SEO Is the Worst It’s Ever Been (And It’s Still Your Best Marketing Channel)

Here are two ideas that can be true at the same time: SEO offers worse returns than it used to. SEO is still one of the best marketing channels.

SEO really has changed:

Talk to website owners, and you’ll even hear whispers that some companies are losing 20–40% of their monthly clicks from search. 1 2 3

Including some not-so-quiet whispers from research firms like Gartner.

This sounds like the end of the road for SEO. What marketing channel could stand to lose 20–40% of its return and still warrant energy and investment?

Well: SEO.

SEO has historically been such a stupidly lucrative marketing channel that even today, during AI search Armageddon, SEO is still the best marketing channel at your disposal.

keyword research, you could target particular people at a particular moment in time, and all but guarantee a steady stream of relevant visitors to your business.
  • It had a very low barrier to entry: you could get started in small, incremental ways. A few links or blog posts were still beneficial, without any need for big set-up costs.

    • Are there any other marketing channels that even come close to these benefits?

    SEO was an affordable, compounding asset that could be depended upon as the main growth engine of your business. And as a result, SEO became a near-universal marketing channel, used by small businesses and post-IPO giants, adopted in B2B and B2C. It was too good and too cheap to ignore.

    In fact, SEO was so good that many companies engaged in SEO solely to monetize the traffic it generated. Affiliate marketing boomed, as did what we now call “site reputation abuse”. SEO traffic became the end, and not just the means.

    Search interest for “affiliate marketing” peaked in 2023.

    Affiliate marketing is harder than ever. But that, too, should be expected. Affiliate marketing was a form of arbitrage, and all arbitrage opportunities are temporary. The window to easy profit has closed.

    In many ways, we’re shedding the unhealthy and unsustainable expectations of SEO and learning to treat it more like a marketing channel, and not a magic money tap. The era of easy SEO has ended, and now we’ll have to work harder to earn those same disproportionate results.

    I’m okay with that, and I think you should be too. Or as Alex Birkett put it in a discussion on LinkedIn:

    And I agree with this—“SEO was too easy for too long”—and actually think it’s great that this isn’t the case anymore. Did we really want to spend the golden days of our careers publishing ultimate guides and pushing links to them to drive vanity traffic? Not me.

    Alex Birkett

    The only test that matters

    SEO is harder and less certain than before. But I am not going to stop doing SEO for Ahrefs.

    If I was advising a startup, or helping a scale-up, or starting my own business, SEO is still the very first channel I would test. I would go into it with different expectations, and less certainty of outright success, but I would still expect it to be a major source of growth—and quite likely the best marketing channel at my disposal.

    This is the only test that matters: even today, when it’s at its worst, is there anything better or more reliable than SEO?

    Further reading

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