Digital Marketing Reads: Volume 30

Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world. Missed the last one? Read Volume 29.

Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl: A turning point for SEO and GEO

If you have a website, you may have noticed your organic search traffic declining in recent years. While this could be due to a number of variables, it is almost certainly due in part to the rise of AI bots scraping your site content, displaying it in snippets that show up on Google search, and making it so that users often don’t need to click onto your site to find the answer they were looking for (and hence, resulting in less search traffic for you).

The ethics on this are more than a little grey, but the good news is that there may soon be a way for us to gain back some of that lost traffic. Cloudflare has introduced a new Pay Per Crawl feature (in private beta when this was written), allowing website owners to charge AI crawlers for accessing their content. This initiative aims to give publishers more control and create a new revenue stream from AI-driven scraping, in response to rising concerns over uncompensated use of original content.

LinkedIn Study Finds Adding Links Boosts Engagement By 13%

According to this article, LinkedIn recently debunked a long-held myth: including external links in your posts actually boosts engagement by about 13.6% and increases impressions by nearly 5%, contrary to the old advice of avoiding links to keep your posts “algorithm friendly”.

Their analysis of over 577,000 posts from nearly 48,000 company pages shows that posts with a link consistently outperform those without. On top of that, the study found carousels drive the highest engagement rates, while video and poll formats are also performing well. So if you’ve been skipping links to be safe, it might be time to rethink that strategy. Link away on LinkedIn, we say.

Organic search vs paid search: Which should you choose?

This article breaks down the difference between organic search and paid search in super simple terms. Even if you’re familiar with them, it’s well worth the read to refresh your knowledge.

In short, organic search takes time and effort to build credibility and lasting visibility (via SEO), while paid search gets you fast exposure with precise targeting (for example, via Google Ads). You get the best of both worlds by using them together: paid search delivers quick wins and valuable short-term traffic, and organic search builds lasting authority and a reliable traffic stream over time.

So a smart marketing strategy weaves both paid search and organic search into one digital marketing plan for long-term success. (And if you want help with your SEO and paid ads strategies, you know what to do: contact our Mildura digital marketing team.)

Rock Solid Marketing helps businesses in Mildura and across Sunraysia with SEO and web design. Contact us to talk about your website or your search plan.