5 Fundamental Shifts That Are Shaping Search & Digital Marketing

Businesses are rapidly transitioning to digital – with the demand for SEO at its core. Here are some of the changes marketers must pay attention to.

The last six months have seen a climatic mix of chaos, uncertainty, empathy, challenge, and opportunity.

All over the world, companies have had to adjust operations.

They rapidly scale up or down, and rethink their entire business model as conditions continue to change.

At the same time, the transformation to digital accelerated, with the demand for SEO at its core.

In this article, I will share five fundamental shifts that I see in the market with some insights into search behaviors.

1. The Traditional Customer Journey Is Changing in Many Industry Sectors of the Economy

Suppose you look at big B2B companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and IBM.

They historically relied heavily on tradeshows and field-to-field meetings.

Now they are investing in online content for their websites to replace what customers would have gotten from offline events.

They are creating content and mechanisms for one-on-one online interactions so their account teams can connect with customers.

For example, practically overnight retail consumer questions about takeout menus, seating charts, and COVID policies have changed what customers are looking for.

Global companies are struggling to understand how they should adapt to a new normal and modify their content for different regions to address regional lockdowns and re-openings.

Pro Tips

• As we enter Q4 and holiday shopping season, search can help reveal these radical changes in real-time.
• Continue to invest in virtual connections and be prepared to balance them with in-person events when the time comes.

2. Narrowcast Marketing Fails in Times of Dynamic Change

Marketers that are looking at a narrow range of metrics are failing to capture important Business Intelligence (BI) to understand the full extent of market shifts to inform search strategy.

Analytics that look at a narrow range of metrics fail to grasp the extent of market shifts I have seen in search.

Typically, SEO platforms look only narrowly at trends.

That’s not enough to really see the scale and breadth of what is happening in search.

It’s essential to process massive amounts of data to see the full scope of changes happening across the whole search landscape.

Read more: searchenginejournal