The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Our inbound lead generation is highly dependent upon SEO — it’s how we get more than 70% of our leads. So, naturally, we got a tad nervous when we saw some of our top commercial landing pages dipping out of top-five positions for their targeted search terms.
When we took to the SERPs to investigate who was unseating us, we discovered something equal parts unsettling and interesting: Our high-value, commercial-intent landing pages weren’t being displaced by competitors. They were being ousted by business directories and “listicles” that rank or compare multiple companies.
In fact, an evaluation of seven of our most important commercial keywords demonstrates a 50% increase in the number of lists and directories in top-five organic SERP real estate year-over-year (excluding SERP features such as People Also Ask).
Here’s an example for the keyword “SEO content writing services.” The image on the left is the SERP in 2022, and the one on the right is the SERP in 2021:
Notice the difference? The Featured Snippet, which we owned in 2021, is gone, we’ve dropped to position 5, and there are now three lists in the top-5 organic results where there used to be none.
We saw this again and again, and it left us with three questions:
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Is there, in fact, an intent shift happening here, where Google is favoring lists, directories, and company rankings (consciously or unconsciously) over traditional commercial landing pages?
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If so, what can be done about it?
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What does this mean for the future of SEO?
Let’s tackle them one at a time.