It’s been a rollercoaster week for digital marketers. Outages for Meta channels, LinkedIn and YouTube have no doubt made for many stressful email chains and calls to support reps – everyone involved has definitely earned a restful weekend.
Meanwhile, we did see an announcement from Google which released a new core search update designed to reduce low-quality, “spammy” content.
Elsewhere I found an interesting take on how Generative AI-powered search is likely to lead to a drop in organic traffic for SMBs, as well as a report which might help you win the argument that vanity social media metrics do not equate high levels of website engagement.
Google releases new core search update
Google announced this week that its making updates to its core search algorithm, with a view to “tackling spammy, low-quality content in search”.
The aim is to achieve this by refining ranking systems to identify unhelpful or badly created pages, particularly those created at scale using AI, or those generated to match specific long-tail search queries.
The goal is to reduce low-quality content in search results by 40%, and essentially is a sign of Google doubling down on generic, mass-produced and unhelpful content.
Regular readers will know this is not a new thing; the main takeaway for marketing managers is that properly thought though and well-written content should trump generic, lazily produced pages. But you already knew that, right?
AI & the decline of Organic search
I came across an interesting piece in Moz this week about the effect of AI on organic search traffic and wider marketing strategies. The hypothesis, backed up by (admittedly not exactly statistically significant) research by Gartner, is that small businesses might notice a drop in organic search traffic of as much as 50%.
As such, it’s important to consider your wider marketing strategy, and ensure that you aren’t overly reliant on organic search as a traffic channel – while in the end it might not be as much as 50%, it does feel likely that Gen AI-powered search will favour the very top-ranking organic sites, leaving those outside the top couple of positions in a very vulnerable state.
No correlation between social engagement and readership
A report was released this week by Memo which demonstrated there was no correlation between social media engagement and article readership – if anything, negatively received articles drove greater engagement than positive ones.
I would suspect that if you’re reading this, you aren’t surprised by this – indeed, it’s been widely noted that we’re moving towards a world of sharing articles in closed messaging groups, rather than with hundreds of contacts. In any case, it’s useful to be able to cite reports such as these to internal stakeholders who need persuading.
Further Reading
Social Insider have pulled together this list of ideas for LinkedIn content planning. None of it is revolutionary, but its always useful to have lists such as these to-hand for those days where you’re suffering a mental block.
Speaking of content inspiration – TikTok is launching a monthly trends digest that might offer some useful tips and ideas for your upcoming content planning. Also, US lawmakers are moving closer to forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok or risk a ban.
Meta reportedly lost $3 billion in earnings following outages that lasted the best part of a day earlier this week. Remarkably, both LinkedIn and YouTube also suffered outages this week.
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