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👋What’s growing: Working like it’s 2009 again.

The percentage of job jugglers in the US hasn’t been this high since the Great Recession. The number of American adults holding more than one job surged to around 9 million this year—that’s roughly 5.4% of workers.

It’s not all bad, though. While some people are scrambling to keep up with inflation, others are just side-hustling. Here’s hoping they build companies that support employees who won’t need a second income.

LEADERSHIP

Play the long game, not the wrong game

If your SEO strategy has gone off-course, you might not notice for years. Step in and do an audit before you waste any more time or money, and swap useless website traffic for actual revenue growth.

You’ve spent years investing in SEO, but is it really paying off? 

[Calculate your SEO ROI]

Traffic is great, but this is where too many SEO strategies stop.

The end-game is revenue.

And traffic ≠ revenue.

It can be hard to pivot your strategy — Sunk cost fallacy says you won’t want to change strategy because of the time you’ve already put into it, like enduring a movie that sucks. But this isn’t a movie. It’s your business.

Before we start: having an SEO dashboard isn’t optional if you want to fix this. If you don’t have one yet, head over to Semrush to set yours up for free.

Time to put the $ in $EO.

1. The wrong keywords = the wrong traffic

Everyone is occasionally going to rank for irrelevant keywords.

It’s just part of SEO, and it often gives us a chuckle when we look at our reports. (For a while, our editor had an adventure blog that randomly started ranking for the term “bodies exploding in mausoleums” even though she had definitely never written about that). 

When 50%-80% of your traffic is generated by irrelevant or only-sorta-relevant keywords, you’re letting Google associate you with terms that won’t bring money in.

Here’s the fix.

(A) Check the keywords you rank for in your dashboard. In Semrush, this would look like:

• Going to Organic Research, 

• Entering your domain in the search bar

• Scroll down to the Top Keywords section

(B) If you see irrelevant keywords in the top 20 results, find all pages that use them and:

• Update that content to be more closely relevant to your core business

• Delete it if it doesn’t help you make a sale

• Try redirecting that to a better page

😱What if you see a drop in traffic? Good. You don’t want nonsense traffic on your site telling Google that irrelevant keywords are a good match for you. 

2. Give the people what they want

If your keywords are relevant but still don’t drive revenue, check keyword intent. 

Are they looking for information? Looking to reach a particular page? Or looking to buy?

None of the intents are bad to be capturing as long as the keywords are relevant, but you have to think about two things:

1. Do the pages I show them meet their intent? A product page doesn’t work for someone looking to know more about your business.

2. Do I want to maximize conversions now? In which case you might want to target commercial or transactional keywords.

Let’s have a look at yours! It should look something like this (Semrush version):

• Enter your domain in Organic Research again.

• This time, check the Keyword by Intent Section.

• Are most of your keywords (I) informational and (N) navigational? Time to find “higher-intent” (commercial and transactional) keywords.

Naturally, high intent keywords are more competitive because every other business would also like to make money. Shocking, we know. You can find less competitive keywords with the same intent with the Keyword Magic Tool.

• Do the pages you show answer their needs? Match the intent.

3. But are you sticky?

Doing all the above right and still no luck?

SEO might not be the issue. It might be a stickiness problem. 

Check the bounce rates and time spent on your top pages:

• High bounce and low times mean visitors aren’t sticking around → you’re not matching intent.

• Low bounce and decent times (>10 seconds) but no revenue → time for some conversion rate optimization (CRO).

It’s a big topic, so we’ll just drop these here:

• How to Combine SEO and CRO.

• 7 tips to improve your landing page’s conversion rate.

Takeaway: Face your flaws & be prepared to make changes

Einstein famously said doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results was insanity.

Yes, we have to give our SEO strategy time to work. But we also have to change course when things aren’t working out.

So if you’re getting traffic but no conversions, you have to drop that traffic to make space for real, valuable views on your site. It calls for some brutal honesty and scary moves (no one wants to say goodbye to content they poured their heart into, especially when it’s ranking).

But you’ve spent years getting your SEO strategy to where it is. Don’t get attached to a mistake just because you spent so long making it.

CULTURE

Your late-night musings could change the world

Where bright ideas turn marketing campaigns turn reality-shifting sensations.

In the depths of the night in 1947, copywriter Frances Gerety scribbled something down on paper:

A diamond is forever. 

You might have heard of it.

This was just after WWII when money was tight and diamonds weren’t at the top of everyone’s shopping lists. De Beers needed to make diamonds relevant, and their go-to copywriter, Gerety, mined the goods.

According to the American Gem Society, diamond sales grew by 50% in the three years after that tagline came to life.

Before this, diamonds weren’t the obvious standard for engagement rings. Only around 10% of brides-to-be received a diamond in 1939. By the 1990s, that number got closer to 80%, says Statista.

More campaigns that shaped how we live:

• Gilette saw an opportunity to market to women in 1901. They’re the reason so many women choose to shave their body hair.

• Sunkist made orange juice a daily staple in the 1930s, by promoting the health benefits of oranges to women who typically prepared breakfast back then.

• Sears, Roebuck and other brands made gendered clothes a thing in the 1940s and 50s. Pink for girls and blue for boys wasn’t so normalized back then. Historian Jo B. Paoletti says kids were mostly dressed in bleachable white cotton to easily salvage clothes from accidents.

Fast-forward a few decades…

We’re bombarded with ads every day. Can a campaign still drive societal change like De Beers’? Let’s look at the past couple decades.

• Apple‘s marketing made the iPhone a worldwide staple by framing it as an experience and a generational leap forward. Yet the iPhone itself was revolutionary, as the first intuitive touch-screen smartphone. That helped.

• Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” introduced many people to the concept of toxic masculinity, an idea that is here to stay.

• Dove’s “Real Beauty” was considered one of the first campaigns to ever go viral, raising awareness about how many women don’t feel beautiful (±80%). But aside from doubling Dove’s sales, it hasn’t resulted in significant societal or consumerist change.

• GoPro’s “Be a Hero” made their first person cameras a must for recording and sharing all kinds of experiences, but mostly action.

It is hard to quantify without a serious study, but it does seem a little harder to reproduce what De Beers and Sunkist did. Still, keep a notepad by your bed. Scribble down your crazy ideas. Cultural shifts aren’t possible until somebody causes them.

DATA POINT

Is this real life or just fantasAI?

71% of images on social media are now AI-generated, says Forbes. But can users tell the difference?

Two buzzwords of today, “authenticity” and “AI,” don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.

AI tools are lowering the barriers of entry for people and businesses wanting to share creative content, but they’re also raising concerns — and eyebrows.

Signicat published a report last month sharing a scary number: Deepfake fraud incidents grew by 2137% over the past three years. 

It turns out that as deepfake technology gets more sophisticated, businesses — particularly financial institutions — are at a higher risk of fraud. Traditional security systems can no longer fully detect what’s real during KYC checks.

And humans aren’t much better. 

Kapwing published an AI quiz sharing deep fakes and real videos of everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump. Only 7% of testees got full marks. You can take the quiz here if you think you can do better.

A 2024 Yale University study found that only 27% of people in the US believe they’ve encountered AI-generated art, so transparency could be an issue here.

In that regard, we can expect to rely on:

• Platforms like Meta’s promises they are addressing it

• Companies like Reality Defender building AI detection tech

• Governments slowly thinking about legislating against AI and deepfakes

This week’s issue was written by Amy Hawthorne and edited by Catherine Solbrig.