Rand Fishkin breaks down where SEO stands: mobile search is booming, desktop barely declined, and half of all searches don't generate clicks to external sites. Organic traffic still converts better than paid, and opportunities exist beyond traditional links in images, video, Maps, and Knowledge Graph results.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, co founder of Inbound.org, and I'm very excited because I get to tell you about SEO. Now, I know for some folks they think SEO is a little bit boring, but I think SEO is the most, or at least one of the most exciting practices in all of marketing. And that is because it's this wonderful combination of technical, of creative, and of keeping up with a constantly changing world that Google has created for us. Now, at Inbound, I get to talk about things like how to keep up with Google in 2017. And included in that are some very big strategic items and then some deeper tactical stuff. And I'll walk you through a little bit of both of them in the short few minutes that we've got now. I want to start by saying that it is the case absolutely, that mobile is the fastest growing part of search, but desktop has not actually been shrinking, at least not very much. We've seen about from the height of desktop's rise in search volume a few years ago, we've seen maybe about a 10% total drop. Mobile has gone crazy in that time. Absolutely. And is now even bigger than desktop. So you basically have this world of more than twice as many searchers as you had just a few years ago, more than twice as many searches taking place. And search is particularly awesome for content creators and for marketers because search does a few things. When someone performs a web search or mobile search, they have high intent, they know they want that thing and they want it right now. That means it is often much easier to convert them from a visitor to your website or webpage into a paying customer or a subscriber or someone who gives you their email address in exchange for some value or some piece of content. They've said, I need this. You can serve that up. And that's a wonderful exchange of value. Now, search. Some of the cool things that we've been able to do at Moz over the last few years is to look at clickstream data to see where clicks are happening. And there's a few stats that I find totally incredible. One of them, for example. So this is looking at millions of searches and search clicks. One of them is that about 1%. A little more. I think it's 1.19% of all clicks that happen in Google result in a paid ad. Click 1.19%. And Google made more than $40 billion on 1% of all the searches that happen on their engine. That is, if that doesn't blow your mind I mean, I think that's incredible. About 50% of all the searches that take place in Google get no click or go back to another Google property like YouTube or Google Maps or they click on Google knowledge graph or Google answers their query before they ever need to click on anything. So Google has taken about half of all its traffic and said we're going to take care of that query ourselves inside Google or inside Google's properties. The other half those clicks are taking place to other websites. But because it's such a small slice that is paid, there's a huge opportunity for organic and that's what SEO is. SEO is all about earning those high rankings, that organic traffic. It used to be five years ago if we were talking about SEO, we would be talking about the 10 blue links. How do I rank higher? Number one, number two, number three. Nowadays, take a look at a Google search result, go ahead and search for Disney World. Do you see what's happening? There's a knowledge graph on the right hand side. There's images and video and news, there's ads. Above the fold, there's Google Maps information. Like this is a rich page of information. And the number one ranking position, which is of course Disney World's official website, is probably about a third of the way down the page. And if you're ranking number three or four, you're getting very, very few clicks for this term because there's so much else that's taking attention away from searchers. And this is one of the big points of my talk, is that we need to be thinking bigger than just these 10 blue links. We have to be thinking about keywords, the keywords that we choose to target in terms of what appears on the page and then the targeting that we respond within our content in terms of how we get into those results. If you do that, you have a big opportunity to beat out a lot of your competition who are still not thinking in terms of images and videos. And how do I get into Google News and how do I get into the knowledge graph and how do I get into instant answers? How do I get that result? Zero. How do I get into rich snippets of all kinds and other rich sorts of data? Google is constantly testing all kinds of new stuff. 3% of Google's results have Twitter embedded in them. If you're not thinking about Twitter in terms of your SEO strategy, you're probably missing something there. Twitter is huge for brand names, it's huge for trending items and it can get quite a bit of click through rate and certainly a lot of branding and awareness inside of Google, so tons of opportunity, lots to execute on. Hope you'll join me again at HubSpot and at Inbound and at Moz. Take care.
