In the current virtual world, digital marketing is one of the core obligations that a business must have to just sustain in the market. Every informed leader has already realized that having a separate department for digital marketing is a necessity at this point. However, is it enough to gain an upper hand over the competitors? The present scenario where the organic traffic is declining remarkably, says otherwise. Many businesses have detected a significant drop in organic traffic despite maintaining their online presence. The purpose of this article is to make the readers aware of the declining organic traffic and that SEO is the best defense against it.
Why is Organic Traffic Dying?
Algorithm updates
Google, the most popular search engine, gets constant updates and keeps improving for better delivery. However, it is a nightmare for online marketers as the search algorithms also get updated. As the content is usually posted to stay optimized with the algorithm, its effectiveness also falls when there is a sudden update.
Increase in Competition
As businesses are seeing the importance of online marketing, they have started investing in the required personnel. This investment has led to almost all of them aiming to effectively optimize SEO and SEM, resulting in a steep increase in the competition. Thus, the website results observe a downward trend.
Quality Concerns
Many businesses have yet to understand that attracting traffic is not limited to just keywords. Because of this misconception, they look for as many keywords as possible and just stuff them into their content, which mostly results in lowering the overall quality.
Artificial Intelligence Interference
AI overview is another huge obstacle for digital marketers, as it sometimes results in even zero search results. AI overview provides information the users are looking for and suggests concise search-related websites. This significantly impacts the Click Through Rate (CTR) as the overview suggests only a handful of websites.
About SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a term all businesses are familiar with, but only a few understand its effective utilization. SEO is basically a practice to improve a website’s ranking on search engines by refining the content and technical aspects. A business should not just overly rely on one-time efforts like paid ads, as they are usually time limited. Having a well-planned SEO plan, on the other hand, would be a long-term strategy and would work even during unforeseen situations.
Importance of SEO to stand up against this decline
There are various other factors that make SEO an effective shield:
Adapting to algorithm changes – A strong SEO foundation would help with making the website resilient even to constant updates. It includes high-quality content and the usage of proper SEO techniques to prevent the website ranking from falling.
Enhance website – An effective SEO strategy should include not just keywords, as search engines prioritize websites’ fast loading speed and easy navigation. Optimizing these SEO aspects would maintain rankings and decrease the bounce rates.
User-oriented content – Developers and content creators often forget that the content should not have excessive jargon. A website with user-friendly content should be the highest priority as Google also prioritizes it. Visitors are inclined to stay and explore the website based on its ease of engagement.
Utilizing Analytics – An in-depth analysis is important to identify opportunities for better performance. Tracking SEO results and user engagement through Google Analytics and Search Console is essential to understand which strategy is working and which could be improved.
Optimizing SEO effectively can help websites get chosen even in AI’s overview results and ultimately receive higher traffic. Furthermore, it is cost-effective and helps long-term business growth once the page ranks well.
It is, therefore, important for businesses to consistently invest in solid SEO strategies. The decline in organic traffic affects most websites, so staying resilient is the key. By understanding SEO’s relevance, businesses could even take advantage of the decline as their competitors might not be able to adapt in time.
