The essential goals of SEO have changed over the years. This isn’t an especially new observation. But it is one that calls for continuous monitoring.
The mission used to be simple: push a site up the search rankings, get more clicks, rinse, and repeat. But these days, SEO is increasingly complex. And that has implications for web marketing companies and their firms. For both of them, success depends on adaptation.
There’s a clear reason why “getting clicks” doesn’t encapsulate the SEO mission statement anymore. People aren’t clicking the way they used to. The landscape of the modern internet has been described as “low-click” because many people now use Google in order to acquire information from the search engine results page itself.
The latest research indicates that only about half of all searches result in users clicking on any of the links they are presented with. This raises questions: Should the no-click searches just be written off as irrelevant to an SEO campaign? Or is there still a way to leverage those searches to improve a site’s reputation, traffic, and conversions?
The answer depends on the exact nature of the search, as well as the site’s overall marketing strategy. But with no-click searches making up such a large portion of online activity, SEO professionals definitely can’t ignore them completely.
What the shrinking number of clicks really tells us is that it is increasingly important for SEO to be integrated into a broader marketing strategy. Site rankings and organic search results are still important, but they should be tailored more toward making a site authoritative than making it easy to find.
But this goal only applies to the precise information that is most relevant to the site in question. An SEO company cannot hope to capture a large proportion of no-click searches. But if that company has the right goal in mind, it might be able to place an excerpt from the client’s site above the organic search results on Google.
That way, certain users will be exposed to information from that site without having to click. And this may help them to recognize the site as an authoritative source, and one worth re-visiting.
