2018 Marketing Year In Review

It’s been a busy year of evolving trends in online marketing. Below are the top 10 developments all small business owners should know about.

1. Organic CTR (click through rate) was still 10X bigger than paid on mobile and nearly 20X on desktop.
2. In 2018 we saw a trend of “zero-click searches” thriving, which is not so great for owners of small business websites but great for Google and searchers. What am I talking about? Just notice how you get an answer without clicking on a single website in the search below. More than 60% of mobile searches yielded no clicks to a website in 2018.
   
3. Organic traffic accounted for 38% of mobile searches, and 66% of desktop searches.
4. You had to spend more for visibility in local search in 2018 – 35% of local packs contained ads in 2018. This means companies had to spend money to be listed in local search more than ever before.
5. Reviews were increasingly important in 2018. Online reputation management, or reviews, can be one of the strongest drivers of consumer buying power. Here are a few statistics:
   • 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34).
   • Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business.
   • 40% of consumers only take into account reviews written within the past 2 weeks – up from 18% last year.
6. HTTPS is now a requirement for websites. If you still haven’t added HTTPS to your website, you should add it immediately. You can secure your website by installing an SSL certificate (get it from your host). Otherwise, you may be losing visitors who are deterred by the “not secure” warning before they even arrive at your website.
7. In July, Google started rolling out the “speed update” which alters ranking to prioritize web performance. Your website needs to load fast, especially on mobile networks, or it will suffer in ranking. You can check your speed here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
8. In April, Google began the roll out of “mobile first” indexing, meaning it will index the site as it appears on mobile. If you haven’t already moved to modern techniques to keep your desktop and mobile versions of your site in sync, you should consider redesigning your website soon.
9. Google+ is now in the process of being shut down (I dropped Google+ marketing for my clients back in the summer – that was a smart move).
10. Google AdWords is now Google Ads.

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