Ask any seasoned marketing professional for a list of events or situations that are capable of completely disrupting their workflow, and almost every single list will include at least one Google search engine algorithm update within the last 10 years. The fact is that most modern marketing tactics depend in some way upon search engine optimization of content across websites, eCommerce platforms, social networks, and digital media channels. However, while these platforms rely largely upon the advertising income from businesses, they are built primarily to cater to the needs of users and often change their algorithms to become more intuitive and capable of providing searchers with better results.
As the primary search engine, it’s understandable that updates to the Google search algorithm can be the most disruptive, and Google updates its algorithm in some way between 500 to 600 times a year. While these changes often go unnoticed at a surface level by users and advertisers, there have been significant updates over the years that have caused major disruptions in advertising campaigns and marketing strategies across your website, directories, social media marketing campaigns, and other channels. Each change also leads to evolving attack vectors and tactics that can be leveraged by online threat actors and businesses willing to use blackhat marketing tactics and cyberattacks to damage businesses through SEO channels.
To better understand the impacts these changes have on marketers, and the steps marketers are having to take to resolve issues that arise in the wake of algorithm updates, UpCity partnered with Pollfish to conduct a survey of 500 digital marketing professionals across the United States. We have broken down the results of this survey, which show how businesses are resolving challenges on their web pages and strengthening their 2022 online presences, into two major sections:
- Digital Marketing Challenges and Impacts
- Digital Marketing Solutions
Marketing professionals in the field have a lot to say about the challenges that arise when Google updates its algorithms. We’ve included commentary directly from our community of digital marketing experts on how best to respond and adjust your marketing strategy moving into 2022 and beyond to any updates that might arise, based on their experience with past Google algorithm updates.
Digital Marketing Challenges and Impacts
58% of digital marketers note that their businesses have been negatively impacted by a Google algorithm update. On the other hand, 42% of digital marketers noted that their business received negative digital marketing changes from recent world events
Few online software platforms and online services have the name recognition that Google brings to the table. The search engine is offered as a free service to search for and connect with businesses and brands. Relying largely on advertising revenue, Google’s search engine constantly strives to evolve its algorithms to best meet user needs, so it constantly makes changes and updates. Often these changes fly under the radar of users, but over the last 15 years, there have been at least nine named updates that greatly impacted marketers and website owners. Some of the most disruptive, game-changing updates include the following adjustments to the algorithm.
Panda in 2011
The early 2000s saw Google trying to combat black hat SEO tactics and excessive webspam to provide better search results. Their answer was the Panda algorithm update. Panda classified and ranked pages on the content on the page, intended to end content farms where the strategy to rank was to include as much content as possible, and not all of it was helpful. The algorithm punished this approach severely, forcing companies to reapproach how they handled content management in their SEO strategy.
Penguin in 2012
While Panda focused on content farms, Penguin was Google’s answer to black hat link building tactics designed to artificially manipulate search results due to the weight Google’s algorithm had previously put on links in rankings. Penguin boosted authoritative and relevant inbound links and penalized those who used spamming techniques.
Hummingbird in 2013
With the rising importance of mobile devices and user reliance on them–especially for natural language searches–Google rolled out the Hummingbird rewrite of Google’s core algorithm to allow the platform to better anticipate and deliver on mobile device user needs. This platform became the foundation for future updates, as it allowed Google to be faster and more precise in its search engine results. The algorithm had moved away from simply matching keywords to a page and instead allowed the engine to understand the search query intent and provide relevant results.
Pigeon in 2014
With the foundation for mobile search support laid by Hummingbird, Pigeon was launched to help boost and prioritize local search results and is considered to have one of the biggest impacts of the named updates. The algorithm boosted local businesses to help them appear higher in search rankings versus large brands. When launching the algorithm, Google made sweeping changes to ranking signals for its search engine and Google Maps. The Pigeon algorithm update has been iterated upon several times to address brands’ efforts in tricking the algorithm to treat national chains as local businesses through deceptive exact-match keyword use and other tactics.
RankBrain in 2015
Built on the back of Hummingbird, RankBrain was an advanced machine learning system that allowed the engine to see queries as concepts rather than matching queries to results at the level of individual characters. It assigned machine identification values to items and concepts, allowing the algorithm to prescreen content and discover relationships between search queries to develop the most relevant results possible based on the occurrence of the term and links to the term from other pages. This helped the engine address not only common inquiries, but unique inquiries it had never encountered before the launch.
Mobilegeddon in 2015
In the same year as RankBrain was released, Google went all-in on mobility, warning developers that the coming changes required their websites to be mobile responsive to appear higher in results on mobile devices. This requirement was at the page level, not the website level, allowing developers to create targeted mobile experiences for mobile device users. This algorithm was wide and left few sites unaffected.
Fred in 2017
At this point, it should be clear that Google’s intent over the years in their major algorithm updates has been to ensure top-ranked websites in results provide users with a quality experience and sufficiently relevant content. With the Fred update in 2017, Google prioritized quality content with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The update focused on removing low-quality results from queries.
Many of the impacted sites included those with poor content and ad placement that affected the user’s ability to interact with the content on the screen. Also targeted by Fred were poor links and overuse of affiliate linking, not to mention, sites with deceptive links and ads. Essentially, Google’s Fred update took a stand against any type of page not intended to provide users with educational or informational content and a positive user experience.
Product Review Updates in 2021
Google algorithm updates follow marketing trends, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that updates today revolve around product and service reviews, as reviews have become a crucial and often sought-after resource for assessing a business in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 update around product reviews required sites to link to multiple outlets for consumers to acquire services or products and provide quality video and audio evidence to support the feedback given in reviews.
Current Events and the Impact on Marketing
World events can greatly impact marketers and tactics around SEO. Perhaps one of the most disruptive world events in modern times, the COVID-19 pandemic forced vast swathes of the global economy to abandon marketing and advertising strategies altogether for almost a full year in 2020. Even when companies started to recover in mid-2021, many remained cautious and hesitant to return to fully fleshed-out marketing strategies and instead kept their marketing efforts as compact and streamlined as possible. Throughout this period, agencies and marketing professionals have had to help brands reposition and even perform full rebranding campaigns to reposition themselves relative to the changes in the economy.
International events such as the conflict in Ukraine are also destabilizing the economic landscape, forcing brands to change tactics and modify advertising strategies to remain competitive in online channels.
58% – We’ve been negatively impacted by a recent Google algorithm change
42% – We’ve been negatively impacted by a recent world event
We reached out to digital marketers to find what challenges were most prevalent for them in 2022. With more businesses fighting for exposure across the digital landscape, it can be a challenge to compete with not only competitors but the daily news cycle as well.
“Google algorithm updates are the principal reasons for negative SEO effects. Website issues like dead links, extra rich keywords, irrelevant keywords, back-dated keywords, and content. According to the search engine, a website’s everything should be up to date.”
—Lyle Florez, Founder, EasyPeopleSearch
“Google’s been really cracking down on SEO and changing things around for everyone, so you have to constantly be on your toes and ready to pick up on the new rules, otherwise, you’re going down.”
—Rick Berres, Owner, Honey-Doers
“Marketers in the professional services industry anticipate unpredictability in the marketplace as a major challenge for them in the next three to five years. World events making the headlines, such as COVID, the Great Resignation, and the war in Ukraine are taking up a higher percentage of the world’s overall search traffic, driving down search volume for keywords related to businesses.
In short, businesses are facing stiff competition from the news media. For businesses that want a legitimate connection with the headlines, competition is even more intense. The keyword difficulty for the search terms COVID, great resignation, recession, and the Ukrainian war are often as high as 70% or more. Any business in today’s environment must implement multi-layered integrated marketing ad campaigns that combine PR outreach, paid to advertise, and shared and owned media to reach the internet users searching for their keywords and topics.”
—Ashley Bailey, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Hinge
29% of B2B and B2C businesses have experienced decreased page views and website traffic, followed by lower customer conversion rates at 24%
Sweeping changes to the Google algorithm that affect performance on search engine ranking pages (SERPs) can greatly impact a website on some levels. Any changes that impact keyword rankings can require massive revisions to the content on the page and structural and meta-data changes to regain lost ground relative to the competition. Such changes that prevent traffic from reaching a page can significantly reduce page views and traffic to a website, negatively impacting conversions and bottom-line profitability. If an update impacts local marketing and an advertiser’s ability to rank in the featured snippets segment of Google, it can greatly exacerbate decreased traffic volume.
22% – Loss of keyword rankings
29% – Decreased pageviews/website traffic
18% – Loss of featured snippets
24% – Lower customer conversion rates
7% – Other
The challenges facing digital marketing experts can greatly impact the overall bottom-line of a business. To get a better feel for how your online presence might suffer due to these challenges, we asked the digital marketing community to share their own experiences with how badly their digital assets have been affected.
“Faulty links or technical issues in websites that arise after an algorithm update can lower website traffic. That’s because when a company site isn’t properly or frequently updated, it loses its rank in the different search engines. Due to this, it becomes difficult to increase engagement rate and sales drop significantly.”
—Aqsa Tabassam, Head of Growth & Outreach, Apps UK
“Professional SEO and targeted keywords ensure that your business has the necessary digital footprint to rank high in search results, and more importantly, get you results. Without high rankings or online visibility, your business has very little chance of gaining new customers online.”
—Shoaib Mughal, Founder, Marketix
“Fake reviews, in my opinion, are one of the most typical causes of bad SEO in 2022. Fake reviews can damage your company’s reputation and mislead clients about the quality of the service or product you provide. Let’s say someone else has convinced you to buy or use a product or service because of their personal experience with it. For those who know how important a good or negative review is for a firm, this should come as no surprise. The consumer’s decision-making process is influenced by the reviews that are posted.”
—Robert Zeglinski, Managing Editor & Researcher, Breaking Muscle
As a result, 26% of B2B respondents noted that these negative changes resulted in decreased business revenue. In contrast, 28% of B2C respondents said that fewer new customers/clients were the biggest impact that they experienced
Depending on your business model and reliance upon digital marketing and advertising channels related to Google, a change in the algorithm can have sweeping negative effects on your business. For B2B service providers, who rely largely upon SEO tactics in driving traffic and conversions online, decreased revenue has been one of the worst side effects of algorithm changes. Similarly, with SEO driving traffic for B2C retailers and businesses, a change in how customers reach the site could decrease traffic significantly if the company doesn’t immediately respond to the algorithm shift.
A decrease in customer traffic and subsequently overall revenue have far-reaching implications for brands, more so now in the wake of COVID-19 when revenue streams have been negatively affected for more than two years. Changes in how brands can be searched for and found could greatly impact the company’s ability to remain staffed and capable of meeting customer needs, further exacerbating already diminished revenue streams.
| B2B | B2C | |
|---|---|---|
| Decreased company revenue | 26% | 25% |
| Company downsizing | 22% | 17% |
| Loss of existing customers/client base | 21% | 26% |
| Fewer new customers/clients | 24% | 28% |
| These changes haven’t had a significant company impact | 7% | 5% |
Because SEO tactics help the lead conversion processes, Google algorithm changes can also affect profitability. The marketing community was largely in sync when discussing the business impacts of issues caused by changes impacting digital marketing strategies.
“These issues may eventually lead to the company’s overall downfall. Once employees see that the business hardly has any traffic and isn’t generating any revenue either, they’ll instantly leave, opting for better opportunities instead. As a result, the company will end up in a rut, downsize, and eventually could even fail altogether.”
—Kurt Walker, Founder, Mill City Home Buyers
“Revenue and qualified lead flow seems to be the biggest fallout from SEO issues. Long-term, rankings and associated organic traffic can be impacted, but I’ve only experienced several clients out of 1,000 or more that were so dramatically impacted by the loss of rankings and organic traffic that they were forced to make cutbacks on staff. In those cases, black hat strategies had backfired and we were hired to clean up the mess.”
—Kent Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer, Anvil Media
“We focus heavily on organic reach through SEO to expand customer bases in the restaurant industry. Restaurateurs thrive on both local and international marketing successes to sustain their businesses. So a faulty SEO strategy is guaranteed to dent overall revenue, which then spills over into staff cuts to accommodate unsustainably slow sales periods.”
—Brian Nagele, CEO, Restaurant Clicks
Digital marketing and advertising are critical elements of modern business strategies that an organization must be able to craft, implement, and rely upon. When disruptions to the underpinning technologies occur, such as significant changes to the algorithms that drive search engines and impact what brands show up in a search, it can erode a brand’s marketing strategy at a foundational level that’s hard to mitigate against. However, digital marketing experts have eventually identified solutions to many of the SEO challenges due to world events and changes to search engine behaviors. We’ll explore those solutions more in detail in the next section.
Digital Marketing Solutions
15% of both B2B and B2C digital marketers are working to address these issues by creating new content
The multitude of vectors that SEO operates along can be a double-edged sword when it comes to any changes in the marketing ecosystem driven by vendors, changes in consumer behaviors, or updates to software systems. While one or more vectors might be negatively affected until the brand can make the necessary adjustments to its overall marketing strategy, other vectors tend to emerge as solutions or at least stop-gap measures to mitigate the negative effect of changes.
The modern marketing SEO ecosystem is largely driven by the various types of content delivered across multiple channels. There’s a natural advantage for businesses when changes do impact their SEO and the brand leverages content marketing heavily in its overall strategy. This is primarily because content marketing is one of the most affordable and flexible methods available to drive traffic and capture leads. Keywords can play into content generation and on-page SEO, but also are important for off-page SEO as well. And with the emerging importance of local SEO tactics, keywords can play an even stronger role in pivoting your strategy to respond to any changes to search engines that might negatively impact your brand messaging.
Pairing changes to your technical SEO tactics with your on-page SEO strategies is a highly effective way of adjusting your website to changing search engine requirements. Beyond these tactics, you can also leverage other tools to engage new clients and build rapport with your existing base to help increase word-of-mouth marketing. One of the oldest tactics still in play, email marketing campaigns are the most cost-efficient methods of accomplishing this, as they boast one of the highest ROIs of any marketing tactic in a marketing expert’s toolbox.
15% – Creating new content
13% – Sending out targeted email marketing campaigns
13% – Targeting new keywords
13% – Expanding our company products/service offerings and/or customer base
9% – Creating more conversion-based landing pages
10% – Increasing paid ad spend
8% – Improving our backlink profile
10% – Boosting our on-page and/or technical SEO (internal linking, header tags, title tags, etc).
8% – Revamping our company branding (logo design, website visuals, slogans, colors, etc.)
2% – We have not yet made any changes to address these issues
The community of marketing experts agreed that a proactive approach to dealing with the challenges posed by changes in digital marketing was best overall.
“By being aware of the most common causes of negative SEO effects in 2022, you can take steps to mitigate their impact on your business. Google algorithm updates, world events, technical website issues, and negative reviews can all lead to lower keyword ranks, reduced website traffic, and decreased revenue. However, by staying up-to-date on the latest SEO news and making sure your website is compliant with Google’s guidelines, you can avoid being caught off-guard by these changes.
In addition, having a contingency plan in place for world events and regularly auditing your website for technical issues can help you reduce the negative impact of these factors on your business. Finally, responding to negative reviews in a timely manner and taking steps to improve your customer service can help you combat the negative impact of these reviews on your SEO.”
—Kristin Stump, Marketing Manager, My Enamel Pins
“Steps that companies can take to address these issues include creating new content, making technical improvements to their website, and monitoring their SEO regularly. By taking these steps, companies can help mitigate the negative effects of these common digital marketing challenges.”
—Robert Johnson, Director of Operations, Mywoodrings.com
“Take extra precautions to protect your best backlinks. You want to keep links from high authority websites, and to do so, it’s best to put preventative measures, such as ready-made emails to send on sites, should spammers create sly attacks. Spammers will create dummy emails, and use these to ask those high authority sites to take down your links or remove them, and instead link it to their site. This is very common, which is why it’s a must to create cease and desist requests.”
—Brian Lee, Founder, Drill and Driver
13% of digital marketers said that if time and resources weren’t a factor, they’d also focus more heavily on sending out targeted email campaigns. 13% also noted that they’d expand their company’s product/service offerings and/or customer base to help address their issues
While automation tools exist to help streamline email marketing, it is admittedly a somewhat time-consuming process, as contact lists must be constantly managed and groomed to ensure the right audiences are being targeted in any given campaign. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with consumers coming to service providers and retailers with a variety of evolving needs, it follows that many brands in our list of respondents are willing to expand their services or product lines to reach more customers and provide solutions to issues and pain points beyond those upon which they are currently focused.
13% – Creating new content
13% – Sending out targeted email marketing campaigns
12% – Targeting new keywords
13% – Expanding our company products/service offerings and/or customer base
10% – Creating more conversion-based landing pages
11% – Increasing paid ad spend
8% – Improving our backlink profile
11% – Boosting our on-page and/or technical SEO (internal linking, header tags, title tags, etc).
8% – Revamping our company branding (logo design, website visuals, slogans, colors, etc.)
3% – Other
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, 20% of B2B digital marketers are working to increase their expertise, authority, and trust (EAT) by encouraging more reviews and testimonials
As we mentioned in the section about changes to Google’s algorithm, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) are increasingly utilized by search engines to identify pages that provide increased value to their users. To show all three components of EAT consistently across brand products and services, many organizations are relying upon review generation and review management tactics to add weight and validity to the experiences of their existing customers. This is largely due to how consumers have evolved their search habits to include no less than an average of 10 reviews before they feel they can trust a company. More interestingly, though, is that they tend to prefer to see a mix of realistic positive and negative reviews, as it shows them a more realistic picture of what to expect in the experience as a customer.
It’s important to note that not only should your brand be soliciting reviews and feedback across multiple channels, but it’s also important to be seen responding to comments and reviews, both positive and negative. Properly engaging with a negative commenter or reviewer, even to be seen requesting a method of contacting offline to handle their specific concerns, shows other customers and potential clients your willingness to engage and solve concerns and problems actively. This greatly impacts not only consumer trust in your brand but also allows you to showcase your expertise and authority to build confidence in the products you are representing.
Also in the list of methods for increasing EAT, businesses are responding to increased demand from consumers for video content by increasing the use of video across multiple mediums to drive and increase engagement and improve conversions. This can come in the form of short targeted video ads to longer-form video content including podcasts and educational webinars.
Brands are also relying upon training events and industry networking events to expand and improve their presence across multiple channels. Appearing at industry events and interacting with peers across your industry can help to show potential clients and existing customers their willingness to dedicate time and resources to expanding and enhancing your team’s knowledge base and keep up with current trends.
B2B
20% – Encouraged more customer reviews/testimonials
15% – Showcased company culture through video marketing and/or social media
18% – Responded to customer comments quickly on social media/review platforms
10% – Hosted a new podcast and/or webinar
12% – Explored more PR opportunities with interviews and/or media placements
11% – Attended more industry networking events (virtually or in-person)
10% – Expanded our team’s digital marketing knowledge through new certifications/training sessions
3% – Other
In contrast, 18% of B2C digital marketers are increasing their businesses’ EAT by responding to customer comments more quickly on social media websites and review platforms
In the retail space, consumers view increased and timely engagement as one of the primary influencing factors determining how they feel about a brand. This has led to more businesses adopting artificial intelligence-driven engagement tools and the deployment of AI tools such as chatbots on social media sites and eCommerce platforms. As a cost-saving feature, these tools can handle low-level simple inquiries as well as scheduling a follow-up for more complex issues, reassuring your customer base and potential clients that their concerns are important and actively being addressed in some way by your brand on-demand. Through these methods, client retention and repeat business expand, and the perception of the brand as one that can be trusted to engage with customer needs improves. During follow-ups and direct engagement, your staff has the chance to provide guidance and information that customers will convey in reviews as a level of expertise and authority that your brand can be counted on to deliver.
B2C
15% – Encouraged more customer reviews/testimonials
13% – Showcased company culture through video marketing and/or social media
18% – Responded to customer comments quickly on social media/review platforms
11% – Hosted a new podcast and/or webinar
13% – Explored more PR opportunities with interviews and/or media placements
12% – Attended more industry networking events (virtually or in-person)
14% – Expanded our team’s digital marketing knowledge through new certifications/training sessions
5% – Other
It can be a daunting task to tackle SEO improvements without insight and guidance from a professional digital marketer, so we asked the community to share some of the tactics they’ve put into play to improve their EAT ranking since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and how these tactics have benefited their organization.
Sarah Jameson, Marketing Director of Green Building Elements, provided perhaps the most in-depth and well-structured answer to this inquiry:
“There are three steps you should take to improve your expertise, authority, and trust overall. First, optimize your link-building strategy. Acquiring links from other sites to your own is not only beneficial for lead generation but improves the overall credibility of your website. Reaching out to bloggers or guest posting at news websites would result in organic traffic and a steady improvement in your site ranking. This will also give your website more authority within the industry, letting you stand out from the rest because of your expertise. Second, promote customer reviews. Nothing can make you any more trustworthy than your customers promoting your brand or service. Reviews also help boost your overall rankings as Google sees this as a strong indication that your website is trustworthy and authoritative. Make sure that these reviews are truthful and that you are immediate in addressing bad reviews with solutions. Finally, create high-quality content for Google Discover. This Google feature aims to curate a feed of personalized content for users’ preferences without the need for RSS feeds anymore.”
—Sarah Jameson, Marketing Director of Green Building Elements
Several other responses dialed in on some of the same tactics, giving weight to Sarah’s overall narrative that improving your EAT value is challenging, but overall one of the most important things you can do for your brand long-term.
“An excellent way to improve your EAT is to produce content that’s valuable, informative, and authoritative without being a sales pitch. Obviously, as a business, it’s necessary to sell yourself, but creating high-quality content that establishes you as an authority without being directly related to the sale of your product or service is how you build your online presence. Keyword-rich content that solves a real problem for your audience is absolutely key to improving expertise, authority, and trust in the eyes of search engine crawlers. It’s also crucial to build a diverse portfolio of backlinks from high-quality sites, in particular those within your industry or niche.
Backlinks are a sort of ‘seal of approval’ from a reputable site that signals to the search engines that your site is valuable and should be ranked accordingly. There are many ways to do this, but creating quality content means it’s more linkable, and you can hit many SEO birds with one stone. You can also reach out to journalists using services like HARO, Terkel, or Help a B2B Writer.”
—Stephen Light, Co-Owner & CEO, Nolah Mattress
“The biggest piece of advice I could offer in regards to demonstrating EAT following the Covid-19 pandemic would be to demonstrate transparency onsite. This can be achieved through producing and publishing content directly relating to the extra precautions that your organization is taking to ensure all services, products, and advice are delivered in a way that reassures the user, follows current guidelines, and agrees with current medical consensus if applicable. In having this content readily available onsite, you will have created a new trust signal that will not only reassure the user but also signal to search engines that you are following best practices at all times within your business. Whilst being a trust signal in its own right, it will also increase the image and reputation of the brand, which will, in turn, generate additional favorable reviews across the web as a whole—solidifying your position as a leader within your respective industry.”
—Edward Ziubrzynski, Head of Onsite SEO, Fibre Marketing
52% of respondents are very confident in their 2022 digital marketing changes
Keeping up with changes in digital marketing can be an extremely challenging undertaking and not every brand has the resources or skills on-staff to implement the necessary systems and adjustments. This is reflected in an aggregate of 48% of our respondents feeling that their brand needs to make improvements to how they will respond to changes in digital marketing platforms throughout the remainder of 2022.
52% – Very confident
36% – Somewhat confident, but there’s room for improvement
12% – Not confident
17% of them would feel even more confident by increasing their digital marketing talent and resources
To combat their shortcomings, a majority of our respondents felt the need to make improvements listed the expansion of staff marketing talent through hiring, outsourcing, or partnerships with skilled freelancers as their leading strategy. Just behind staff acquisition, a large portion of our respondents were planning to either restructure their monthly digital marketing budgets or expand and improve the technology solutions in place as part of their marketing technology stacks. A significant percentage of respondents instead plan to focus on training and education to expand the skill set of their staff and restructure their departments to provide more manpower for digital marketing projects. All of these approaches will help the brand’s marketing teams be more independent and responsive to customer needs and the changing demands of digital marketing service providers, vendors, and platforms. Reducing friction and increasing access to the necessary resources, skills, and manpower is the only way that many small businesses will be able to keep up with competitors and attract consumer attention in highly competitive industries.
To round out the final discussion, we wanted to find out from our community of marketing professionals from around the world what other steps they might suggest for brands not feeling confident in their 2022 SEO marketing plan.
“Focus on quality over quantity. Quality links from credible, relevant, and authoritative websites that are trusted by search engines, can help you reach the top of the search engine rankings. Websites tend to be so caught up in metrics like domain authority and domain rankings that they forget about the most important aspect, which is relevancy. If you find website content that is highly relevant to your content but has a mediocre DA, we suggest that you should definitely go for it. Relevance is ultimately one of the best markers of a ‘quality link’!”
—Amit Raj, Founder & CEO, The Links Guy
“Robust content development based on SERP and competitive analysis is critical for today and the foreseeable future. Backlink development is the second most important factor. This can not be an afterthought or conducted using outdated methods, or the site risks being penalized. If a business is focused on local search, they require local citations and relevant backlinks from their geographic area. These two factors are evergreen quality signals within Google. They are baked right into the core algorithm. By focusing on strategies and tactics which improve user experience and answer a searcher’s query comprehensively, the website advances forward, earning Google’s trust and signals authority while providing expertise as a subject matter expert to people searching for answers to their questions.”
—Marc Muhammad, SEO Team Lead, Bot Publishing Inc. for LillyPad.ai
“A step you can take to improve your teams’ confidence in their SEO plan is to have an outside SEO consultant with a history of success in your space take a look at your annual plan and provide feedback and suggestions as needed, for a fee. This can provide peace of mind that you’re on the right track and haven’t missed anything before executing on the remaining quarters’ objectives.”
—Nicolas Straut, SEO Lead, NorthOne
42% of businesses intend to expand their in-house digital marketing team in 2022
We mentioned in the previous section that expanding the digital marketing talent and access to resources were major strategies being put into motion by many of our respondents. From that group, 42% stated that they planned to accomplish this by expanding their in-house talent through the hiring of staff, rather than outsourcing to an agency or freelancer. As with most business tasks tackled by an in-house team versus outsourcing, there are benefits to doing so that can’t be achieved by an agency or third-party service provider.
Expanding the digital marketing team allows a small business to have more control over the budget and timeline of marketing projects, and enhances the results of their efforts because the team is in-line with the mission and values of the brand from the onset of the project. In-house marketing teams know how best to structure campaigns and advertising assets to the brand’s ideal customers and target audience, and can then build more effective tools for reaching the clients that the sales team has indicated to be the most likely to convert. Finally, to circle back to the enhancement of your brand’s EAT rankings, your customers will trust an internal team of individuals they are familiar with and interact with consistently, providing your team with built-in trust and an assumption of authority and expertise by loyal customers who have benefited from the efforts of your team directly.
42% – We plan to expand our in-house digital marketing team
26% – We plan to partner with a third-party agency
16% – We plan to work with external freelancers or contractors on projects
17% – Our company doesn’t plan to partner with new talent in 2022
It’s vital that brands remain agile and responsive to the needs of customers, and digital marketing experts have many tools and strategies that they can deploy. When search engine algorithm changes require a massive overhaul in your marketing strategy, a majority of our respondents said an in-house team was the best route to ensuring they could pivot as necessary to mitigate potential negative impacts.
Can Your Team Weather the Next Google Update Successfully?
Digital marketing will constantly be an evolving and changing landscape that marketing professionals must be able to react to remain experts in their field. Google’s search engine makes around 600 updates a year, affecting how users can find your brand. So your team needs to be agile and craft responsive marketing campaigns that will outperform the competition and gain the attention of both your current ideal customer and future clients whose needs might fall into the purview of your brand.
In this Pollfish survey, UpCity revealed that many brands feel that they need more resources and guidance to tackle the digital marketing challenges we anticipate having to face in 2022 and beyond. If you feel that you might need to get a headstart by outsourcing as you work to build your team, UpCity’s marketplace of digital marketing agencies is a great first stop on your journey to bring in the resources and help that’s necessary to outperform your competition.
UpCity’s Survey Method
UpCity used Pollfish to survey 500 digital marketing professionals in the United States on the recent digital marketing challenges that they’ve faced, as well as the steps they’re taken to resolve them.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents are fulfilling in-house digital marketing roles, while the remainder consists of business owners (29%), agency-based digital marketers (17%), and digital marketing consultants (15%). Sixty-one percent of respondents work at B2B companies and thirty-nine percent work at B2C companies.
Fifty-eight percent of the respondents are male and forty-two percent are female.