This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Todayโs newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is a quick summary of the Semrush โState of Search 2023.โ
To start with, here are some interesting stats around โTotal Search Traffic By Market:โ
The Electronics, Beauty, Media and Food industries all grew YoY
The Retail, Online Education and Travel industries shrank in terms of traffic, but not dramatically
The Service and Technology and Fashion industries experienced more significant drops in traffic in 2022.
Another interesting stat (that youโll surely agree with if you have your own site that youโre trying to grow) is how much more volatile 2022 was compared to 2020 and 2021 (especially the first half of the year:
Another (depressing) stat:
Only around one in five searches led to a click on the first result in 2022.
Damn.
Itโs an interesting, well-put-together stat sheet. I definitely recommend giving the full post a read
Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first:
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My Take
Impressive study. There were some bright spots, like the number of NEW domains ranking in the SERPs last year was higher than previous 2020 (but not as high as 2021), so thereโs a little hope in starting from scratch still.
Mostly the stats can make you feel a little down about being in the game, like looking at the increasing volatility of the SERPs year over year, or the new-to-2022 SERP features that push organic results down, or the stat I already shared about what the zero click vs. click-through rates are for searches.
Search traffic still remains incredibly valuable, of course. I heard on a podcast yesterday (sorry, canโt remember which one) that said, basically, SEOs were overall shit marketers because organic traffic converts SO WELL.
As someone that ranked #1 for โBest CBD Oilโ for a few stellar months in years past, I can back this up. Very little people read the article, they just click on whatever the first recommendation was and bough that.
It feels like the slice of the pie weโre all competing for gets a little smaller and a little harder to eat every year, but it happens slowly enough that you donโt quite notice the pain day to day. :)
I look forward to seeing what 2023 looks like in the rear-view mirror, analyzed in a similar way.
This concludes Sean Markeyโs Super Optimism Hour. Please tune in tomorrow for more of the same!
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Links, Resources, and Recommendations
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Until tomorrowโฆ
Sean Markey
sem@hey.com
PS โ LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? An endless road of existential dread that runs straight through the capital of Nihilism? Iโd love to hear from you (and thank you to those of you who read and have responded already!)
PPS โ would you eat those chips?
hey:
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