TWIPLA Staff September 24, 2024
3 Minute Read
With click-through rates from Google Search in free fall, TWIPLA's Jorge Cuevas sat down with renowned marketing adviser and Orbit founder Andy Crestodina to hear his thoughts on how businesses can strategize for content marketing success, find inspiration, and sustain excellence of output.
You've been a leader in digital marketing for over two decades. How have you seen SEO evolve, and what emerging trends do you think will define the next five years?
If you’ve been watching for a while, you’ve noticed: clickthrough rates from search are in decline. That means that Google is doing a better job of keeping their traffic and a worse job at sending visitors to websites.
It’s obvious if you just look at any search results page. It was once 10 blue links. Then Google added rich snippets, then featured snippets, then PAA boxes, then knowledge panels and now… AI overviews.
Compare the same search results page from 2016 to 2024…
This trend has been obvious to industry watchers for at least 10 years. And those who understand it and have adapted are not alarmed.
One reason to remain calm is in your analytics. The phrases and pages that have been impacted the most are the information intent phrases and the blog articles. The fact is that many of these searchers never really had “visit website intent” and they’re happy to get their answer right there in the search results page.
The good news is that many of the commercial intent phrases (those with the highest conversion rates for the most important interactions, like lead generation) still have good clickthrough rates.
Although Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have much historic data (one of GA4's many drawbacks), I grabbed this before in the dying days of Universal Analytics. It has two segments: visitors who started on the blog (information intent) and visitors who started on sales pages (commercial intent). You can see that the most important traffic is less impacted…
As someone who’s authored 500+ articles, how do you stay inspired to create new content, and what advice would you give to marketers struggling to consistently produce quality content?
There's no shortage of tips for making content marketing a success.
But the well is deep.
I’m on the frontlines, talking to clients and prospects everyday, hearing their challenges and working with them to solve digital marketing problems.
I’m out in the communities, meeting with people at conferences, hearing presentations and learning what others are facing and how they are adapting.
I’m keeping things updated. Many of those 500 articles are slowly going out of date. So I’m going back and rewriting older articles. Around half of my “new” articles are actually rewrites of older articles.
Given your long-standing experience in content marketing, what do you believe are the most common mistakes businesses make when creating a content strategy, and how can they avoid them?
A lot of content marketers are creating their content strategy on weak foundations.
Before writing blog posts, marketers should first go back to their sales pages (product pages, service pages, homepage) and polish these to perfection. Make sure those pages are filled with answers to prospects’ questions. Make sure those pages are filled with supportive evidence.
Unfortunately, many websites are filled with unsupported marketing claims.
But it’s on this weak foundation of low converting pages that content marketers try to build. They work hard to drive traffic to websites with low conversion rates. They bring visitors to blogs with terrible email signup CTAs.
If the mousetrap is broken, why fill it with cheese?
So before you write another blog post, work on website credibility - go back to your key pages, the pages that are built to sell. Improvements to these pages have a 100x impact on marketing outcomes.
About Andy Crestodina
Andy Crestodina is a marketing expert and keynote speaker on topics ranging from social media to analytics at conferences around the world. He's also the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios. Orbit is an award winning web development and website optimization company, specialized in B2B lead generation for mid-market brands across all industries.
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