Hello, everybody. The bad news for today’s newsletter is that there’s no good news to report. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that some of you may find solace in the fact that you’re not alone. We’ll see.
Visibility is dropping for businesses across the board. Sure– some agencies certainly have some clients that are showing improvements. In general though, rankings are taking a dive. This is most especially true for mom and pop businesses, but we see it in dominant local hospital systems and nationwide businesses too, just to a smaller extent.
We don’t have insight into all businesses, but we have enough insight to confidently declare this trend a reality. It’s hard to say when it began in earnest. Late last year is a good estimate. Let’s call it November.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to the United States and Canada. We see it in France, Spain, Australia, the UK, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and pretty much every other country we’ve looked into. It doesn’t matter if the keywords are generalized like “interior painter” or incredibly specific, like “best commercial oak tree trimming service Toad Suck AR” (a real place). This plague does not discriminate.
In any case, if you’ve been diligently practicing careful SEO and getting frustrated when your formula falls flat, you should know that you have plenty of company. We aren’t sure how helpful this line of persuasion will be with client retention, but letting your customers know that other agencies are in the same boat could help you hang onto frustrated business owners. Or not. You know your clients better than we do.
We don’t like to bring problems to your attention without having a solution in mind. If your clients are ultimately most concerned about increasing their revenue (which is the case for most business owners), talk to them about things like Local Services Ads. Google has been pushing local search in a pay for play direction for years, and paying to jump to the top of search results is a tactic that works.
Not all businesses are eligible for LSA. Other ad avenues are Google Performance Max and Paid Search Advertising.
There’s no amazing segue after a bad news bombshell, so we’re going to jump right into this week’s closing links. The first one is an Ad Age article about the huge amount of positive press that Tillamook (an American dairy brand, for those of you who are unfamiliar) received after sending a 40 pound block of cheddar cheese to a dog that has become a social media darling. Next, from Hootsuite, is an explainer about Social AI, a ChatGPT alternative for social marketers. Our third link is a Shopify listicle about retail customer retention. Finally, from Engadget, we’ve got a rundown of Snap’s acquisition of Saturn, a calendar app used by thousands of high schools.
It’s funny how some of the sentences in the preceding paragraph wouldn’t have made sense to anyone in the recent past, but that’s the world we live in. Have a greek weekend.