Organic traffic is a great thing. It stands for visitors for whom we do not have to pay directly, which means that they are not generated via advertising campaigns, email marketing and similar paid channels. In addition to social media channels, search engines are particularly popular for organic traffic. But with both it is becoming increasingly difficult to get visitors to the site without the direct use of money.
Social media platforms such as Facebook have been around for some time, especially when it comes to the organic traffic which continues to decrease and it is almost not worthwhile to operate the channels with this goal. It always looked different on search engines like Google and Co. There you knew: If you turn on the right screws, take care of the on-page and off-page optimization and then use a few tricks, ideally more visitors come from this source from day to day. But even that is so slowly over.
As was evident from the Digital Marketing Report for Q2 2019 of the marketing agency Merkle, the organic traffic from the Google search is constantly decreasing. In fact, compared to the same period last year, traffic has dropped by eight percent in the last year. But it’s not just Google that makes it harder to reach visitors without paid campaigns. The drop was 11 percent for Yahoo and 26 percent for Bing. Only the search engine Duckduckgo, which relies on data protection, recorded a significant increase of 49 percent. However, it is also interesting to note that the decline in visitors is mainly due to the desktop search – in the mobile search, the numbers are not quite as negative.
How is this decline going to continue? On average, only 23 percent of site visits come from organic search on Google and other search engines. This value has also fallen by six percent compared to the same period of the previous year. What leads to these rather negative values? Definitely not fewer searches, but there are more paid ads, which are also visually highlighted and therefore also have more clicks. In addition, Google offers answers to questions often directly in the search results and so it is no longer necessary to visit the websites themselves.
