Author: Miriam Ellis
It used to be that a simple Google search would typically deliver a wide enough array of results to help you find what you were looking for. This was a passive experience on the part of the searcher—enter a keyword phrase and you’d have the world at your feet.
This is no longer the case for two reasons:
We use the internet for so many more activities than we did 20 years ago.
Multiple sources indicate that Google’s search result quality has worsened in recent years.
Gut-check my statements by thinking about your own phone and laptop use. Do you spend most of your screen time searching, or doing something else these days? Are you satisfied with Google’s top organic results, or do you have to dig deeper to find what you want?
When you look at your own usage and realize that many of your potential customers are likely hanging out somewhere other than the search results, what you’ve learned must become central to your digital marketing strategy. The days of your top goal being a spot in Google’s top 10 results are fading fast. As internet users become more active in their habits, your brand must catch up with them.
Let’s take a look at how you can adapt your marketing to support the active search journeys your potential customers are actually embarking on.
Table of contents:
The decline of passive search
Passive search is the act of typing your keyword(s) into a search engine and being adequately satisfied with whatever ranks (or appears high up on the search results page).
While passive search is a good fit for basic functions (like checking a weather forecast, the time in another country, or converting US dollars into Euros), it has significant limitations for modern day users—limitations that other platforms are actively looking to fill. In some ways, recent Google’s algorithm updates even discourage passive searches by forcing users to dig deeper on other platforms, which I’ll discuss more in the next sections.
Why passive Google search is broken
In the past, the public was largely satisfied with the assets Google ranked highly for more complex search terms. Now, hardly a week goes by without new studies, surveys, and articles expressing and explaining why so many people no longer find the Google Search experience acceptable. There are almost as many theories for the cause of this dissatisfaction as there are Google users. Here are three factors to keep in mind:
Google is losing the quality battle — Google has allowed content from big brands (presumably created by content farms) to take up too much space in its index, according to Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media. When authoritative domains publish large volumes of low-quality content that have little or nothing to do with the brand’s recognized fields of expertise, searchers are unlikely to be well-served. All too often, weaknesses in Google’s algorithm are simply allowing large players with the ability/budget to produce encyclopedic content to outrank smaller publishers with genuine authority.
“I am no fan of Forbes and am often dismayed by what it ranks for, but one could argue that its strategy and choices are an entirely a rational response to Google’s algorithmic biases.” — Greg Sterling, Co-Founder at Near Media
Google’s UX has become too cluttered — Recently, I was talking to a fellow SEO who was so befuddled by Google’s current search experience that they suddenly realized they had been unintentionally clicking on ads. Not only are paid advertisements difficult for both novice and adept searchers to distinguish from the organic results, but the plethora of SERP features has resulted in a mess. Commercial-intent searches, such as [organic fair trade coffee beans], are now met with a wall of product grids and shopping features that make finding a simple website link like wandering through a house of mirrors. Not long ago, the UX was so much simpler than this, and Google’s index served as a table of contents for real businesses that real people could understand and use with little trouble.
![The google search results for [organic fair trade coffee beans] showing the search filters (i.e., all, shopping, images, forums, videos, news, etc.), filters relevant to the specific query (i.e., coffee grinders, coffee filters, mugs, etc.), filter bubbles for product results (i.e., weight, nearby, dark roast, reviews), a left-hand menu with filtering options, and four sponsored listings before the first organic search listing.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a484d4_bd586d4009454b33bef7b6cddb7db13c~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_87,h_85,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/a484d4_bd586d4009454b33bef7b6cddb7db13c~mv2.png)
Google has forgotten it’s a part of the search journey, not the destination — With the exception of easily answered searches that fall into the [what’s the weather like] category, Google-controlled assets do not satisfy most search intents. The problem is, Google has decided that it wants to be the end point for too many queries (in order to keep users on Google and increase its revenue potential). In the past, the SERPs acted as stepping stones on your journey to relevant content—the thing the user was searching for, be it a product, a local business, an informational resource, or anything in between. By contrast, the results nowadays increasingly feel like the only thing Google wants you to discover is…Google. Earlier this year, a US District Court ruled that Google violated antitrust law and acted as a monopoly at the expense of competitors. As we can see, it has also been at the expense of users, like your potential customers, who want to find you and not just another self-preferenced Google asset.
Active search: How users actually use Google today
Active search refers to when the user has to dig deeper than a search engine’s top-ranked results or transition to a completely different platform to satisfy their search intent.
Here are three examples of how users must now search actively to find what they’re looking for:
01. A searcher is looking for [how to restring an acoustic guitar]. Google’s top results feature an AI overview scraped from sources of unknown quality, followed by a long list of low-quality sites that are riddled with ads and popups.
The dissatisfied searcher either keeps digging or finds the nearest link to transition out of the SERPs to YouTube, where a video from a genuine expert will walk them through the process, step-by-step.
02. A searcher is looking for [organic linen drawstring capri pants], but none of the shopping results Google features on its first page (or even within the top 50 results) match all aspects of this user’s long-tail query. The searcher abandons Google and goes to Instagram to find a product that exactly matches their specific preferences, perhaps from a boutique seller.
03. A searcher queries [why did JRR Tolkien dislike tape recorders]. There may be some relevant content returned in Google’s top-ranked results, but the searcher will not feel fully satisfied unless they can interact one-on-one with real people who have a track record of demonstrating authority in this genre of fiction. They head to Reddit and either jump into an existing discussion or start their own.
In all three cases, the searcher has made a significant transition from being spoon-fed by Google’s results (i.e., passive search) to becoming an active seeker of the specialized solution that uniquely satisfies them. This is the transformation we are witnessing today that requires a major marketing adjustment on the part of businesses, organizations, and publishers.
How to embrace active search
While the rise of active search is specific to the era we are currently marketing in, the potential solution may be a familiar one for veteran marketers, and it requires you to determine where your brand’s ‘home’ is (in addition to your brand’s domain/homepage).
To that end, Rand Fishkin, co-founder at SparkToro, urges brands to market like it’s 1964:
“What I’m suggesting to you is that digital marketing in 2024 is a lot like marketing in 1964. It is getting the right message that appeals to the right people in the right places and at the right time to the right audience.” — Rand Fishkin, Co-founder at SparkToro
He’s specifically referencing how difficult attribution has become in a zero-click dynamic, but a top takeaway that’s applicable to nearly every scenario is this: in 1964, marketing depended on being wherever your customer was.
It meant constructing your futuristic supermarket in the most densely-populated neighborhood in town. It meant getting your holiday catalog into households before anyone started shopping. And, it also meant going to business lunches, sponsoring local sports teams, and socializing within your community so that you became known (and liked) by the people you wanted to serve.
The task ahead of you is to translate mid-century marketing to the web, actively engaging with (and establishing a presence in) your potential community.
For local businesses, all the old-school, offline community involvement remains smart, but whether local or virtual, organizations should start spending a little less time worrying about ordinal organic rank and a lot more time hanging out with their customers.
If what Fishkin is saying (and what I’m suggesting) sounds like radical change, you’re right—keep reading!
Support your audience’s active search journey: Best practices
Your audience’s active search journey can look very different from that of other audiences (even those shopping for similar products or services). So, you’ll need to build up your own rules of engagement for your audience/business.
Here are some of my best practices to get you started:
Do not mistake other platforms for Google
Structure your team to reflect your audience’s active search journey
Monitor brand mentions and distribute content
Do not mistake other platforms for Google
I’m not suggesting that search engine rankings are unimportant—they still matter. For local businesses, your Google Business Profile is still critical. But, how you think about where your business fits is rapidly changing.
You can’t be one of ten blue links in Google’s SERPs anymore and call it a day. Instead, bring the maximum creativity your entire team can muster to figure out whether the best fit for your business exists on one of the following platforms, where you can socialize one-on-one with your potential customers:
If your organization already knows that there is a better match for you on a platform not listed above, you’re ahead of the game, but most enterprises are struggling to find the right home-away-from-home page. In most cases, the right platform is waiting for you somewhere in my short list. But there’s a twist to all this.
If we look back at the past two decades in SEO and marketing, you can see that we developed a habit of throwing everything at Google to see what would happen. Some of the content we threw in there was not good, and a lot of it didn’t deserve to see the light of day in the SERPs. This is not an approach you can take with the social platforms where you need to establish yourself.
Experimentation is definitely necessary, but if you annoy the public with low-quality marketing tactics, you risk being blocked by other members and even banned from communities.
You’ll still put on your SEO hat to look at rank tracking reports and the like, but you’ve got to find a different hat for joining the party at Reddit or Substack. In those environments, audiences will judge you by how well you socialize, and in some of them, behaving like a salesperson will get you booted. The secret ingredient to succeeding is being deeply passionate about whatever the topic is that you have in common with a particular community—rather than being there to sell, you are there to participate in a shared interest.
The shared interest could be a physical town or city if your business is local, or if virtual, your passion might be the music associated with the instruments you sell. Maybe it’s the homes that can be beautified by the lamps you manufacture, or the photography that can be captured by your specialized lenses.
And here’s my most radical advice of all: if you do not genuinely feel passion for what your business offers, you need to employ people who do. This may sound ironic, given that developments in AI are causing major enterprises to lay off staff on the notion that having fewer employees will make a more attractive picture for shareholders. Be wary of this trend, because in order to sustain profits, focus belongs on how appealing your brand looks to customers (not shareholders).
If the emerging social aspects of doing 21st-century business like it’s 1964 are outside your comfort zone as a business owner, find and hold onto staff who are willing to hang out, help out, and build relationships.Treat each environment with respect, because social spaces are akin to other people’s homes.
Embrace the zeal of posting images and videos.
Engage in the comments section and comment on other people’s work.
Give away free advice.
Be there for others and demonstrate your expertise, authenticity, and trustworthiness.
It must happen every day on Nextdoor that someone hires a house painter who shares their interest in making Halloween costumes for cats, just like it used to be common for mid-century people to hire a contractor because they attended the same bridge club.
Structure your team to reflect your audience’s active search journey
Once you’ve established where you’ll be socializing with your community, organize your staff to build and maintain a presence.
In this scenario, your social media managers will likely take on a more emphatic role. Duties will include:
Social media monitoring and participation
Social content ideation and creation
Social media analysis and reporting
If your brand develops its own social hub (like a Discord server), you’ll need all of the above, plus additional roles like:
Community moderators
Account managers
Technical support staff
Monitor brand mentions and distribute content
The more complex your business model is, the more likely it is that you’ll need tools to scale both monitoring your social channels and distributing content to them. Whether you have multiple business locations to promote or multiple social channels to manage, software can help you:
Monitor mentions of your brand on topics that are relevant to it.
Organize and format content appropriately for each channel.
Popular software choices include Sparktoro, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite.
Future-proof your digital marketing with more humanity and authenticity
I’m not pleased with what’s happened to Google’s SERPs and I hope it can improve, but I confess to being open to any trend that helps businesses be more real with more people. If you can see the positives in this change from passive to active use of search and the web, you’ve got some real opportunities ahead of you.
Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com. Twitter | Linkedin