As the year draws to a close, content marketers reflect on some of the market impacts that have influenced day-to-day business activities and marketing goals.
Most of these professionals indicated that search engine updates remain one of the most prominent factors affecting search engine optimisation (SEO) performance.
Market analyses show there are more than 20 different internet search engines users can use to look for information.
These analyses further categorised the most popular search engines as Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask and AOL.
A small percentage of users also turn to lesser-known engines such as DuckDuckGo, Naver and Dogpile.
The latest statistics indicate that Google not only leads but dominates this sector with an overwhelming market share of 91.4% as of November 2021.
Bing, which is Microsoft’s answer to Google, comes in a distant second with a 3.14% market share.
When asked how search engine updates affect SEO performance, content marketing experts, such as Search Engine Land, stated that both major and minor updates have potential negative impacts on company and brand digital visibility and exposure.
These experts went on to say that the visibility and exposure issues lead to ceding rankings to competitors, which in turn affects website and brand internet traffic and revenue.
Google, as the most-used search engine worldwide, rolled out a significant number of updates throughout 2021.
Research found that the frequency of these updates put content developers and marketers under increased pressure to identify issues and find ways to adapt and modify SEO parameters.
However, there is another side to this coin, as updates can also impact SEOs positively and boost rankings when competitors are bumped lower in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Interviews with several SEO-based content developers cast a more comprehensive light on how search engine updates influence SEO and the day-to-day work-balance of content marketers.
Most professionals acknowledged the importance and inevitability of algorithm updates.
They further confirmed that a brand’s or company’s virtual performance can either rise or fall after an update and that internet exposure increases or decreases largely determine workloads after updates.
Some content marketing leaders indicated becoming distinctly busier after algorithm updates and expanded that these workload increases included communications with clients regarding website performance changes.
Investigations revealed that most reputable content marketing agents accept that contingency strategies after updates are part and parcel of the fluid nature of the industry.
Reports also show that experienced content marketers use drops or rises in rankings to either reaffirm SEO approaches or explore ways to realign content for more effective results and content resilience.
These interviews further revealed that brands and companies should not go into panic mode and exert crisis controls when search engine rankings are influenced.
The experts reiterated that it is best to establish long-term content development strategies that will stand the test of time and survive update after update.
They also advise that, to effectively and efficiently manage workloads and outcomes, content marketing agents should focus on core updates and evaluate those impacts and not use every single update as a basis for change.
