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…
 

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.