A significant change happened to website visibility in Google organic search at the start of last month. From the 30th June, when Google’s latest Core Update started, the number of impressions that websites focusing on a specific country received from that country increased dramatically, while impressions from the rest of the world saw an almost identical drop. We’ve seen this across almost every single website we operate that is aimed at a single country.
Naturally, the UK is the primary focus for many of the websites we operate, and for nearly all of them, daily domestic impressions increased two, three, sometimes even fourfold. The strange thing is, unless you’re filtering the impressions by country, you wouldn’t realise there had been a change, since impressions from the rest of the world dropped by an equal amount.
Strangely, these increased impressions aren’t resulting in a corresponding increase in clicks. We are seeing some improvements in organic traffic from the UK to some sites, but it’s a small improvement compared to the massive jump in impressions. We’ve seen similar growth in visibility for a lot of paid search advertising campaigns as well, although that mostly kicked in at the end of July.
What this means
More visibility is always good, although if your UK specific site is actually targeting the whole world Google may have just robbed you of some overseas customers. The lack of clicks isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we have seen that traffic from Google organic search is typically more invested in what they’re seeing on your site than previously. This is, as we’ve discussed before, because users are ushered along their decision-making journey by AI assistance before finally coming to your site when they’re already at the point where they are ready to make a decision.
Does this mean I don’t have to do any SEO?
Honestly, no. And I don’t just say that as an SEO expert. The fact is that SEO is as important as ever, even in the age of AI. The fundamentals of getting found by AI, either AI powered search or AI chatbots, are largely existing SEO techniques, with some minor adjustments. Without having worked on your website’s SEO, you’re highly unlikely to get anywhere with AI.
