Organic overtakes social in search visibility

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In recent years as organic advertising has increased and gained more visibility in the market, many will be aware of the importance of search and the role it plays in business being found and delivering conversions. Some may still be new to the concept or question whether it works. Many of our clients are well are of the benefits of search and organic rankings, and plenty of these examples can be seen from viewing our case studies page.

However, are you aware of the recent report that has given search and even bigger boost in the market? The latest report by Searchaholic (which can be viewed by clicking the link) shows that search has outpaced social for the first time in 3 years. The actual figures show that search accounted for just under 35% of traffic, while social accounted for just over 26.5%.

We are all well aware of the power of social media and the explosion in popularity and usage of these platforms – especially over the last 3 years. If this is then thought about for a second, then it can be concluded that search already faces some stiff competition against social, so results appearing on the lines of the above show conclusively what a powerful medium search is. Even people who were unsure about the capability and the ability of search to generate real results must stop and think very carefully about what this report is saying.

Searchaholic isn’t the only report to come out which supports this claim either. Chartbeat, (which is an online analytics platform for media and publishers) has also seen a similar and correlative rise in figures of search against social. This was initially thought to be down to certain ‘world events’ that happened at particular time,s but figures showed the rising trend continued after also.

Of all the social platforms it has been observed that Facebook has dropped the most in terms of visits, but despite dropping over 10%, remains the biggest medium of all the social entities. Soundings suggest a lot of this has been to do with Facebook ‘cleaning up its act’ after a time period when fake news became a real problem. The lowering of figures isn’t perhaps a decline per se but more an equalling out and a fairer representation of visits based on more reliable content.

Some other conclusions which can be drawn from the reports show the rapid increase of mobile search over desktop search, with also accelerated mobile pages being conclusively favoured over the opposite.

The thing to take from this is not to panic about social media advertising – it is not dead. Rather (as with most things in life and business) a balanced and portfolio approach needs to be taken to a marketing strategy. With figures like these, organic / search must be included!

If you are a business that is unaware of search, then now is the time to take note and realise what a positive campaign can do for you and your prospects.

In Front Digital know how to get good organic search results. Why not contact us now to find out how we can get you noticed?

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