its original use case: adding friends and sharing content.
“The amount that people are sharing with friends on Facebook, especially, has been declining,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an April trial for an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission. “Even the amount of new friends that people add … I think has been declining. But I don’t know the exact numbers.”
Instead, Zuckerberg said the company has seen a big boost in direct messages.
Zuckerberg’s comments come as research showsFacebook is falling behind other online platforms with younger crowds. A Pew Research Center report from December found that Facebook usage has dropped off over the last 10 years, with just 32% of teens saying they use what was previously Meta’s namesake social network. That compares to 71% in 2014 and 2015, although teens still use Instagram frequently.
Meta has aggressively shaped its apps to keep up with new trends. In 2013, Facebook failed to buy Snapchat, but about three years later it introduced its own alternative in Instagram Stories. Instagram’s short-form video feed, known as Reels, came to take on TikTok in 2020, and Zuckerberg said in his testimony that video content is where people are spending most of their time on Facebook these days.
Even the iPhone may be at risk of losing favourover the next decade, an Apple executive said.
“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as it sounds,” Apple’s Cue said during his courtroom testimony in the Google trial, according to Bloomberg.
With 19% of global smartphoneshipments in the first quarter of 2025, according to the International Data Corporation, Apple’s iPhone is the world’s second most popular smartphone brand.
But Apple, along with other tech behemoths, is determined to figure out what comes next.
And the answer could be smart glasses that use AI to analyse the world around you to execute tasks without reaching for your phone — a vision that Meta, Samsung and Google are already betting on. Zuckerberg said in his testimony that he believes consumers will eventually interact with content through “smart glasses and holograms,” removing the need to use a “glowing rectangle” to access digital platforms. Amazon’s head of devices and services Panos Panay also didn’t rule out the possibility of camera-equipped Alexa glasses similar to those offered by Meta in a February CNN interview.
Liza-Bart Carroll wears Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses during the Second Annual White House Correspondents’ Weekend TGAIFriday Lunch hosted by The Washington AI Network at The House at 1229 on April 25 in Washington, DC. Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Apple, too, believes the next step in computing will involve devices worn on the face, as evidenced by the $3,500 Vision Pro. That device, while niche, could be a precursor to the types of smart glasses Apple’s rivals are working on or currently selling.
At the same time, consumers aren’t upgrading their phones as frequently now that mobile devices no longer dramatically change each year.
For now, consumers will continue scrolling through Instagram and typing Google Search queries on their iPhones. And change is a good thing for corporate giants like these; it lets them show Wall Street there’s still room to grow while boosting their arguments to lawmakers that they face stiff competition.
What’s changing, though, is that the tech companies that ruled the early 2000s and 2010s may have to fight a bit harder to stay ahead of the curve.
Feature Image Credit: David Swanson/AFP/Getty Images
A new report released by Rand Fishkin at Sparktoro with the help of Datos’ panel measure web browser activity showed that about 1/3rd of active web users don’t use Google all that much, by that much it means they only do 1-20X searches per month.
The data Rand put together is interesting, it not only shows you how much users use Google but what they are doing on Google.
It says that the American desktop web users in 2024 performed, on average, 126 unique Google searches each month and the median was 53 Google searches per month. From that Rand said, “5.35 billion humans are active on the Internet each month (GWI), and that ~81% of Internet users perform use a search engine at least once a month.”
Rand’s number is that Google does 5.9 trillion searches annually, which jives with Google’s over 5 trillion searches per year – but I think Google would have said, almost 6 trillion and not over 5 trillion. So maybe Rand’s numbers are a tad high?
Here is the breakdown of how much active web users actually use Google Search:
More interesting to me is what these users do when on Google Search:
87% use Google.com, almost 11% spend their time on Google Image Search (I almost never use Google Images), Google Maps (web, not apps) 0.64%, Google News 0.38% and Google Shopping only 0.23%.
The study goes way deeper, so I recommend you check out Rand’s story over here and let me know your biggest takeaway.
Find out what words you should avoid searching on Google
We all use Google to answer the looming questions in our heads. But there are apparently some things we should avoid using the search engine for.
From searching symptoms we are experiencing to finding out the latest movie release, Google is certainly a handy tool when it comes to easily accessing information.
However, the top search engine in the world also has some sides to it that we should seek to avoid.
Most of us do internet searches every day, but there are some things it’s best not to know (Getty Stock Image)
Regular users of the search engine will be used to using Google Images. However, no matter how innocently motivated your search may be, some of these images should not be glanced at and are hard to leave your mind easily.
Unfortunately, Google Images does not come with trigger warnings, so consider this article a friendly warning before you decide to search any of the following five terms on Google.
In fact, these terms are so stomach-churning that they have been compiled in a report by It’s Gone Viral in 2023.
Try to remember that while it may seem harmless to Google health-related terms, if you have any concerns about your health, prioritize consulting a medical professional above searching for answers online.
Anyway, let’s proceed with the specific words you should avoid searching…
Larvae
The first word we highly recommend you avoid searching is Larvae.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is defined as ‘the immature form of an insect or animal that has hatched from an egg but has not yet become an adult’.
While this may seem like an innocent search, you could stumble across a condition of the same name.
According to WebMD: “Mouth larvae are parasites that hatch and live inside the oral cavities of human and animal hosts. These pests can cause a dangerous infection known as oral myiasis.”
The site adds: “People can develop oral myiasis by eating larvae in their food. Flies can also enter the mouth and lay eggs in wounds.”
The searches might seem innocent, but could end up scarring you (Getty Stock Image)
Degloving
Another word to avoid Googling is degloving.
WebMD defines degloving, also known as avulsion, ‘happens when a large piece of your skin along with the layer of soft tissue right under it is partially or completely ripped from your muscles and connecting tissues’.
Sounds incredibly unpleasant, right? Well so are the images so don’t dare to take a look!
Krokodil
While Krokodil may sound like crocodile, you won’t see anything near the reptile if you search that on Google Images – so beware of any typos when searching for crocodile images!
Instead, what you’ll be shocked to discover is that Krokodil has different meanings in different languages.
However, the particular definition defined in the It’s Gone Viral report refers to the opioid drug desomorphine.
A Time magazine report from 2013 dubbed it as ‘The World’s Deadliest Drug‘.
It started when doctors in Russia discovered ‘strange wounds’ on many drug addicts.
Later, it was discovered that they’d been injecting a new drug known as ‘Krokodil’. This was later dubbed as a ‘flesh-eating zombie drug’ in a report from CNN.
Definitely not the type of visuals you want your eyes to witness, right?
Some of these searches will leave you a lot more horrified than this (Getty Stock Image)
Fournier
While Fournier is a popular French name, it can also refer to an ‘acute necrotic infection’ of the genital area, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD).
WebMD warns: “Fournier’s gangrene gets worse quickly and can kill you, so it’s always an emergency.”
Harlequin ichthyosis
The final word you should avoid Googling is Harlequin baby syndrome, also known as congenital ichthyosis.
Healthline defines this as a ‘rare condition affecting the skin’, which is a ‘type of ichthyosis, which refers to a group of disorders that cause persistently dry, scaly skin all over the body’.
The site clarifies further that the skin of a new-born with this condition is ‘covered with thick, diamond-shaped plates that resemble fish scales’.
Babies with this condition should be treated immediately.
Google says the feature, which saves a web page snapshot, is no longer needed.
One of Google Search‘s oldest and best-known features, cache links, are being retired, Google’s search liaison said in an X post seen by The Verge. Best known by the “Cached” button, those are a snapshot of a web page the last time Google indexed it. However, according to Google, they’re no longer required.
“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Google’s Danny Sullivan wrote in the post. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
Nowadays, however, the feature is used for more than just a web page backup. Many people rely on it to check to validity of a site, and SEO managers can employ the feature to check their pages for errors. Many users, particularly news professionals, use the cache to see if a website has recently been updated, with information added or removed. And sometimes, a cache can let you check a site that’s geoblocked in your region.
Previously, clicking on the three-dot menu next to a result would open an “about this result” dialog with the Cached button at bottom right. Now, however, it opens a much larger menu showing a website’s “about” page, a Wikipedia description, privacy settings and more. The cached button is now nowhere to be seen.
None of the comments in Sullivan’s replies were positive, with one SEO user saying “come on, why delete the function? It’s really helpful for all SEO.” Sullivan did say that Google may one day add links to the Internet Archive where the cache link button used to be, within About This Result.
However, that sounds like it’s far from a done deal, and would shift a massive amount of traffic over to the Internet Archive. “No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go — involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around,” he wrote.
Google turns 25 this year. Can you imagine? It’s only 25 — yet it’s almost impossible to recall life without being able to just Google it, without immediate access to answers. Google Search is everywhere, all the time; the unspoken background of every problem, every debate, every curiosity.
Google Search is so useful and so pervasive that its overwhelming influence on our lives is also strangely invisible: Google’s grand promise was to organize the world’s information, but over the past quarter century, an enormous amount of the world’s information has been organized for Google — to rank in Google results. Almost everything you encounter on the web — every website, every article, every infobox — has been designed in ways that makes them easy for Google to understand. In many cases, the internet has become more parseable by search engines than it is by humans.
We live in an information ecosystem whose design is dominated by the needs of the Google Search machine — a robot whose beneficent gaze can create entire industries just as easily as its cool indifference can destroy them.
This robot has a priesthood and a culture all to itself: an ecosystem of search-engine-optimization experts who await every new proclamation from Google with bated breath and scurry about interpreting those proclamations into rituals and practices as liturgical as any religion. You know why the recipe blogs all have 2,000 words of copy before the actual recipe? The Google robot wants it that way. You know why every publisher is putting bios next to author by-lines on article pages? The robot wants it that way. All those bold subheadings in the middle of articles asking random questions? That’s how Google answers those questions on the search results page. Google is the most meaningful source of traffic on the web, and so now the web looks more like a structured database for search instead of anything made for actual people.
And yet, it keeps working. Google is so dominant that the European Union has spent a decade launching aggressive interventions into the user experience of computers to create competition in search and effectively failed… because our instinct is to always just Google it. People love asking Google questions, and Google loves making money by answering them.
And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself.
The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running an ever-changing series of monetization hustles with no regard for anything but collecting the most pennies at the biggest scale. AI-powered content farms focused on high-value search terms like heat-seeking missiles are already here; Google is only now catching up, and its response to them will change how it sends traffic around the web in momentous ways.
That leads to the second problem, which is that chat-based search tools like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s own Bard represent something that feels like the future of search, without any of the corresponding business models or revenue that Google has built up over the past 25 years. If Google Search continues to degrade in quality, people will switch to better options — a switch that venture-backed startups and well-funded competitors like Microsoft are more than happy to subsidize in search of growth, but which directly impacts Google’s bottom line. At the same time, Google’s paying tens of billions annually to device makers like Apple and Samsung to be the default search engine on phones. Those deals are up for renewal, and there will be no pity for Google’s margins in these negotiations.
On top of that, the generative AI boom is built on an expansive interpretation of copyright law, as all of these companies hoover up data from the open web in order to train their models. Google was an original innovator here: as a startup, the company aggressively pushed the boundaries of intellectual property law and told itself and investors that the inevitable legal fees and fines were simply the cost of building Search and YouTube into monopolies. The resulting case law and settlement deals created the legal architecture of the web as we know it — an information ecosystem that allows for things like indexing and the use of image thumbnails without payment.
But the coming wave of AI lawsuits and regulations will be very different. Google won’t be the scrappy upstart pitching an obviously world-altering utility to judges and regulators who’ve never used the internet. It is now one of the richest and most influential corporations in the world, a fat target for creatives, politicians, and cynical rent-seekers alike. It will face a fractured legal landscape, both around the world and increasingly in our own country. All of that early Google-driven internet precedent is up for grabs — and if things go even slightly differently this time around, the web will look very different than it does today.
Oh, and then there’s the hardest challenge of all: Google, famously scattershot in its product launches and quick to abandon things, has to stay focused on a new product and actually develop a meaningful replacement to search without killing it in a year and starting over.
This is not a prediction of imminent doom, or any particular doom at all: Google is a well-run company full of very smart people, and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is as thoughtful and sharp as any leader in tech. But it is a dead-certain prediction of change — these are the first serious challenges to search in two decades, and the challenges are real. The extent to which Google Search might change as the company reacts to those challenges is enormous, and any change to Google Search will alter our relationship to the internet in momentous ways. And yet, the cultural influence of Google Search is invisible to most people, even as Search arrives at the precipice.
It’s easy to see the effect some tech products have had on our lives — it’s easy to talk about smartphones and streaming services and dating apps. But Google Search is a black hole: one of the most lucrative businesses in world history, but somehow impossible to see clearly. As Google faces its obstacles head-on, the seams holding the invisible architecture of the web together are starting to show. It’s time to talk about what 25 years of Google Search has done to our culture and talk about what might happen next. It’s time to look right at it and say it’s there.
We’re going to be doing that for the rest of the year in a series of stories that starts today with a look at Google’s influence over the media business — influence that led to something called AMP. We’ll also be looking at the world of SEO hustlers as the party comes to a close and take a look at the ecosystem of small businesses content-farming to stay afloat. We’ll show you how Google’s influence shapes the design of almost all the web pages you see, and investigate why it’s so hard to build a competing search engine.
For 25 years, Google Search has held the web together. Let’s make sure we understand what that meant before it all falls apart.
Feature Image Credit: Jason Allen Lee for The Verge
Stay up-to-date on the latest in search engine optimization. Learn about SEO strategies, best practices and the latest updates to Google’s ranking factors.
The Gist
SEO best practices still matter. To show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), following search engine optimization (SEO) best practices is necessary.
Still Google’s world. Google dominates the global search engine market with 84% market share, making it crucial to consider in an SEO strategy.
High-quality content. On-page SEO involves optimizing visible elements such as content, which should be relevant and high-quality, with expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) guidelines in mind.
When someone wants to search for a product, look at videos or read about a topic, they go directly to their preferred search engine. And if you want to show up in said search engine results pages (SERPs), you’ll need to follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
As we delve into best practices as of February 2023, our primary focus will be on Google. Why? Because it has dominated the global search engine market since its inception in 1997.
Google doesn’t share its search volume data. But experts around the web estimate the search engine sees anywhere from 40,000 to 99,000 search queries every second. For one day, that could amount to more than 8.5 billion searches.
SEO, which companies use to maximize content marketing efforts, ultimately breaks down into three categories:
On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Technical SEO
Let’s take a look at some core components of these three categories and how SEO professionals can aim to follow best practices.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO, also called on-site SEO, refers to the optimization of elements that you can see on-page, such as:
Content
Content is at the core of on-page SEO, and it’s what many people focus on when first optimizing their SEO strategy.
Relevance and quality are more important than any other Google ranking factor.
Google actively penalizes thin content that offers little to no value to searchers. While in the past it used to consider pages as a whole, it now looks at and ranks subsections within pages to match queries.
When you’re working on your content creation strategy or overall SEO strategy, consider these questions to determine if you’re headed in the right direction:
Do you have a target audience in mind that will find your content useful if they come directly to you?
Does your content demonstrate expertise that comes from firsthand experience?
After reading your content, will someone feel they’ve learned enough about the topic?
If you’ve answered yes to these three questions, you’re on the right track.
Some content worst practices to stay away from include:
Creating content specifically to attract people from search engines
Utilizing extensive automation to produce lots of content on a variety of topics
Summarizing what other content creators have said without adding additional value
Writing to meet a particular word count or because you’ve heard Google’s algorithm prefers a specific word count (it doesn’t)
Creating content that promises to answer a question that has no answer (for example, suggesting you know the release date of a movie that has no confirmed release date)
E-A-T Guidelines
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This concept became a core part of Google’s algorithm in August of 2019 and continues to play a significant role today in evaluating content.
The authoritativeness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website
The trustworthiness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself and the website
E-A-T plays a part in websites of all types, including gossip columns, satire websites, forums and Q&A pages. How a website meets E-A-T guidelines will depend on the type of website. Some topics or industries will require less formal expertise than others.
For example, a news website with high E-A-T articles will convey journalistic integrity, contain factually accurate information and utilize robust policies and review processes with included sources.
A site containing scientific topics, on the other hand, should be created by people or organizations with the appropriate scientific knowledge or expertise and represent established scientific consensus.
When it comes to establishing E-A-T for your content, think about the page’s topic and what expertise is needed to achieve the purpose of that page.
Search Queries
Search queries are the words and phrases people use when using search engines or smart assistants. These words and phrases shift based on the search intent — the “why” behind the action.
Types of search intent include:
Informational: The searcher is looking for information, wants to answer a question or learn how to do something. The best way to target an information query is to develop high-quality, SEO-focused content that provides helpful and relevant information to the user. Position yourself as a source of information people can trust.
Navigational: The searcher is looking for a particular website or page. For example, they might type “YouTube” or “LinkedIn.” You can’t typically target navigational queries unless you own the specific website or page the person is looking for. But you can make sure you claim the top results spot for your brand’s own navigational query.
Transactional: With this search intent, the user wants to make a purchase. The query might include a brand, product or service name or a generic item, such as “coffee maker.” You can target these search queries with optimized product or service pages. You can also use pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to target these search terms.
By understanding search intent — which might include keyword research to best understand which words the target audience uses — companies can better craft content to meet needs and win more readers.
Links
You should include two types of links within your website or web page content: internal and external.
Internal links redirect to another page or piece of content on your website. For example, on an article about the latest chatbot trends, you might link to a related article about how chatbot technology works.
External links direct readers to a page that is not yours. These links should be highly relevant webpages or sites with high expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
Link building is also important — getting other websites to link back to your website or piece of content. These links signal to Google that your website is valuable enough to earn a citation, allowing content to rise in search rankings. We’ll talk more on these later, in off-page SEO strategies.
Visuals
Visuals (videos, gifs, pictures, infographics, etc.) are a large part of online content.
If you plan to use visuals on your site or pages, you’ll want to ensure that they’re:
Large and high quality (beware of large image file sizes, however, which can cause slow loading)
Relevant to the content
Shareable
Placed high on the page
Have a relevant file name
Have alt text, which aids visually impaired users
If you’re using video content, include a video transcript. Not only will a transcript make your content more accessible, but it will also make videos more “scrapable” by search engine bots.
Meta Title & Meta Description
Your meta title (the alternative title that shows up on Google) tells search engines and searchers what your content is about and what keywords to focus on. This title should be relevant to your content, include at least one word or phrase from your keyword research and be no longer than 60 characters.
Search engines don’t factor meta descriptions into your ranking — but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
The meta description is the ideal place to let Google and searchers know what your page is about. As a result, you’ll see higher click-through rates.
URL & Slug
Including your keyword within the slug of the URL — the last part of the URL that identifies the unique page — is a small bonus to SEO. However, if you can’t do so in a sensible way, it won’t be a big hit against you.
Ensure that your slug matches the title of your content. For example, if your blog post is about customer experience, your URL might be: www.yourwebsite.com/blog/all-about-customer-experience
Another thing to keep in mind is that shorter URLs receive high click-through rates than longer ones. A shorter URL comes across as more trustworthy and authoritative to users.
Other best practices for URLs include:
Avoid using dates in your slugs (for example: “2022-customer-experience-best-practices”
Use the hyphen between words in your slugs
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to optimization strategies that don’t involve the content on your website. Some of the most vital off-page SEO tactics include:
Link Building
As mentioned above, earning backlinks from other authoritative sites can position your website or web page as trustworthy and increase your rankings on Google.
You don’t want to get backlinks from any site. In fact, getting backlinks from link farms — a group of websites that all link to one another to increase organic search rankings — can result in a penalty from Google. Google also penalizes any site that gets caught paying for links.
Some link-building tips to turn to instead include:
Create high-value content that others want to share
Promote your content via social media, which leads others to sharing it
Submit your website to business directories
Promote your content via paid campaigns, which may lead others to link to it
Look for relevant content on other sites that contains broken links, and send an email with the suggestion to use your content as a replacement
Ask people in real life to share your website or content on social media
Brand Building
Google rewards well-known brands. And branded searches (your company’s name, domain name searches and product searches) will lead right back to your website.
Google offers a great tool, Google Trends, that allows people to track interest in a topic, such as a brand, over time. SEO professionals can also use this tool to track searches for specific products or services.
Social Media
Social media plays a big role in how people learn about brands, websites and content. As of 2022, there were 4.59 billion social media users worldwide — a number expected to grow to 5.85 billion by 2027.
You should have a presence on the social media channels that matter most to your target audience.
Facebook: More than 2.9 billion monthly active users (MAU)
YouTube: More than 2.5 billion MAU
Instagram: More than 1.4 billion MAU
Not only should your profile include pertinent information about your brand (what it does, where it’s located, contact methods, the website, hours for in-store operation, etc.), but you should also post original and engaging content regularly.
For instance, if you offer a specific product, you could create educational content on how to use that product or answers to frequently asked questions. You can also encourage user-generated content from your community.
Encourage users that read and engage with your social media content to visit your website or web content to learn more.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is exactly what it sounds like — it refers to the technical aspects that play into your website and web pages, like page load speed and responsiveness.
Google Search Console is an ideal tool for monitoring and maintaining SEO health. It can measure traffic, generate reports, including a technical SEO report, and fix issues.
Technical SEO includes:
Site Speed
Loading performance is part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, which measures different aspects of the user experience. A website or page should only take 2.5 seconds or less to load the page’s main content.
To ensure fast website load speeds, you should:
Choose a fast hosting option
Choose a fast domain name system (DNS) provider
Keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum
Use small image files (without creating pixelization)
Minify your site’s code
Compress your webpages
Mobile-Friendliness
As of the second half of 2022, mobile traffic accounted for more than half of global web traffic. Not only does a mobile-friendly design make for a better user experience, but it’s a significant ranking factor for Google.
If you’re unsure of your website’s mobile accessibility, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Most brands accomplish mobile-friendliness by using a responsive web design, which adjusts itself automatically depending on the type of device a person is using.
Google also offers a guide on customizing website software for companies that use content management platforms (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Squarespace.
Beyond using a responsive design, companies should also pay attention to how content and assets behave on-page for mobile users. Layouts that shift when a person is trying to read content or interact with the page are a significant part of Google’s Core Web Vitals.
SEO professionals can monitor these movements with a metric called cumulative layout shift (CLS), which measures visual stability and quantifies how often these shifts occur. Core Web Vitals recommends that pages maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand your web pages while crawling them. It tells them:
Exactly where each page is
When a page was last modified
Which pages hold the most priority
How frequently a page is updated
Some hosting platforms create an XML sitemap automatically. If your chosen platform does not, you’ll want to look into using an XML sitemap generator.
These tools also track the general SEO performance of your site, allowing you to:
Test your site’s mobile-friendliness
Access search analytics
View backlinks to your site
Search in 2023: SEO Strategy Remains Top Priority
People want content that is high-quality and relevant to them. If you want to appear in their search results, it’s essential to pay attention to changing SEO trends and tactics.
Google continually updates its algorithm, meaning how they rank your site or content will depend on your use of the latest SEO strategies. With the latest tips above, you can ensure your content meets essential Google ranking factors and shows up in search results for your target audience.
Michelle Hawley is an experienced journalist who specializes in reporting on the impact of technology on society. As a senior editor at Simpler Media Group and a reporter for CMSWire and Reworked, she provides in-depth coverage of a range of important topics including employee experience, leadership, customer experience, marketing and more. With an MFA in creative writing and background in inbound marketing, she offers unique insights on the topics of leadership, customer experience, marketing and employee experience. Michelle previously contributed to publications like The Press Enterprise and The Ladders. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her two dogs.
The more technical aspects of this indispensable tool shouldn’t derail your content marketing efforts. How to ensure that doesn’t happen.
According to GrowthBadger, more than 3 billion blog posts are published each year. In the U.S. alone, some 31 million bloggers post at least monthly. For many businesses and influencers, this tool has become a cornerstone, helping drive web traffic and brand awareness and greatly influencing sales.
Of course, there’s more to a successful post than typing thoughts in a Word document. The process is surprisingly tech-heavy, and ensuring that these technical aspects are functioning properly is key to providing an enjoyable reading experience.
1. Use Google Search to Find SEO Keywords
Search engine optimization is heavily focused on using relevant keywords to improve search rankings. Topics chosen for blog entries should be relevant to the site as a whole, so you can naturally include the keyword in the title and content of the blog. And while you aren’t going to get much traction with short keywords like “shoes,” long-form keywords can be a powerful way to strengthen SEO rankings.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do tech-heavy research to find them. As best-selling author and podcaster Jeff Goins recommends in a recent blog entry, “Use Google Suggest, also called autocomplete. When you start typing a word into Google and it fills in the rest of the search for you, this is Google Suggest at work. Before you finish, you’ll see phrases that pop up as most relevant (and the occasional ridiculous results). Start here before getting into more advanced forms of keyword research.”
2. Use Plugins to Incorporate Extra Features
If you’ve spent much time scrolling through blogs, you’ve doubtless seen a wide variety of added features besides text: video embeds, social share features, interactive polls and contact forms are just a few used to make content more engaging. While this process may seem complex, it can be done via user-friendly plugins that allow you to take more of a “drag and drop” approach to formatting.
Regardless of which platform you use to host or create your blog, a variety of plugins or widgets can streamline the user experience and help a site appear more professional and user-friendly. The task is then to consider which features would be most beneficial to your audience, as well as which ones will enhance a particular post.
3. Engage New Visitors by Pinning High-Performing Content
As Jesse Schoberg writes for DropInBlog, “A visitor to your site will probably enter by way of one of your many blog posts. They then click around your site and see what else you have and are bombarded with information. A pinned post can serve as a great entry point into your site. You can pin the post with the highest conversion rate at the top or just a general post introducing the site to your user. The pinned post functions the same way a sign on a storefront would. It should be something inviting or exciting to entice your reader further into your site.”
You can look at your website metrics to identify posts with higher performance metrics, such as views, shares or comments, and/or select according to what you think would be the most interesting to your readers (such as a contest or giveaway), or evergreen content that serves as a strong introduction to your business.
4. Let Coding Happen in the Background
There are a variety of platforms for hosting a purely blog-oriented website, some of which can add blog content to a pre-existing website, and you don’t have to engage an IT team to make this happen. Many platforms use drag-and-drop design functions, or give you the ability to copy and paste a specific code to make the appropriate update. In using these tools, the coding aspect of a blog essentially happens in the background. This not only ensures that text, images and other content looks right when it’s published, it also ensures that transferring a blog post to the live version of your site doesn’t mess things up elsewhere. The key is selecting a platform with publishing and editing features that you are comfortable with based on your level of tech expertise.
5. Make Sharing Easier
Sharing blog content is key to reaching and growing a target audience. As noted previously, a widget can enable readers to share content they enjoy through their own accounts, and the use of other automation tools streamlines the process of sharing content through your own social media accounts.
By ensuring that blog content is automatically shared to your accounts after it’s published, you don’t have to worry about the technical aspect of correctly copying the link and scheduling an attractive post for social media. By automating this process, you can spend more time focused on creating material that will compel followers to click.
When all the technical aspects of a blog are properly in place, you don’t have to worry about glitches and errors disrupting the reading experience. You can have confidence that content will be delivered to readers in a compelling manner, while also providing opportunities for them to easily share it with those in their circle.
Here’s What B2B Content Marketers Will be Investing in Next Year
69 percent of B2B content marketers have said that videos will be their top area of content marketing investment in 2022, with 61 percent saying that events will lead their investment areas next year, while 57 said that owned-media assets will top their content marketing spending in 2022 — two of several statistics of interest to digital marketing contained in recently-released survey data. MarketingCharts
New LinkedIn data shows how gen Z is recalibrating the norms of work
Gen Z comprises the fastest growing audience demographic on the LinkedIn (client) platform, with 63 percent visiting the Microsoft-owner professional network at least once a week, and 74 percent saying they use LinkedIn to learn new skills, according to newly-released report data. . The Drum
YouTube gives dislikes the thumbs-down, hides public counts
Google’s YouTube video platform has done away with the default display of thumbs-down count data, moving instead to make that information available only as private feedback to video content publishers, in an effort to foster more respectful interactions between creators and video viewers, YouTube recently announced. The Verge
B2B Buyers Say They’re Engaging Salespeople Late in the Process, But Are Open to Doing So Earlier
The solution identification stage is the most frequent point of first engagement B2B buyers use with sellers, followed by the identification and clarification stage, with the evaluation of solutions phase rounding out the top three first engagement points, according to newly-released survey data of interest to online marketers. MarketingCharts
Making the Business Case for Your Marketing Budget
Building a collaborative relationship with corporate suite peers is a leading way to make the case for marketing budgets, and the Harvard Business Review looks at how CMOs can show the effectiveness of marketing in driving business, using data, trust, and more. Harvard Business Review
Massive CTR Study Reveals Actionable Insights
Differences in Google search desktop and mobile click-through-rate (CTR) insights garnered from 750 billion impressions are featured in newly-released third-party study data, which reveal that in the business and industrial sectors more searches for business-related content are conducted on mobile devices than on traditional desktops. Search Engine Journal
LinkedIn Quietly Experiments With Product Pages To Boost Conversations
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has undergone testing of specialized business product pages on the platform, as part of ongoing efforts to increase engagement between members, brands, and brand product development teams, the social network recently announced. MediaPost
25% of marketers cite sustainability as ‘general goal’ rather than employ specific metrics
Gauging the success of sustainability efforts is a top challenge among marketers, with some 42 percent having said that they need to make new technology investments in the area, according to recently-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. The Drum
ON24 teams up with HubSpot in app marketplace
B2B users will be able to better integrate the features of the HubSpot platform and cloud-based hybrid engagement service ON24, with new event data-sharing options available in a forthcoming upgrade to the platforms, ON24 recently announced. MarTech
Budgets Show Spending Across All Social Networks: Trends For 2022
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the three top social media platforms when it comes to effectively reaching business goals, according to Hootsuite’s newly-released annual social trends report, which has also shown that younger people are increasingly using social networks to research brands instead of traditional search engines. MediaPost
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A light-hearted look at the “inflation, shrinkflation, and skimpflation” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
Instagram is Paying Up to $35,000 to Lure Creators Away From TikTok — PetaPixel
Atari Unveils New Logo, Games, And More For 50th Anniversary — Forbes
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Lee Odden — 5 Questions 4 With Lee Odden — Demandbase
Lane R. Ellis — What’s Trending: Embrace Your Inner Tinker — LinkedIn
Have you found your own top B2B marketing news from the past week? Please drop us a line in the comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to join us for the week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope you’ll return next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page, or at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.
