Stop Focusing on WordPress Searches and Serve Your Customers
When my faucet was leaking water into the cabinet below, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t even know the question to ask. So I just googled, “Leaky faucet.” I found some YouTube videos, tried what they recommended, made it worse. Went to Home Depot…twice. They told me “Moen” was good for replacement parts. I ordered parts on Amazon. They didn’t fit. Nothing worked. 4 weeks went by.
Turned out, until we got 2 different quotes from professionals, we didn’t know the problem was unfixable and it needed to be replaced. Maybe if I had known a bit more about how faucets worked, I would have known what to look for.
“WordPress” search traffic is down from 2020
Over the last few months, we’ve seen several outlet report on the seemingly alarming decrease in search terms Year over Year in the WordPress space. This week over at Ellipsis, the published one such report titled, What will the future of WordPress searches look like after COVID-19?
It’s an incredibly in-depth article and looks to be well researched. I mean, they even spoke to a Statistician at Oxford.
But much like every article that takes a short-term snap shot of data taken without looks at a ton of mitigating factors, it’s easier to use the data to back into the story you want to tell.
That article concludes with a survey Ellipsis administered that had a “non-statistically significant” number of respondents (though the actual number isn’t made public) before basically pitching their service at the end.
What is the point of these studies?
So what is the point of all that data? If search stats are momentarily down, but WordPress usage is up, and every survey response is confident in the WordPress ecosystem, who are exercises like this for?
They aren’t asking the right questions
I’m not a statistician, and I haven’t worked at an agency for a few years now. But I’m not convinced studies like these are asking the right questions. As more people start to use WordPress, there could be a couple of other factors that contribute to the decline of certain WordPress-related search terms:
- More WordPress website owners are relying on the professionals they’ve hired to answer the questions they have. Or more likely:
- More people who don’t know the specific WordPress terms are doing the searching.
Remember – I had no idea how to fix my leaky faucet, or even where to start.
It’s possible, even likely, that the people using WordPress and WooCommerce websites to power their online businesses don’t know to search “Elementor,” “SearchWP,” or “Yoast.” Instead they’re searching “drag and drop website builder,” “better website search tool,” and “how do I SEO my website?”
So what’s the answer?
Serve your customer by answering the questions they’re asking, not by looking at the solutions you already know exist.
The tools might change. The need to solve problems won’t.
There’s always fear when a landscape appears to be changing. Just look at the blow back from the block editor. People like what they are familiar with, and if there’s fear that “WordPress whatever stats are down,” they want their fears to be assuaged.
People will always need a roof over their heads, even if the tools to build the roof change. Heck…even if the fundamental definition of roof changes.
Similarly, Customers will always have problems in need of solving…even if the solution changes over time.