Can You Keep Up with Search Today?

As the old saying goes, there is no constant except change — and SEOs and digital marketers know this better than most. You complete a project — the project you sold to your management as being a game-changer and a wise investment — and suddenly an update at the major search engine upends your plan.

In almost every case, a search engine rolling out updates is doing so to make improvements. It's not about being punitive; it's not about creating barriers or undermining anyone's work. Pure and simple, the goal is improvement— the same way you approach your work to improve your site's UX, to improve traffic, conversions, and revenue. Now, that improvement by the search engine may dampen a website's ranking, but that's more likely because that website was doing something that was otherwise undesirable. These days, most of this is related to user experience (UX) in some fashion.

So, what are businesses doing to try to keep up?

If we look at this from the relative positions of a business and a search platform, making improvements requires investment from each group.

Generally, at a business, you have just a few people working on the problems: a team of two, maybe three SEOs, access to 1.5 developers, a program leader, and that's likely about it. If you're fortunate, your business has access to content folks, design folks, and maybe someone with dedicated UX knowledge.

Along the way you need resources. Access to tools and time from your developers have very real costs, so every program requires a budget, which means working with your senior leaders to justify the budget and accountability against the budgets assigned. This approach aligns mostly with an inhouse-lead effort. If you bring a third-party consultant or agency into the mix, your muscle expands, as does the cost. Things get expensive in a hurry, in either direction.

I recently ran an informal survey across my global network of digital marketers, and the data below is from a sample size of just over 200 respondents. The survey was purposely anonymous, as I was after very specific information: how much time you (generally) are putting toward SEO work. This was inclusive of everyone working on anything impacting SEO: content, developers, technical SEO projects, planning, keyword research and so on. Getting directly to the point, the data showed that the largest respondent group was in-house Digital Marketers at 44.6%, and almost ½ of those folks had teams of between one and four people. Finally, 64% of respondents have plans for an average of 80 hours/week of time dedicated to SEO work.

If we take this data as, at least, directional, we can also see overall, it's not a lot of time. I'm sure it feels like a lot of time to the individuals living and doing the work on a daily basis, but is 80 hours/week invested in a channel that almost every single company is leaning on heavily to drive revenue and keep costs down a reasonable investment? Does it allow your business to "keep up"? In short, no. Not remotely.

It's easy to say you can't "keep up," but that implies a comparison of some sort. Without a comparator, true as the statement may be, it exists in a vacuum. And while I'm certain every SEO would agree in some way with the statement "we need more resources/support/engagement," there are limits, as the data above alludes to.

At the major companies who define the space that digital marketing and SEO functions within, it's an obviously different environment. Beyond just pure numbers, they also define direction.

Last month, at the same time that informal survey above was running, data was pulled for career opportunities inside five major search companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and TikTok were included. And specifically, two discrete job roles were identified. Each role has a direct connection through the normalized work they typically focus on, on the world we live in today in Search. The first role was "AI Engineer", and the second was broader in scope; a "Software Engineer". Neither role has a typical direct connection to the work an SEO does, but both roles definitely have trickle-down effects from the work they do, that SEOs must work with.

As of mid-September 2023, here is the landscape each company is working to fill. They are actively hiring for these roles, right now. The roles that will do the work to expand the next iterations of search that consumers interact with, and that SEOs need to optimize for.

Those are huge numbers — and let's be honest, not every person hired will work on something that directly impacts the work an SEO does. While the work they could do changes the landscape, it's safe to cut these numbers down.

But even after we get generous and cut away hours/week from these major players, we're left with a hard truth. (A truth we've known for years, and a truth whose gap is widening at a very fast rate today.) If any of these companies is putting this much effort into creating and defining the direction "search" is moving in, can you keep up? When you have a team of four SEOs tasked with managing even a mid-sized website, the better question is: how invested is your company in organic search as a strategy?

Knowing Google is investing directly in growing generative-AI-based search, and knowing they are actively hiring more AI engineers to grow and expand that functionality, can your team keep up without help? Knowing that more and more consumers are first using TikTok to search for products, does your team have the knowledge, bandwidth and remit to optimize in this space?

Is it reasonable for any company to expect modest investments to move their needle in this new world of search? Or is this increasingly becoming a task akin to lighting a match in a hurricane? That task might sound impossible, but it can be done. If you have the right help.

The bottom line is that it's increasingly becoming more difficult to manage all this work with small teams. And those teams are still disproportionately responsible for, in many cases, ever-increasing goals. To succeed today, you need the right people and the right platform. While the people are key, that platform is what enables them to manage work at scale, take advantage of trusted relationships, provide timely data that impact business decisions, and ultimately act as a force-multiplier for them. Whether that's across social channels, within search, or managing direct customer conversations, it's that platform that enables success.