Takeaways From MozCon: What Digital Agencies Need To Know About SEO Digital moves fast -- a fact that's definitely not lost on agencies. By the time we’ve mastered a tactic, a new one is right around the corner. While keeping pace with industry changes is something we all need to prioritize, that pressure is often felt even more heavily by agencies that have to juggle multiple client accounts.
Change was a big theme at this year’s MozCon, my company's annual conference for digital marketers. Topics addressed everything from the changing search engine results pages (SERPs) to organizational alignment to how to write for inclusivity. It was a great time to reflect on how far we’ve come as an industry and where there’s still room to grow. Here are some of this year’s key takeaways:
Digital agencies must adapt to the new search landscape.
Agencies that offer search engine optimization (SEO) services need to adapt to the modern search landscape or risk being left behind. Research presented by Rand Fishkin showed that, while they still hold the lion’s share of the search market and continue to send the majority of traffic to websites, Google is driving a smaller percentage of organic search clicks than they were previously. Today, nearly half of all searches result in no click, and the majority of conversions for local businesses come from the search engine results page (SERP) itself.
To adapt, marketers should stop thinking about SEO in terms of pure website clicks, and start thinking about how to leverage this new low-click landscape to drive other important initiatives like brand awareness and conversions. For example, SEOs marketing a brand with a local presence could spearhead a Google Post strategy to boost CTA clicks directly from the SERPs or highlight a special sale. And any brand can focus on earning featured snippets to both present themselves as the experts to searchers and to rank in the coveted "position zero" as the first result a searcher sees, hovering above even the organic results.
Digital agencies should embrace nuance.
It’s natural to crave black-and-white answers to our problems, but the reality is a lot more complicated.