Why Legacy SEO/SEM Is Declining

In 2013, where could I go to search?
-Google

In 2023, where can I go to search?
-Google
-LinkedIn
-ChatGPT
-Tik Tok
-Pinterest
-Instagram
-YouTube
-Reddit
-Text a Friend or Colleague
-Ask a Question on a Live Event
-Podcasts
-Slack communities
-Discord

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The reality is, people trust their NETWORK a lot more than the results they get from a random commodity blog in Google written by AI or published in the Philippines for $50.

So they’re going to other places like LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Instagram, Podcasts, YouTube, Slack & Discord communities, and more to get information on what initiatives to prioritize, what products to purchase, who to follow, etc.

People are still making the “search”. They’re just doing it in different places than Google now.

People are starting to figure out that depending on what type of "search" they're making, what the most relevant search engine is.

And the breakthrough in B2B is realizing that often when your buyers make that search, it isn't in Google. It's in another place that likely you have no digital tracking that it ever happened.

And even when they make the "search" via text message or LinkedIn DM or a Slack community, then they eventually go to Google, search the brand (navigational search) and go the website.

Google search gets all the credit in attribution software for this, and never tracks or takes into consideration the critical important touch from dark social that drove the Google search in the first place.

Marketers are back at HQ celebrating how well their SEO strategy is working when it literally did nothing.

They keep investing more in SEO and don't see or focus on the things that are actually driving the impact. This is the massive measurement bias of SEO that you need to be aware of.

Attribution software says SEO drives 79% of our revenue. Customers says SEO drives 3% of our revenue. This difference is everything and something every B2B company needs to acknowledge and be aware of.

If your primary marketing strategy is still to capture existing market demand through SEO/SEM, over time you are vulnerable to slowed growth and declining market share.


p.s. The exact same thing happens in SEM / Google Paid Search. It's not just organic.

p.p.s. SEO isn’t “dead”. It just doesn’t deserve to be a top priority for a majority of marketing teams because they can get significantly better ROI and sustained competitive advantage from other programs.

p.p.p.s. Isn’t it interesting that all the biggest early promoters of SEO - Gaetano Nino DiNardi 🇺🇦, Rand Fishkin, etc. now are all talking about SEO decline and rise of dark social? Smart people see these clear trends in human behavior.

p.p.p.p.s. Other market forces impacting legacy SEO are the rise of YouTube shorts as top results in Google SERPs, AI impacting the quality and volume of content being published, and social networks becoming core search engines.