What are the big differences that you see?
We see the following:
  1. Paid listings blend in – paid listings aren’t as clearly defined as they used to be. In other words, they blend in, which helps ads generate a higher percentage of the clicks.
  2. Localized listings can be ads – the first listing in the localized listing is also paid.
  3. The right side no longer has ads – most of the elements on the right side, when you click on them, drive you to perform another Google search.
  4. Less organic listings – the homepage only has 9 organic listings if you exclude the localized listings.
  5. Organic results are pushed down – not only do the paid and local listings show first, but news results are also in-between the organic results. This causes the 3rd, 4th, 5th… organic result to get fewer clicks.
The common trend, therefore  is people are focusing on the paid ads more than the organic
listings.

.And.

Organic listings are no longer guaranteed to be as high up as they, once were. Do you follow
are you with me, so far?
Just look at this eye tracking study of a Google SERPs result, the common skimming of the
presented listing.
eye tracking
It clearly shows, how the paid ads have the majority of the attention.

So, does this mean you should give up?

No, I am not trying to paint a picture of how you shouldn’t try to rank high on Google or that
SEO is useless. Because although Google keeps adjusting the layout of their SERPs page,
 it’s still the most popular site in the world.

If, it were a country it would be tied to India as a population of users, per month -- 2nd ONLY to China in population, hell even YOUtube alone has that ranking and 'Youtuba' - China adds, 
another ~.5BB users. And those are conservative estimates.
google similarweb
Commanding, 57.34 billion visits a month means… you have no choice but to do SEO!
But you shouldn’t waste your time thinking about each and every change Google is making
because it’s albeit... out of your control.
Just look at how many algorithm changes they made in the last 12 months. It’s too hard to
keep up with each change or predict Google’s next move. That’s why I take a different
approach to get ahead of Google’s upcoming algorithm changes. If, I were you....
I focus on user experience.

What should you do?

You aren’t going to be able to control your rankings for every single one of your keywords… especially if you are doing SEO the right way. It's an near impossible task at hand.
The majority of your traffic should be coming from long tail phrases. Just look at my blog,
 I rank for ~477,000 keywords. Of course I have a computer and ai to help me out.
That’s far too many keywords to track on a regular basis.
I focus on three (3) things, as a human:
  1. Create an amazing user experience – Google doesn’t want to rank sites at the top that are the “best optimized.” They want to rank the site that users love the most at the top. So, focus on providing that and, in the long run, you should rank higher.
  2. Overall organic traffic growth – keywords have trends and they change in popularity over time. Instead of focusing on a handful of keywords or even a few hundred, I just focus on increasing my overall organic traffic. As long as it keeps climbing quarter over quarter, I’m happy.
  3. Conversion rate – more traffic doesn’t guarantee more sales. I continually optimize my conversion rates so that each additional organic visitor I get has a higher chance to convert into a customer.
And I know I said I focus on three (3) things, which is true… but every once in a while I focus
on one more thing. It’s updating my old content.
If I had to add in a 4th, it would be updating my old content. Even though I know SEO fairly
well, there is no guarantee the even my traffic keeps going up and to the right.
Just like you, my traffic drops every once in a while.
641 decline
It sucks when your traffic just drops 6.94% in a week and it is scary when that trend continues.
But when it does happen, follow this and you can reverse the trend of your declining traffic.

Which strategy should you follow?

There are a few SEO strategies I use to get more traffic that still work well today. If you
follow them, you should get more traffic over time:
  1. Globalization – search isn’t too competitive outside of English. That is changing fast though, so I would follow these globalization tips as soon as possible.
  2. Off-page SEO – it still impacts rankings significantly and you can’t ignore it. Here are 6 off-page strategies you should follow.
  3. Link building – here’s one of my favorite strategies for link building… it works really well. Even if you have a new site and no one knows who you are, you will be able to build links using it.
  4. Land and expand – you already rank for terms on Google. This strategy will allow you to turn one ranking into hundreds.
  5. Brand building – Google wants to rank brands higher than non-brands. Follow this as it will help you build a brand.
There are tons of other tactics and strategies, both tactically and strategically that people are
using, but the Five (5) main ones I mentioned above still work well in today’s competitive 
SEO & associated, search  landscape.

Conclusion

Yes, you want to continually improve your search traffic over time, but obsessing over
whether or not a keyword is ranking number #1 doesn’t amount to a 'hill of beans,' or doesn't
mean much.
SEO has moved to a long-term, long-tail strategy. The goal isn’t to rank for one keyword, or
even a hundred or a thousand… the goal is to rank for hundreds of thousands, if not millions 
of keywords over time.
And as long as that trend is continually going up and to the right, you’re fine.
One way to see if things are going directionally right is to use Ubersuggest. When you put in
 your domain, you’ll see a chart that looks something like this:
keyword rankings
You want the total number of keywords to increase over time and you want the small green
bar to continually go up over time as that means a higher portion of your listings are moving
up in Google and it's SEO schema.
So, are you going to continue focusing on rankings?

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