SEO is the worst that has ever been (and it’s still your best marketing channel)

Here are two ideas that can be real at the same time: SEO offers worse phrases than before. SEO is still one of the best marketing channels.

SEO has really changed:

Talk to the owners of the site and even hear whispers that some companies lose 20-40% of their monthly search clicks. ^{1 2 3}

It sounds like the end of the road for SEO. What marketing channel can lose 20-40% return and still require energy and investment?

Well: SEO.

SEO was historically such Stupidly lucrative marketing channel, which even today, while searching for AI Armageddon, SEO is Still The best marketing channel at your disposal.

When I started selling SEO content and services for the first time about fourteen years ago, the main redemption I received was that it sounded too good to be true. In retrospect, they may be right:

• It was predictable: Basically, you can make decent growth forecasts, estimating with some accuracy how to augment traffic. It was – and still is in marketing.
• In time, it improved: would generate a one -time investment in content or links better Results in time. This was very different from the linear relationship with payment of paid advertising. SEO was an asset that was in value.
• It was precise: By using keyword research, you can at a given moment to individual people and almost guarantee a lasting stream of appropriate visitors to your company.
• He had a very low entry barrier: You can start in a miniature, incremental way. Several links or posts on the blog were still beneficial, without the need for high configuration costs.

Are there any other marketing channels that even come close to these benefits?

SEO was an inexpensive, connecting a resource, which could be relying as the main engine of the development of your company. As a result, SEO has become an almost universal marketing channel, used by miniature companies and post-IPO giants, adopted in B2B and B2C. It was too good and too low-cost to ignore them.

In fact, SEO was So It is good that many companies have been involved in SEO only to earn on the generated traffic. Partner marketing will flourish, just like what we now call “abuse of website reputation”. The SEO movement became the end, not just means.

Today, generative artificial intelligence has obviously changed SEO. Companies are basic to spam the search results with thousands of average blog posts and to skip the indirect and operate artificial intelligence equally basic for Google to directly respond to the search engine. AI at the same time increased the supply of SEO content and reduced the demand for it.

This is SEO Monkey Paw: We can practically create SEO content for free, but now it is much harder to get clicks.

Some people quickly cry about SEO’s “death”, but I think about these changes in a different way: SEO is reduced from universal Marketing channel to Extremely good one. All marketing channels have advantages and disadvantages – and now SEO has acquired several disadvantages to complement the absurd number of professionals he always had.

Importantly, I think that most companies don’t lose much of these changes. Even in the world of AI reviews and content generated by AI, all these absurdly great SEO benefits still exist-though with some modifications:

• The SEO movement is still predictable… but we should reduce our expectations as to what “good” performance looks like.
• The SEO investment will continue to generate more value over time … Just a little slower than before.
• SEO will still be precise … But we will have more competition to reach the same audience.
• SEO still has a low entry barrier … But the best results will require more money and skills to achieve.

Clicks can fall. But for most SEO companies, it will remain one of their greatest growth factors. They will still want to refuse their competitors to access lucrative serpts. They will still want to be the largest player in the smaller search landscape. The tactics that worked then will continue to work largely, work the same: content, links, technical SEO.

The SEO contribution at the bottom line may decrease, but will continue to contribute and generate a significant return on investment. (This may not be a problem at all: who will say that LLM movement will not have a higher conversion rate and will contribute to revenues than customary search movement?)

There will be companies that consider SEO to be too competitive or too pricey for their needs. It is a pity, but this also applies to any other existing marketing channel.

It will also be more arduous to build companies exclusively on monetized search movement. Partner marketing is more arduous than ever. But this should also be expected. Partner marketing was a form of arbitration, and all possibilities of arbitration are short-lived. The window for basic profit has been closed.

In many ways, we abandon unhealthy and unbalanced SEO expectations and learn to treat it more like a marketing channel, and not a magical touch of money. The Effortless SEO era has ended, and now we will have to work strenuous to get the same disproportionate results.

It doesn’t bother me and I think you should be too. Or as Alex Birkett put it in the discussion LinkedIn:

And I agree with it – “SEO was too basic for too long” – and I really think it is great, that this is not the case. Did we really want to spend the golden days of our career by publishing the final guides and pushing links to them to drive vanity? Not I.

SEO is more arduous and less certain than before. But I’m not going to stop doing SEO for Ahrefs.

If I advised the startup, helping on a scale or set up my own company, SEO is still the first channel that I would test. I would enter with various expectations and less references, but I would still expect it to be the main source of growth – and quite probably the best marketing channel at my disposal.

This is the only test that matters: even today, when it is the worst, is there anything better or more reliable than SEO?