Connect with us

MARKETING

After Google: Should SEOs Jump Ship?

Published

on

After Google: Should SEOs Jump Ship?

The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

There was a pre-search-engine age. It’s hard to conceive of now, but there was. Even in the early days of search engines, when Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Excite still competed for the crown, I can remember web portals. Pages that I’d start at, in the “computer room” at school, to navigate and explore the web not by searching, but by clicking on organized links.

In the beginning, there were web portals. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

These were already the death throes of a previous internet age. Search engine dominance, and specifically Google dominance, has been the norm for this kind of journey for decades now. It’s all that many SEOs have ever known.

But what comes next?

Advertisement

People have talked for a long time about existential threats to Google’s dominance, and often, implicitly, by extension, SEO. You’ll have heard the claims that Amazon or YouTube are now preferred engines for certain kinds of search, or that Google is going to struggle against the unique technological advantages of Apple, AI chatbots, the unique regional advantages of Baidu, or the unique format advantages of TikTok. Or maybe you’ve even heard that people prefer to restrict their searches only to Reddit. Even mainstream outlets are suggesting that Google search quality may be in decline.

This post is not about the health of Google search as a product, or about the implications of improving AI products for your SEO strategy right now. (Although, I know of at least one post for this blog being written on that topic!) Instead, this post is about which of these threats, if any, actually stand a chance of unseating Google’s dominance.

In what capacity?

To ask what might take Google’s role, we must first ask what role it is that we’re interested in. Google is many things, and possibly part of the reason Google’s doom is so often predicted is that we’re not always talking about the same specific things.

What exactly is it that search engines as a genre, and then Google, have dominated? Perhaps we might mean:

  • The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’ve not yet discovered? For example, you might not know yet what the best site is for a given topic.

  • The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’re already familiar with? Perhaps you’re searching on Google hoping to see a result from Reddit, or from Wikipedia.

  • The place you’d start to answer a given question? So maybe you’d be happy with a non-web result as long as it answered your question.

  • The place you’d start to complete a task? So, again, the best answer might not be a web page at all.

The truth is that the present reality blurs these use cases to the point of it not being useful to separate them. But for Google to be replaced by something that maintains this close alignment, it’d have to be a close peer competitor.

The obvious pretenders

There are two that come to mind, as similarly resourced companies trying similar things via a similar method (a web index): Bing and Apple.

Advertisement

I don’t want to be dismissive of Bing, or of the value of someone — anyone — else maintaining a similar enough competitor to keep Google somewhat honest. Although it’s often mocked in SEO circles, Bing in reality is not so many years behind Google at any given point. But, really, it’s hard to see the events that could lead to Bing supplanting Google at its own game. It’s just too similar for people to make the switch. One possibility based on recent news is for Bing to become less similar, pursuing one of the precise alternatives I’ll cover below – but more on that when we get to it.

Apple, on the other hand, is doing something similar, but with some unique advantages. I must credit my former colleague (and 2023 Mozcon speaker) Tom Anthony who has been very prescient around Apple’s moves in this space, going so far as to backward-engineer Apple search results that weren’t supposed to be publicly available. Apple can do things that Bing can’t, leveraging Apple’s app ecosystem and device integration to provide search results that skip certain steps of a user journey in ways that Google cannot, or will not.

The trouble with Apple as a Google search competitor is obvious, though. The unique advantages, as I said, are to do with apps and hardware. Apple devices are expensive — prohibitively so. (This varies by market – in the US, with the base price of a phone contract being so high, iPhones are more palatable and have a notably higher market share than in Europe, for example. But, that’s a topic for another day – either way…). There is a fairly hard cap on the market share of a search engine that is only superior on high-end devices, and not only that, but ones from a specific brand.

So could Apple take a big chunk out of Google? Yes, it may already quietly have done so with various iOS changes pushing the prevalence of Apple’s own search results. But totally replace Google? Very unlikely.

You can say the same for regional competitors like Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. These may well consistently beat out Google in their own backyards, and perhaps even spread to nearby countries and regions, but it’s hard to see them beating Google in its own backyard(s).

Revolution, not evolution

So what about competitors that replace Google by doing something totally different, to solve the same problems? The reality is that a lot of the problems we solve right now with web search, are not actually well suited to web search. The fact that something like a Google Home will often answer your questions by essentially reading out a featured snippet is a symptom of Google’s dominance, not a symptom of web search being well suited to that use case. Even Google themselves recognize this, and betray that in tools like Google Translate, clocks, calculators, and so on, embedded in SERPs. So who might the more disruptive threats be?

Advertisement

One name that came up a lot in 2022 is TikTok, and I’d point you to this excellent post by Lidia Infante on this very blog. To sum up her argument, TikTok can take market share from Google, but it can’t replace Google entirely. TikTok is too specialized (in video format and certain topic areas), and the quality assurance is too weak. So, again, we have a competitor that chips away at Google without replacing it.

Then of course, most recently, SEOs of Twitter have been right to point out that for many queries, ChatGPT produces better responses than Google. Take this example, “excel query for extraction the domain name from a url”:

1674474876 177 After Google Should SEOs Jump Ship
1674474876 874 After Google Should SEOs Jump Ship

The ChatGPT result above is far more informative and easy to follow. However, like TikTok, this only works for certain things. ChatGPT is not a web search engine:

1674474876 627 After Google Should SEOs Jump Ship
1674474876 949 After Google Should SEOs Jump Ship

So you have to be willing to abandon the premise that your result should be a web page. Which, in this context, comes down to: do you trust an answer if you don’t know who wrote it? ChatGPT and similar technologies have access to “knowledge” sourced from the web, like Google, but they don’t cite a source. Indeed, it would be immensely difficult to trace the source of their various claims, some of which seem quite… odd.

Similar to TikTok, then, this is something I might prefer to Google for a specific kind of query. In this particular case, the kind of query that previously took me to StackOverflow. But I’m not going to ask it for mortgage advice.

I noted above that Bing is rumored to be integrating ChatGPT with its own search product. This enlarges the threat to Google in that it makes this technology more accessible, but really, the same qualms apply – there are many, many queries for which this is not helpful. Even if Bing can hybridize these technologies into a “best of both” of traditional web search and NLP, well – that’s already the road Google is going down.

The other challenge with this “ChatAI as search” model is an economic one. Google and Amazon have both already come to the conclusion that the type of queries asked of their personal assistant devices are barely, if at all, economic to run – because of the limited monetization opportunities for purely informational queries. Perhaps my distinction above, about what we mean by replacing Google, is very relevant here – some of our use cases of Google as a search engine are actually just a loss leader for others. As such, perhaps this bundling of disparate uses is necessary.

The King is dea… wait, wait, he’s still breathing

1674474877 369 After Google Should SEOs Jump Ship

Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines in the United States as of January 2022 – via Statista

Ultimately, these threats look set to chip away at Google, not replace it. At worst, a broad monopoly will be sliced up and shrunk, and that doesn’t feel like any great evil. For SEOs, we should be aware of these new search engines, and these new “search engines”, and of the risks attached to being locked into the Google ecosystem. But don’t forget the chart above: the original pie is not going anywhere. The Google SEO game is still not a bad game to be playing.

Advertisement



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

Published

on

Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

Published

on

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

(more…)

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

More promotions and more layoffs

Published

on

More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

Advertisement

Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

PX3zocqNZfzMbWNEZhW9dZnAgkdPrLW8fjkrbVrcEkrNJpJiXrVKkjlQ0Tzuj8YKh Ht9HTEvmxDDt0ZsntfYiZHS0NJ7zEZ 6yMT3OjZajbaXBFV1D2Pk5euJeHKdRuzOzM5ZUxwNtsVNaiIbNrd Q

Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

FIHUBtZJfK3IzbyZl C6WXBPTE64Gzg1URDzQUXCrD8YkAPZS7mmjpmAAiuhhheJUE4dGVcn6e9XW87ogLVz0Ya4rqHwB8WfXTHS W0hRW7yEdr2bQNjlTwnXvNhMv9NZ092pq1ws7lu DYqLV8i6fcFIHUBtZJfK3IzbyZl C6WXBPTE64Gzg1URDzQUXCrD8YkAPZS7mmjpmAAiuhhheJUE4dGVcn6e9XW87ogLVz0Ya4rqHwB8WfXTHS W0hRW7yEdr2bQNjlTwnXvNhMv9NZ092pq1ws7lu DYqLV8i6fc

Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

Advertisement

Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS