Recently, I’ve been discussing the importance of SEM and SEO with a number of colleagues as we talk about content marketing and content strategy. When looking for some data, I realized that I caught myself doing what most of us often do, saying “I’ll Google it.”

Last week I shared a quote from a former colleague about brands and how they’re formed. How many people think of Google as an ad company? Yes, we may see their Google Home device and think they’re a product company too, but really we’re saying is that’s secondary.

Google’s brand is one that answers your questions by aggregating the best content for you to quickly find what you’re looking for. They’ve made their experience so good for their users that they’ve made a brand that’s woven into our daily lives.

I want to share my top 5 reasons that SEM and SEO still matter and should not be a “set it and let it” element of any digital strategy.

Owning the market.

Let’s face it Google owns the market, so when it comes to SEM and SEO our focus is often on Google. We do this because Google has a reported 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide.

This number is fascinating, so I thought I’d break it down a little. According to Search Engine Land, that equates to at least 63,000 searches per second. At least 5.5 billion searches per day. At least 2 trillion searches per year.

It’s not easy.

No one said providing the most relevant search results is an easy task. According to an article by Brian Dean, there are about 200 factors that go into the Google algorithm (he lists the factors in his article). These factors break out into the following categories:

• Domain Factors
• Page-Level Factors
• Site-Level Factors
• Backlink Factors
• User Interaction
• Special Google Algorithm Rules
• Brand Signals
• On-Site Webspam Factors
• Off-Site Webspam Factors

It’s not just these 200 factors to be aware of. All things digital change and Google’s algorithm is no different. It’s been reported that Google updates its algorithm between 500 – 600  times per year. Not all of these updates are major, but they are tweaks nonetheless. Moz has a tracker that allows users to explore changes and provides some release notes.

Google it.

An average person conducts 3 – 4 Google searches daily. It’s important to think about this for a lot of reasons as it shows how Google truly has become engrained in our daily lives.

As Google continues to focus on ways to make search more seamless and integrated into our daily lives. With this in mind, I expect this number to increase. Voice and visual searches are still in their infancy but will continue to grow. Recode projects these will be 50% of the search market by 2020, while I don’t think these searches will equal 50% of the market by 2020, I do think they will grow.

Smart homes are on the rise. The cost of smart speakers and virtual assistants is declining. Access to wifi’s increasing. As these elements become more attainable they’re also becoming more ingrained into our lives. As humans, we want to interact with technology in the ways that we interact with each other.

If you ain’t first, you’re last.

I borrowed this subhead from the fictional legend Ricky Bobby (Talladega Nights) as it rings true when it comes to Google search results.

Smart Insights pulled data from Advanced Web Rankings around click-through rate (CTR) based on the position in Google search results. It shows that the CTR drops from nearly 30% in the first position to about 10% in the third position to around 5% in the 5th position before continuing to fall the lower the position.

This isn’t surprising when coupled with the SEO Tribunal’s reporting that the average time a user spends searching for something on Google is less than 1 minute.

We live in a world of convenience. A world of now. If a product can provide these, it stands a real chance to succeed. Google’s built a brand on this.

Bringing it home.

Google reports that 4 in 5 users use search to find content that’s local to them. 50% of mobile searches about local content result in a store visit and that 54% of users search for business hours when searching for local information. These stats show that power of Google for local businesses.

Content marketing’s more important than ever today. Search changes frequently and is complex. Just because you create great content doesn’t mean that more people are going to find it. That’s why SEO and SEM is an important part of every digital strategy.