How SEO Will Change in 2021 (And You're Not Going to Like It)

In this clip, we're going to talk about how SEO is going to change in 2020, and unfortunately you're not going to like it. But before we do, don't forget to subscribe or follow whatever platform you are watching on right now, especially if you enjoy clips on marketing, entrepreneurship, growth, productivity, and more stuff. You're going to enjoy it. Check it out. All right, so SEO, here's what's happening with SEO right now. If you think about Google, I'm— because Google is the large— they take on the lion's share of the traffic in the US and a lot of countries around the world. The problem with this is they're a publicly traded company. Now their incentives are to make more money for their shareholders. Now it's no longer just don't be evil, which was their motto in the past. They actually took that off of kind of their, um, their mission statement or part of their missions and values. So you think about it now, there's only so much space, there's only so much real estate on a search result page. So it used to be in the past, you know, their ads— I remember in high school when they started, um, Google AdWords, um, there was only like one snippet. It was crystal clear that it was an ad, right? And now over, over the years now it's becoming less and less apparent that it's an ad, right? It used to be highlighted in like yellow. It was like crystal clear as an ad and there's only like one or two of them right now. You might see like 4 or 5 ads at the very top and you see more ads at the bottom because Google's making it less apparent that they're ads and they're putting more ads on the, on the, on search engine result pages.

They're making more money.

They're incentivized to make money, which means the organic results, the SEO results, those are getting pinched down a little bit, right? So what used to be at the very top above the fold that would get like the lion's share of the clicks, now it's getting pushed down so much that, you know, they used to say like maybe the number one result in SEO might get 25 to 40 to 50% of the clicks. Now it's like, you know, it might go down to like 10% or so. There's a clip I'm gonna show you in a little bit where when I spoke at the Marketing School Live conference, I actually shared some data from Rand Fishkin from SparkToro. The search result pages, they're getting more and more consolidated, and it's becoming tougher and tougher to make SEO work.

Here's the thing that's happening with Google right now. If you produce a blog post, this is a recent study with collaboration with Rand Fishkin of SparkToro with Jumpshot, the number of zero-click searches are going up, meaning that when you land on a search result page, or a SERP, The problem right now is that most people aren't clicking anymore because Google is adding, here's the answer, right? You no longer need to click on something. And this black part over here is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there's this whole thing, Rand's got a rant about Google driving more clicks to their own—

Bless you.

To their own properties. And that's a problem in itself, but let's just talk about what this means for us right now. So zero-click searches are growing. Over here, all you need to know, if I had a laser pointer, but you can see it's going up and to the right. What do you have to do for yourself? You kind of have to CYA, cover your own asses. Google click-throughs, you can see the blue part is what we want, that's the organic searches. Organic click percentage, that's shrinking. You can see actually the red part for the paid clicks, which is where Google makes its money, that is actually growing. It's growing very slightly, but you can see that. You kind of have to like, if you're just doing blog posts, you have to defend yourself. Um, if you're going to do a blog post, how do you make the most of it, right? Like if we do a podcast, how do we make the most of it? And we've talked about this a couple times, so, you know, people, I don't have the time for this. So what we do is we do something called content sprouting, and then we might take a video. So our YouTube channel I think has 2 to 3 new videos per week, and we'll start with the video first because a video automatically becomes an audio file, right? So video, audio, and then we can convert— let's say I do like, uh, my talk right now, This talk can become maybe 3 or 4 podcast episodes, right? I can go from one video piece of content, automatically I have 3 podcast pieces of content. Then from there, I have like 50 to 60% of a blog post, so I could just have a writer on my team take on the blog post, maybe write a 500-word or a 1,000-word piece, see if it ranks, and then upgrade it. Then we got to think about promotion too. We do seed, sprout, pollinate is a promotion portion, and then the very bottom, it's monetization, so harvesting. We produce a ton of content. We rank for a lot of different things. I think we rank for podcasts advertising, ad networks, things like that. And I was actually talking to Mr. Affiliate Master Syed about this. And he's like, dude, you should think about like how you can like affiliate-ize those or monetize those better. And most people don't think about how they can monetize the traffic that they're bringing. And that's good traffic, right? I think for the podcast advertising one, I think for this year we'll at least collect $30,000 to $36,000 on it. It's not bad. We can probably do more with it, but at least that's some cash flow. That we otherwise wouldn't have gotten. And now we just take that $36 grand and apply it to our salaries and hire more people. So this is content sprouting right here. It's how do you make the most of what you have? This is what Gary Vee does too, because he has a videographer that follows him all around the whole day. And sometimes it might be like a 15-hour session. And then, you know, all that might become like, you know, separate audio clips. It goes into podcasts. And then one guy that used to work at Single Grain now is his copywriter. And so he will convert it into long-form content. I think when he used to work for us, Eric, what was he writing, like 8,000 words a day? Something like that? Yeah, so he was writing like 4,000 to 8,000 words a day. He was just a machine. And now he's with Gary Vee. And he actually gave me his content process just to— and actually, I think Gary Vee's actually shared it on SlideShare, so you can pick it up. Just type in Gary Vee content process. And it's very similar to something like this. But it's literally taking what you have, right? You don't just buy a car and drive it off the street and just don't drive it again. You make the most of it. You do content sprouting. So, So with these zero-click searches, look, okay, it's crystal clear.

Like I mentioned right before you saw the clip, it's getting tougher and tougher. What I think you need to do with SEO now is you cannot just be a blogger. You have to think about if we have a blog post, we're going to make little video clips too. We're gonna make little social clips too. We're gonna make them into audio clips too. So we're not just relying on one channel because blogging in itself is very hard. I talked about in another video, there's over 1.6 billion sites in the world right now. It's becoming tougher and tougher to compete when it comes to just SEO. So you have to diversify because if Google's making it tougher and tougher, and you can see over the trends that the, that what I talked about in the graph is like, it's already hard enough doing SEO. Zero-click searches are rising and then you have to think about on SERP SEO too. You can't just put all your eggs in one basket. Sure, get good at one channel first and then you have to start to diversify. That's the only way you're going to start to protect yourself long-term when it comes to playing the game of SEO, especially In 2020. In the next clip, I want to share a video, also a clip from what Neil was saying at the Marketing School Live conference. And he was talking about how, look, it's not just traffic that matters, it's actually conversions that matter. And how do you convert more when it comes to SEO?

You don't have to increase rankings to get more search traffic. Here's the old site that I have. I eventually got rid of it. Nutrition Secrets. It was a nutrition site. I got my traffic up into the right. And yeah, there's writing content and building links and all that kind of stuff. But the real way we grew Nutrition Secrets, we did something really manual. At that time, there was no software that could do this. Now there is, and I'll tell you about the software in a bit. I don't have a screenshot, but you go into Google Search Console. I still like the old version. I don't know why. You know, you click, click CTR impressions. You see the pages that are getting the traffic. And then from there you look at which you click into the page that has a low CTR. You look at the keywords, the ones that are driving a lot of impressions but low clicks, and then you're like, all right, I need to adjust my page with these keywords so I can get more clicks. Simple concept. You look for keywords that have less than a 5% click rate, look for pages that have less than a 4% CTR rate, and make sure the keywords that you want to rank for in your title tag and within your content and meta descriptions. Once you make that change, You submit to Google and they recrawl it. And here are some keywords that help skyrocket CTR that we've tested. How-tos, list number results, free, you, tips, great, tricks, best, why, blog posts. You guys get the gist. These have all worked really well from everything we've tested. And as you submit it back to Google and you fetch and you submit the URL, you click submit to their index and boom, you're in. You say you're not a robot. And you give it 30 days and you see results. We used to do all this manually. That's how we grew our traffic. It's one of the best ways because Google is looking for user signals. Everyone focuses on links, but not enough of this. If you don't want to do it manually, like how I used to do it, there's a tool called ClickFlow. You know, that's what we do now. And we just automate it and it works much easier. But I kid you not, this is where we're seeing the biggest search gains right now for SEO. We're just optimizing, going after user signals. It's not sexy. No one talks about it. Works. And Nutrition Secrets, as we started doing all this stuff, our branding started going up and we started doing better, getting higher rankings, more pages. And that's how we continually climbed. But traffic and all this kind of stuff is great, but it's not everything. SEMrush showed one of my past startups, Kissmetrics, I think we raised like $17 million for it. It didn't turn out well. I bought out the domain name from the investors for $500,000 and then redirected the traffic, and then they recently did an asset sale. Now I had good traffic. My competitor Mixpanel, who copied my product at the beginning, they even had a TechCrunch article showing similar screenshots, had roughly 1/3 of the traffic. They raised money at an $865 million valuation. What do you think we were worth? I'm the traffic guy. I'm getting all this traffic. I'm beating them. What do you think we were worth? Anyone want to take a guess? More than $15,000 because we raised $17,000, but, but we were worth roughly 1/10 that. Technically not even 1/10 that. So maybe 1/15, 1/20. That's brutal, right? Think about it. I'm a marketer. I'm on cloud nine getting all this traffic. It shows you traffic isn't everything. And I realized at that point, the real formula to success, especially in the future, is traffic plus conversions cubed equals success.

When you think about conversion rate optimization, that's not just about paid advertising and optimizing the traffic coming in, but it's also like taking the traffic that you have from an SEO perspective and optimizing that too. You can use Google Search Console, or you can use the software that I have called ClickFlow. And then that way you can optimize the titles, descriptions you have, or different elements, different blocks on, on the pages that you have on your site. If you're struggling with SEO, you got to go omnichannel, right? Once you start to get it working, once you start to find your voice. And second part is if you're already getting traffic, how do you make the most of the traffic that you have? You can do on-SERP SEO, which kind of is like CRO on the SERP result pages, or you are basically doing like, you know, SEO and CRO at the same time. Um, you making the most of the traffic that you have. These are the 2 big things that are going to happen when it comes to SEO in 2020. Google's going to try to make more money. Always, you got to think about what their incentives are. They are at the end of the day an advertising platform. So how are they going to get theirs, right? How are they going to get their money? And then at the same time, once you understand what they're trying to do, how are you going to make the most of what you have? How are you going to protect yourself, protect your butt for the long term? So that's about it from this video, but I do have another video for you to check out that's related to this. So don't forget to check out the next video if you're watching a video right now. And also whatever channel you're on, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And leave a comment, let us know what you think, and we'll see you tomorrow.