Today I want to walk through how to level up your website traffic in a market where search behavior and marketing trends are shifting.
I’ve been in SEO for more than fifteen years, mostly helping enterprise teams grow. I can tell you this: we’re in a completely new era. More change is coming, and a lot of what used to work no longer does.
Google usage is still rising, but site traffic isn’t. Every SEO founder and expert I talk to says the same thing. Traffic is flat or falling. Fifteen years ago, SEO was the only real game in town. Same with early Instagram and YouTube. Organic reach was wide open. That world is gone.
But SEO itself isn’t dying. What is dying is the old strategy of chasing the biggest, highest-volume keywords. That doesn’t make sense anymore.
What matters now is focus. If you talk about too many topics, you dilute your relevance. This is true on websites, YouTube, and every other platform. You win by becoming the clear answer for a specific set of problems.
Another major shift is programmatic SEO. Companies like TripAdvisor and Yelp rank for massive numbers of terms because they build millions of structured, useful pages at scale. Programmatic SEO isn’t about dumping out thousands of weak pages. It’s about well-designed templates, smart data, and pages that actually help people. When done right, this improves both traffic and conversions.
Tools like ClickFlow already automate painful SEO tasks: internal links, content consolidation, updates, and more. AI lets you build workflows that keep your site fresh without the manual grind.
Even with all this, I expect overall site traffic will continue trending down. Google itself reported that clicks are dropping because AI Overviews take up more space and answer questions before users click. That shift isn’t going away.
So what do you do? You optimize for citations.
Search engines like Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT pull from multiple sources. They look for trustworthy, structured, frequently referenced information. Long-tail queries, clear answers, and strong topical signals help you get cited more often.
On top of that, links still matter. But the best way to earn them today is by building free tools, calculators, generators, and other useful assets. When you give people something helpful, they share it. Those links compound.
If you’re in B2B, pair SEO with CRO. Personalized ads, personalized landing pages, and clear pipeline reporting all matter. We’ve seen conversion lifts simply by adjusting CTAs on long-tail programmatic pages. Even a small lift, multiplied across hundreds or thousands of pages, makes a huge difference.
Your blog content also needs more than surface-level ideas. Add data, show a unique angle, and use visuals. You can let AI generate images or charts that match specific sections. You can even have it create interactive visualizations you can embed and share on social channels.
And this brings me to the biggest mindset shift: SEO is now part of “search everywhere” optimization.
Google isn’t the only place people look for answers. You have to show up on YouTube, Instagram, Amazon, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, apps, marketplaces, and AI search tools. You can’t repurpose one piece of content the same way on every channel. Each platform has its own style and rules. The brands that win are the ones that play each channel on its own terms.
The truth is SEO by itself isn’t enough, and organic reach is smaller than it used to be. But if you adapt, you can still grow—using smarter content, programmatic pages, better conversion paths, and a broader distribution strategy.
Change isn’t slowing down. But if you stay flexible, these shifts can help you, not hurt you.