Your organic search volume is declining. If it’s not yet, it will be soon. We’re at the start of a massive shift in content marketing, one that’s hard for any of us to wrap our heads around, but we have to try. A huge thanks to Scot Wingo, investor and former CEO of Spiffy, for articulating what many of us have been experiencing, but couldn’t quite pinpoint yet. Organic reach is declining, but why?
The Ease of AI Produced Content Ruins Content Marketing
Fundamental issue number one is that marketers ruin everything. With the advent of easy to write content courtesy of ChatGPT and its brethren, lazy and bad or misinformed marketers started churning out 100 times the content to attempt to win at SEO, aka search engine optimization. Google freaks the freak out, and responds with rapid and confusing changes to their search algorithms, completely breaking many SEO approaches.
The Rise of “Zero Click” Searches
Fundamental issue number two is all the AI players and Google are creating more “zero click” searches. That is, they display a summary at the top which answers the question (quality of results varies highly), so there’s no need to click through the website to learn more and get exposed to the brand.
Try it with “Kia Telluride features” or “best American pickup trucks” or “best trade-in tool for dealerships”.
What Are You Seeing?
Is SEO dead? 100% No, that’s ridiculous. Are SEO and content marketing in for a wild ride the next few years? 100% yes. We’d love to hear what you’re seeing, whether you’re in marketing at a dealership or a software company like TradePending.
