The Evolution of SEO (courtesy of Digital Giants)
Interesting article on SEO evolution:
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/07/seo-strategy-customer-journey/
By ROBERT ROSE published JULY 28, 2021 EST READ TIME: 7 MINDistribution and Promotion / Conversion and Optimization / SEO / Content strategy for marketers / Idea generation
Providing the Best Answer May No Longer Be the Best Strategy for SEO [Video Series]
Welcome to the race for position no. 1.
Except in this race, we are not the cars. We are not the drivers.
We are the racetrack. And we are competing to be the first choice for every car and driver.
The race is search. The most frequently chosen car? Google, which commands almost 88% of the global search market.
But it’s really no longer a single race car. Research shows, for example, if people are looking for specific products are much more likely to start with Amazon. If they’re looking for images, they go to Google Image. And if they’re looking for how-to videos, they’re most likely to search YouTube. Apple has begun to eat into Google’s market share of searching for directions.
Looking for what people have said about products or things? Facebook surpassed more than 2 billion searches per day. An estimated one in 10 internet users start with TripAdvisor for travel searches. And there are more than 40 million searches on LinkedIn for jobs each week.
All this begs the question: How are we as marketers thinking about optimizing our tracks – our content journey – for all these cars and drivers?
In episode seven of Marketing Makers, CMI’s series for those who make marketing work, I take a leisurely pace to explore the evolution that led us to today’s world where we must optimize our content for the cars and their drivers. You can watch the show here or read on for some highlights.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zml-wm6ZkD4HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Strategies for Bulletproof SEO Content
World without search
It’s hard to imagine there was a day when Google wasn’t a verb.
If you wanted to know what was available for your family’s entertainment on TV, you could purchase TV Guide or look in your daily newspaper. You couldn’t search for alternate times. You couldn’t search for programming by genres or favorite actors.
If you wanted to know what spaghetti sauce was available, you could go to the store and browse the aisle, looking at every single jar.
Information was a one-way street.
If you were searching for a solution for your B2B organization, well, you kinda didn’t. You could learn about new ways of operation, technologies, or equipment at a trade show, a film from a vendor, a catalog, or a visit from a salesperson.
In the early 1990s, a college student in Canada began the transformation that would change that. He created a program that allowed people to search for specific words in files people uploaded to their public servers (a precursor to the modern internet.) Now understand that the analysis program didn’t interpret language, it literally looked at the letters. If you typed “fun,” you’d get files that had the word funds, fundamental, funny, etc. It was more like searching a database with lots of records.
Now, information was a two-way street. That evolution led to search engines, which indexed and interpreted content. Now, a search about an author’s name, for example, returns not only books authored by the person but content about the author – biographies, reviews, media coverage, etc.
This subtle, but important difference, changed the world for how we as consumers would have access to information, entertainment, education, shopping, and pretty much all manner of things we wanted to consume when it comes to content.
Patricia is the Business Mentor and owner of Grow Vantage and a Past President of the Barrie Chamber of Commerce. She applies over 30 years of business experience (from start-up to corporate) to mentor entrepreneurs. Since 2011, she has held over 6,500 coaching and training sessions in-person and online. Through Ask For Directions Training, her entrepreneurial training program (and parent company Grow Vantage), and as a business coach, she works with start-ups who are new (or who have lost traction) to design, launch and grow their businesses. Along with 20 other expert instructors she teaches strategies in marketing, sales, communications, and finance, as well as practical techniques to increase productivity, and manage their businesses. In other words, everything entrepreneurs need to learn to grow and run their businesses successfully, and avoid the costly mistakes they can't even see coming - that lead to delays in growth and getting stuck.