When One Door Feels Like It Is Shutting, Another BLOWS Open.
Hey Everyone,
I was performing a search the other day, and like you, I have realized there is a bit of a shift going on in Google right now. Or a lot of a shift, however you want to interpret it.
I think they are having a bit of an "identity" issue at the moment, not really knowing who they are, and exactly their best strategy in terms of "competing" within the future of "search" and within the artificial intelligence (AI) world.
Here is the search that I did, "where can you get real time stock market api form" (don't mind my english, that was a Google instant search offering...
Look at the search results.
You probably notice a little ad heavy right? 4 "Sponsored Ads" within the first fold (viewable area) of the page. Not common for every search, but you are seeing this more and more when you perform a search.
Of course Google makes money through advertising revenue, it is over 90% of their entire income. But having ads displayed like this and taking up an entire fold of the search results, is fairly new.
Does this hurt Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts? Yes, surely it does, but in saying this people also know that those are ads, and will search below them if they are looking to find more information. So people will still go beyond these ads.
Does this mean there is more opportunity in Google Ads? 100%. In fact more than ever an from all of our testing on the PPC side of things, advertising in Google is getting cheaper, and the traffic is in abundance. Even a position 4 ad now gets a lot of traffic, and is actually positioned very good within the results. That never used to be the case.
So though it can often times feel like a door is closing, opportunity is evolving and that is always the case within the online world.
SEO is moving in a direction where Google is after the longer-tailed search terms, there are BILLIONS of these terms that have limited competition, and being able to leverage the platforms here at WA, you can create content with more efficiency than ever.
So that is one approach.
And if you have any level of budget, perhaps this is a good time for you to consider getting into the PPC world as well. The doors have been flung open, from a time not-so-long-ago when PPC was a much tougher cookie to crack.
There Will ALWAYS Be Lots of Opportunity Online. Period.
One thing that is consistent though. There will ALWAYS be opportunity online, and lots of it. There are two things that will never change for affiliate marketers:
(1) There are 5.5+ BILLION people online that are spending money (this is your audience)
(2) There are 550+ MILLION products/services that you can promote as an affiliate and earn commissions through.
This opportunity is only getting bigger too. The traffic will always be "somewhere", and people will continue to buy.
Whether you are creating content and getting rankings in Google, whether it is use leveraging ad platforms like Google Ads to get paid traffic to your websites and generate revenue that way, whether it is social traffic, youtube channels, user generated content (UGC) websites (we teach ALL of this here). You have all the opportunity in the world in front of you.
There WILL ALWAYS be a significant opportunity online and we are going to continue to help you navigate the road ahead.
These are promising times to be online, but as we all know when you have a MASSIVE technology shift, there will be some pivots and some foresight that need to take place and we as a COMMUNITY here at Wealthy Affiliate are going to stay on top of it...and thrive.
I would love to hear your feedback on the state of Google, and the opportunity that persists...and in many cases, how it continues to evolve. :)
Recent Comments
127
This was an interesting post, Kyle.
I have noticed all the ads popping up at the beginning of the search page lately, and they drive me crazy. However, I scroll past them to find the information I seek, which is what I believe most users do. I am not much of a stickler when monitoring my Google stats. It's not something I live by, and it doesn't appear that the updates have affected me much.
When I write a post, I focus on information I believe my users are looking for. I also think that opportunities will always be out there, but you may need to change your thinking and adapt. I firmly believe that if your posts are informational and help people, you will weather and excel over any changes Google makes. If you get hit, you make the necessary changes and move on.
Nancy
Yeah, it is infrequent from my tests that it is all 4 ads at the top, but it is definitely something that never used to happen.
I am not sure how that would qualify as a good search experience for an end users, so Google is going to have to be very careful here not to serve too many ads (and alienate their users).
There will always be opportunities out there in search, but people that once got a lot of traffic from broader search traffic, are losing it to those that are now providing much more specific, longer tailed content. That will continue to be the case.
I feel that YouTube Search traffic has been way more stable over the years than the Google Search traffic.
Many people regularly tell about "getting hit by Google algorithm changes" but I very rarely, if ever, hear people getting hit by "YouTube Search algorithm changes".
On YouTube there's a risk of getting banned that doesn't exist when building one's own website but the Search Traffic seems to be way more consistent on YouTube.
Absolutely Roope, and Youtube is not going anywhere. It is only going to grow as we move forward, and more and more people seek authoritative content through Youtube.
Not only that, you are seeing more integration of Youtube into search. So having a diversified approach to content creation (SEO, Youtube) is likely going to be the ideal, and most sustainable mix.
I think this is a great opportunity for those who have not been in Affiliate marketing for long. As the tide has turned a bit, Google is looking for new stuff in the form of long-tailed keywords and phrases.
How it will evolve, I do not have a crystal ball...however, I believe AI will have a big influence on the future.
Exciting times
Steve
Absolutely it is, those that are not engrained in a process (which are often times reluctant to make a shift) are those that tend to embrace new ideas more easily.
There has always been a great deal of opportunity in the long tail, but it has become more obvious in recent months as Google starts to deliver User Generated Content (UGC) with more frequency.
The way people search ahas gotten more sophisticated, thus why the results need to be more specific than ever. Lots of opportunity for everyone.
Thank you for your blog post, Kyle, it's an interesting subject.
I would imagine that it must be really difficult for Google with so much content being produced all of a sudden! How do they determine where to put so much content, it must be almost confusing. I have also seen a lot of sponsored ads on some of the search pages.
This may be slightly off-topic, but I was thinking of writing a blog post about the subject. I use Google alerts and I have an alert set for Wealthy Affiliate, which obviously brings quite a few alerts or quite a few posts! I am utterly amazed at the appalling quality of these clearly AI written posts!
Today, I was reading from three websites talking about Wealthy Affiliate that were just using AI content; it was all just fluff and blatantly obvious! But more to the point, what does Google do with all this poor content? Maybe this is causing Google huge problems for Google, maybe there struggling to find what's genuine and what's not. But I guess they will find a way of sorting it out eventually.
Incidentally, I know that you are teaching members to use AI properly!
A very happy Friday to you.
Roy
There is definitely a lot of low quality AI content out there, and Google has metrics to determine the readership of content, and also to detect low quality AI content (which you have seen wiped out).
Just because something gets picked up within Google Alerts, doesn't mean it is ranking all that well too. So there may not be a correlation there between what Google is ranking...because as new content gets indexed, it will often times make the cut for Google Alerts.
And yes, we will continue to teach AI properly. We are living in an AI assisted world, not created one.
I'm sure that if I can pick up AI content quickly I am sure that Google can, which is good news.
I hear you, Kyle, big time! I don't believe that once a piece of contact becomes indexed, it will quickly go nowhere if it is poor content. I think what kind of shocked me was the amount of AI content I was reading. To me, it appears that people are setting themselves up to fail, which is a great shame. As you mentioned in your first paragraph, Kyle, I can imagine this content will almost be wiped out in the long term!
I appreciate the genuine AI teaching here, Kyle; thank you.
Have a fantastic week.
Roy
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Hey Kyle, thanks for the post. I just wanted to add my two cents. When it comes to the longtail keywords.
It is my sense that Google is focusing more on them because of speech to text. I see more people using that feature more often and being a papa I see that it is the only way my grandkids search when it is given as an option.
I still believe when it comes to a successful online business, user experience and engaging content wins despite how search changes.
Just curious on your thoughts of this.
Rod
I agree with you Rod speech to text tools like Siri have changed the way people search
Yeah, that is partly it. Speech to text is leading to more sophistication, and the reality is Google lacks the long tail within their search as people have chased the broader or mid range search terms up until this point.
They want to be able to provide relevant results to everything, instantly. This would serve as true competition to AI platforms, because people would be able to gain authority, real time information on just about every topic and do so fast.
This for them, would be the ultimate competitor to AI and that idea that AI will one day replace search (which I don't believe to be the case).