Report: Marketers Now Focused on Creating a Customer-Driven SEO Strategy

As customers face difficulties distinguishing between organic and paid search results, new research indicates that marketers have been focusing on providing clarity in this area.

Merkle recently published its “Performance Media Report” for the fourth quarter of 2022, and statistics indicated that between March and May 2022, less than 40% of marketers stated that creating a cohesive experience across SEO and other channels was one of their most important objectives. This percentage grew to almost 50% between June and August 2022.

“One of the reasons holistic search is increasingly important is that consumers cannot often distinguish which listings are promoted and which are organic,” wrote the researchers behind the report. “Google and other search engines have created a seamless and highly visual experience that combines paid and organic listings. Marketers must understand and track movements in user query and interest across both.”

More than 40% of respondents claimed that it was important for them to stay on top of and react quickly to Google’s algorithm changes between June and August 2022 — a slight increase from the percentage who said the same for the period between March and May 2022.

Finding Success Through Customer-Driven Marketing

With more marketers shifting their focus to the customer, previous research has suggested that many are now attributing their organizational success to this new objective.

Influitive released its “2022 State of Customer Marketing Report,” and data indicated that most marketers (67%) now consider customer-driven marketing to be “very important” to the success of their organization. Nearly 29% believe it is at least “important” to their success, and 44% have seen “moderate revenue gains” from their customer marketing efforts.

Over the next 12 months, most marketers (76%) believe that customer-driven marketing will have a “greater importance,” compared to the previous 12 months.