Branded searches are taking over Google

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As time has gone on, and our search engine patterns have changed, a big new trend is beginning to emerge: people are using Google for branded searches more than ever before.

Put another way, people are searching for “Nike” instead of “best running shoes”, or “GreenMellen” instead of “web design companies in Atlanta”. People are doing their research elsewhere, generally on social media or in AI tools, and then using Google to take them to the company site.

SparkToro‘s Rand Fishkin recently shared some amazing data in this LinkedIn post, culminating in this image:

So what does this mean?

More than ever before your company needs to be the answer, not an answer. You need to be active in social media, you need to be showing up in AI answers, and you need to be showing your expertise to your prospective clients. Once they see how great you are, then they’ll head over to Google and find your website.

(and make sure your website doesn’t disappoint)

There are certainly still some people that search for “best running shoes” and “web design companies in Atlanta” on Google, but those numbers are fading. If you rely on that kind of traffic, the next few years could get pretty rough for you. Take the time now to build your entire presence, and reap the rewards when people head over to Google to find you by name.

Google is a reward for getting marketing right in all the other channels

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I shared earlier this year that we need to avoid the mistake of giving Google credit for when other sources are really where your company was found. A few years ago I shared the story of how we found our CPA firm, and how they could have wrongly attributed things to Google.

In a recent post from Rand Fishkin, he shared a simple statement that summarizes this all quite well. He said:

Google has become a reward for getting marketing right in all the other channels rather than the place to start.

While there are certainly many people that still begin their dive into a topic with a Google search, the numbers are continuing to fall. In most cases, people will hear about an idea, a product, or a company on some other platform (often social media or ChatGPT), and then go to Google to find details. This shift is unlikely to slow down.

There’s good news and bad news from this.

The good news is that when people search for you on Google, they’re searching for you. They’re not looking for “home builders in Atlanta”, they’re looking for your specific company. That’s a huge win.

The bad news is that you need to be in those other places in order to be found. If you decide that you don’t want to put the effort into showing up online in places like LinkedIn and YouTube and you just want to focus on SEO, you’ll be fighting over a continually smaller piece of the pie.

If you put in the work to be found on the internet, Google will be your reward.

Using Google as a leapfrog

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We all know that the nature of using Google is changing. Between people switching to using AI instead of traditional search, and Google keeping more users on their site, it’s all changing very quickly.

While listening to the annual “State of the Apps” episode of the Cortex podcast, the hosts shared some personal use cases that really stood out to me. Both of the hosts are using AI for the majority of their searches, and only defaulting to Google in certain cases. From the show:

Myke Hurley: “I’m just using Google as a leapfrog as a way to get to the thing that I already know exists.”

CGP Grey: “I’m using Google to get me to a thing that I already know I want to go to; that’s the only thing I’m using search engines for now.”

They debated the differences between various AI tools (they consider Claude to be better, but ChatGPT is often more useful), but they use those tools far more than they use Google.

Granted, they’re both on the extreme side of the innovation curve and most people aren’t there yet, but it’s certainly trending in that direction. As more people turn to AI for answers, getting your business found on the internet will be increasingly tricky to do.

Be “the” choice

The solution is to do exactly what Myke and Grey hinted at — make yourself the “thing that I know I want to go to“. If people are searching Google for businesses like yours, you have a chance to maybe show up. If they’re searching for you specifically by name, you’ve already won.

Be the choice.

97% of web pages get zero traffic from Google

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Things are changing quickly when it comes to getting your site to rank well on Google. A big one, as I shared a few months ago, is that 64% of visitors that use Google never end up visiting a traditional website, instead getting the answer from Google itself or from a related Google product (Maps, YouTube, etc). It’s a huge number.

In a recent video, Rand Fishkin shared another staggering statistic (via Tim Soulo from Ahrefs) — nearly 97% of web pages on the internet get literally zero traffic from Google. Here is the chart from Tim:

I’m not suggesting that you give up trying to rank on Google, as there is still huge value there, but we need to recognize the increasing inability to do so. The key to remember is that while things are shifting with Google, people are still spending more and more time online. The users are there, and the tactics through which to reach them are simply changing.

This is kind of the idea behind Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Day Trading Attention” — just go where the users are. Have a solid website as a home base, and then spend time wherever people are spending time. In Rand’s video he says:

“The big platforms, you’re gonna take all of our traffic and that is okay because I can still have influence by being present in the places where people pay attention.”

Don’t give up on Google and SEO, but if that’s your primary source of traffic it’s time to start diversifying immediately. If you need help doing that, let’s chat.

Creating “zero click” content

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a growing problem with Google is the number of “zero click” searches on there — searches that don’t lead to another click, because Google answered the question for you. It’s generally a good thing for users, but it’s a bad thing for companies wanting to get more website traffic.

In the case of Google, there’s not much you can do. In other cases, though, it might be best to just lean into this trend. Most social media sites quietly penalize posts that have links in them (hence the silly and annoying “link in comments” that you see so often), so it might be best to simply forego the link and just let people see your content.

This video from the Content Marketing Institute (which I briefly shared last week) talks about this very subject about halfway through:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7204588791657869312/comments/

No links?

For what I’m trying to accomplish with this blog, a lack of links is fine. I don’t care if you read this on LinkedIn or Medium or Substack or whatever, because I’m not trying to sell anything.

For many companies, it’s the same. If their content simply gets shared and viewed more often, it’s a win.

However, what about posts like this one? If you’re reading this on LinkedIn, I didn’t ever link back to my original blog post (trying to go “zero click”), but I still had to include some links to make the content more valuable. Telling you about that video and then making you go find it yourself would be frustrating, so I included a link to it. However, LinkedIn and other social platforms literally encourage content creators to make their content less valuable (with zero links) in order to get more exposure for it.

I get it, because their goal is to keep you on their site so they can make more ad revenue, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

At the end of the day, the “zero click” content approach might be a solid idea. In the video above, Rand Fishkin tells a story of an agency owner that changed up their marketing, watching their digital metrics (website visits, etc) plummet, but saw their sales rise. While it feels kind of broken to do it that way, all of us would be happy to have a similar outcome.

Moving our clients to “zero click” will take some time and some testing, but it’s something worth trying out.

The balance between lift and attribution

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I’ve shared a few times on here how precise attribution of online activities is becoming more and more difficult to track. It feels like companies are collecting every bit of information that they can about us, which is true, but it’s becoming trickier to put all of the pieces together.

Ad blockers and cookie policies are a big reason why, but there’s also just the fact that so many marketing activities simply aren’t done in ways that are trackable (private conversations online, in-person events, etc).

A recent article from Ann Gynn on the Content Marketing Institute blog suggests that we go back to tracking marketing like we did in 1985 — focus on the lift of the brand. From her article:

“To measure impact, you should follow in the footsteps of the 1980s marketer. Evaluate the before-and-after metrics overall, and don’t assign a value to each component’s contributions.“

That’s not to say that we should ignore SEO and other current marketing best practices, as those are still certainly valuable, but that we shouldn’t put as much weight into the numbers. Again, from Ann:

“Still, your brand can’t ignore search rankings as they play a role in those zero-click results and some humans still see Google, other search engines, and even generative AI tools as their go-to research sources.“

Taking it further, she quotes SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin (among the most well-known search engine marketers in the world), who expresses the problem quite clearly:

“They have to understand when you provide attribution, you miss almost every organic channel, every word-of-mouth-channel, almost every social engagement channel that’s organic, and almost every channel that doesn’t directly drive a link that passes a referral string.”

Instead, they must recognize that measurement is the preferred method and it requires a long-range assessment of brand strength and recognition. “You’re going to look at lift, not attribution,” Rand says. “They have to buy into this new method of operating.”

There’s not an easy answer here, but the first step is to accept reality. Rand says “attribution is fully broken these days, but we’re still using it like we used to“. At GreenMellen we still track every bit of data that we can, across a variety of different tools, and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. However, we also need to be sure we’re tracking the overall vitality of each brand so we can get a better idea of the success of the overall marketing plan.

The next few years will be very interesting, headlined by the impact that AI will be making, but we can be confident that precise attribution is never coming back and we need to work hard to find ways to track overall lift instead.

I encourage you to check out Ann’s full article, as well as the live show where she pulled some of Rand’s thoughts.

The majority of Google searches don’t lead to websites

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It’s a trend that has been growing for years, but the number of “zero-click” searches on Google continues to grow (where a zero-click search is one where the user doesn’t ever click through to a website).

In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin points out that in 2024 only 360 of every 1,000 searches lead to a result on the open web. That means that 64% of visitors to Google never end up visiting a traditional website, which is a huge number.

The problem is two-fold:

First, many search questions are answered right on the page, either with a simple answer from Google or with an AI-powered result.

Second, Google does as much as it can to send users to other Google properties. Rand explains:

Equally concerning, especially for those worried about Google’s monopoly power to self-preference their own properties in the results, is that almost 30% of all clicks go to platforms Google owns. YouTube, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Flights, Google Hotels, the Google App Store, and dozens more means that Google gets even more monetization and sector-dominating power from their search engine.

This trend is unlikely to slow down, much less reverse, so we need to start coming up with other ideas to continue to be found online. SEO is going to become a much more challenging game if Google is literally sending fewer visitors to websites.

At the same time, Google search continues to be the dominant player in the search market and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Even with Google taking more of the pie for themselves, there are still many billions of visitors that Google sends out to the web every month, and ignoring that completely would be foolish.

If and when Google takes their next big step into AI-powered results remains to be seen, and likely will have a big impact on things, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say as things continue to develop. For now, I encourage you to check out Rand’s full post to dig into the details.

Build a brand outside of Google

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There was recently a huge leak from Google that detailed much of how their search algorithm works, and it was quite eye opening. One of the best overviews of the leak comes from Rand Fishkin, and you can read it here.

In digging in, he had a few very insightful thoughts that I wanted to share here.

Big brands matter

He had a few thoughts about building a big brand in order to rank well in Google. Here is one:

“If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: “Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”

A related thought is a bit more glum, and essentially says to put your efforts elsewhere if you can’t be seen as a major brand.

“The content you create is unlikely to perform well in Google if competition from big, popular websites with well-known brands exists. Google no longer rewards scrappy, clever, SEO-savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search-measurable forms of popularity, and established domains that searchers already know and click.”

Clicks matter, and Google lied

A theme that goes through Rand’s piece, along with others that I’ve read, is that Google has been dishonest with us for years. It could be somewhat defensible (trying to stop spammers from knowing everything), but it’s undeniable that Google literally lied about various pieces of how their algorithm works.

A major one is clicks in the search results. Google has long downplayed the importance of them (denying them completely until 2019, I believe), but it seems that clicks can matter a lot. Here is a scenario about that from Rand:

Let’s say, for example, that many people in the Seattle area search for “Lehman Brothers” and scroll to page 2, 3, or 4 of the search results until they find the theatre listing for the Lehman Brother stage production, then click that result. Fairly quickly, Google will learn that’s what searchers for those words in that area want.

Even if the Wikipedia article about Lehman Brothers’ role in the financial crisis of 2008 were to invest heavily in link building and content optimization, it’s unlikely they could outrank the user-intent signals (calculated from queries and clicks) of Seattle’s theatre-goers.

Extending this example to the broader web and search as a whole, if you can create demand for your website among enough likely searchers in the regions you’re targeting, you may be able to end-around the need for classic on-and-off-page SEO signals like links, anchor text, optimized content, and the like.

All in all, it’s a massive leak with huge implications, and I encourage you to read Rand’s piece and follow his links to other sources with more info. Things won’t change drastically for how search engine optimization is performed, but these new insights certainly shape how all of us think about Google’s algorithm and behavior.

Filed Under: SEO

Don’t ascribe attribution to Google when other investments drove the real value

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When monitoring your website traffic, it’s easy to look at your sources and see that Google has sent you the most traffic, leading you to think you should double down on it. Maybe you should, but maybe not.

There are certainly people that Google sends to your site that you should be thankful for. If someone searches for “plumbers near me” to find your plumbing company, that’s fantastic! However, there are many cases where it may look like Google is sending you traffic but it’s not really coming from Google.

In a recent post on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin dug into this pretty deep, and this image largely summarized what he had to say:

If your reputation is strong enough that people search for you by name, that is awesome! Really, that should be your main goal. It’s great when people find you for unbranded searches like “plumbers near me”, but if they know to search for you directly, you win.

Google may still find themselves in the middle, but you didn’t get that customer via “SEO (Search Engine Optimization)” even though they technically came via a Google search. You need to find out how people really discovered you and why they searched for you by name and double down on that instead.

As I shared last year, tracking down precise attribution can be nearly impossible, but that doesn’t mean you should default to attributing it to Google. Work hard to figure out where your best customers are really coming from, and focus as much effort there as you can.

If you want more detail and data behind this, I encourage you to check out the full post on SparkToro.

Blogs are still among the highest-ranking pages

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While it’s been well-established that users don’t click on the “blog” page for most sites, having those posts can still be incredibly valuable. The purpose of most blogs (not this one) are to drive people to the website via Google search, and then lead them to the pages that matter (registration, purchase, etc).

For those kinds of goals, blogs are still fantastic.

In a study from Brightedge Research, where they looked at 10,000 keywords across 10 industries, they found that the most common type of page found in the top 10 results on Google were blog posts. Here’s the breakdown:

Helpful content is always going to perform well on Google, and blogging is one of the best ways to generate content that your audience will find to be helpful.

I have my concerns about the future of blogging for SEO, largely depending on where AI takes us, but for now it’s still a great thing to do if you want your business to show up well on Google. Business blogs give you a great place to showcase your expertise and drive more users to your site. It’s a win-win.

Check out the full study from Brightedge here, and this post from Search Engine Land digs into it quite a bit more.