If you’re responsible for marketing, you’ll be well aware of the importance of a great content management system (CMS) for digital products like your website, mobile apps, staff portals, and so on. You may even need to create bespoke digital processes or systems unique to your business, such as internal training platforms or communications channels.
WordPress is the most popular CMS available today, powering almost 45% of the world’s websites. That popularity is on the rise, too, as more and more businesses realise the vast potential of the platform and the benefits it can deliver.
However, there’s still a misconception that WordPress isn’t suitable for large businesses. That’s no more than a myth, though. In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world use WordPress for their CMS.
But what are the specific reasons why that popularity has spread into the enterprise market over the past decade or so? To answer that question, let’s take a detailed look at the benefits and advantages WordPress offers large businesses:
1 – Scalability and Agility
WordPress is famous for its high level of scalability. However large your company, or the size and complexity of your site – as well as the amount of traffic passing through it – WordPress won’t have any problem managing that load.
Scalability is one of its most prominent advantages for large businesses, because it’s also agile enough to easily evolve and grow alongside your changing requirements.
The platform is more robust than most realise as well, with enterprise-grade performance and speed. This great performance also means user adoption and retention will always be high, helping you drive strong return on investment (ROI) on all the digital products you build.
2 – Flexibility and Customisation
WordPress is equally renowned for its flexibility and customisation, which are particularly useful for complex or bespoke development projects. You can use its flexibility to build bespoke features and functionality into your website or create an entirely unique system from scratch.
In large organisations where company-specific processes and workflows are common within your sites, this makes WordPress a highly beneficial option.
3 – Fast Time-to-Market
Thanks to its simplicity and intuitive usability, WordPress is a very efficient platform to build with. That gives you the advantage of delivering development projects with a very fast time-to-market. This is a significant benefit of any CMS, as it helps you save time, reduce costs, and provides more opportunity to test, iterate, and innovate.
4 – Integration
WordPress is very easy to integrate with other systems. Because most large enterprises have a lot of legacy technology to consider when implementing new systems, this is a huge benefit WordPress has over more cumbersome CMSs.
WordPress also integrates very well with back-end systems that are vital to your daily operations, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, PowerBi, and so on. This minimises disruption to your business while integrating WordPress into your existing tech stack.
5 – Low TCO and Strong ROI
WordPress comes with a very low total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to other options. Unlike most CMSs, you won’t need to invest heavily in adding new features or capabilities, and you won’t need to worry about expensive extra work to manage upgrades or updates from the platform.
Because WordPress is so agile and rich with dynamic capabilities and features, it’s also proven to deliver strong ROI in both the short and long-term.
From a long-term value perspective, your initial projects won’t just stop at initial implementation, either. As your project or requirements evolve and your business grows, WordPress can seamlessly adapt and grow with you.
Other Points to Consider
It’s important to remember that every business, and every project, is different. While the benefits listed here do make WordPress an excellent CMS, you should still carefully evaluate how well it aligns with your specific objectives, requirements, budget, and other needs.
It’s also important to understand that most businesses will need the support of an agency with platform-specific skills and expertise to help you leverage a CMS to its full potential. As is the case with all platforms, it will be vastly easier to achieve your objectives and gain greater ROI, if you have the support of an experienced specialist partner to guide you.
If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, or need help deciding whether it’s a suitable option for your own requirements, we have a comprehensive guide to evaluating and selecting the enterprise options for a CMS here.
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- A bespoke client-facing website that represents your brand and provides direct access to your products or services
- An internal web portal, either for training employees or for networking and sharing of information
- A bespoke intelligence platform with powerful data and analytics capabilities
- A new content management system (CMS) that can provide greater flexibility and scalability for a portfolio of multiple sites
- A unique tool to transform inefficient manual processes into a simple digital platform
- A bespoke website that integrates directly with a wide range of other back-end tools and technology, such as your CRM system.
- Experience working with businesses in the healthcare sector
- A strong portfolio of successful bespoke development projects
- The expertise to guide you and help you make the best decisions for your project
- Certifications and accreditations
- Compliance with healthcare sector regulations
- Security and data protection built into the core of your project
- Secure hosting supported by back-up, disaster recovery, and risk mitigation plans
- Ongoing support services to maintain, update, and optimise your site
- Additional advisory services to help you gain as much value from your technology as possible.
- Boosting engagement with customers, with an outstanding UX and personalised services
- Increasing customer retention and loyalty
- Enabling real-time interactions with data and greater analytics capabilities
- Higher adoption rates of internal systems and improved business performance
- Reducing costs by streamlining inefficient processes and removing outdated technology
- Strengthening your corporate network with enterprise-grade security
- Achieving competitive advantages in a highly competitive market.
- In October 2024, Bing recorded its second-highest market share ever (4.16%), the highest since 2011.
- Yandex reached a record-high market share of 2.78% in the same month.
- This decline in Google’s market share does not account for AI-based search alternatives, meaning the real shift could be even more pronounced.
- Whilst Google is still dominant and search competitors still pale in comparison, the direction of the trend is noteworthy and something SEOs and businesses should closely monitor.
- 57% of respondents use AI daily.
- 49% see AI and traditional search engines as interchangeable.
- 67% believe AI will replace traditional search within three years.
- “Does Google realize they already had a really good search engine? The AI doesn’t work. It sucks.” (5.6k upvotes)
- “It’s shaping up to fit in with the shockingly poor Google Search results that are loaded with sponsored garbage.” (2.3k upvotes)
- “Even when you get to the first results, they are usually useless articles, AI-generated content, or sales pitches.” (2.3k upvotes)
- Tracking and analysing search trends across platforms.
- Optimising for both traditional search and AI-driven search tools.
- Enhancing conversion funnels to capitalise on the traffic they do receive.
Digital Business
10 March, 2023
How Healthcare Businesses Should Approach Bespoke Web Development to Set Themselves Up for Success
Many businesses in the healthcare sector require some form of bespoke web development in order to remain competitive today. But entering into a bespoke development project can be a daunting challenge, with plenty of risks attached to it.
This article will answer your pressing questions about bespoke web development, and provide you with a step-by-step guide to set yourself up for success when approaching your own project.
In recent years, modern healthcare has been driven forward by great advances in technology. Organisations in the healthcare sector have leveraged cutting-edge digital technology to transform the way healthcare services are delivered for the better.
But with that positive change comes a shift in expectations to improve technology across the board.
Whether you’re a practitioner or a healthcare solution provider, you now must deliver your services to your end-users through the latest digital channels if you want to keep up with the rest of the industry.
If you’re unable to meet modern expectations for an effortless consumer-grade user experience (UX), your clients and partners will be left unsatisfied and may look elsewhere for a more convenient alternative. This can also apply to your internal systems and processes, as your employees also want intuitive digital tools in order to do their work efficiently and effectively.
To achieve this, you need a sophisticated website that serves your users in a way that’s specifically tailored to their needs and preferences, while also supporting your strategic business objectives. Given the complexity of the healthcare sector, that will likely require you to develop a website with bespoke features and functionality.
Of course, any website you develop also needs to be secure and compliant, and flexible enough to adapt as your business grows or healthcare technology trends continue to evolve.
Going Beyond the Basics with Bespoke Development
While a more straightforward, simple website may be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses, such a limited approach will prevent companies in the healthcare sector from retaining clients and staying competitive.
If you’re struggling to deliver exactly what your clients or other users are looking for, particularly in an industry as technical as healthcare, you may need to build a bespoke website. This could include anything from:
With a bespoke development project, the possibilities – and opportunities for innovation and growth – are virtually endless. You can discuss your current business challenges among your team, and then create something purpose-built to solve those specific challenges.
Of course, coming up with an idea for an exciting new site is the easy part. For many businesses, it’s an additional challenge to know where to go next. To make that easier for you, we’ve provided a simple, proven process here to help you plan and launch a bespoke web development project that will set you up for success.
A Process for Approaching Your Bespoke Development Project
Start with the “why” and think about what you’re trying to achieve
As touched on above, it’s important to have a specific reason for building a bespoke site. Whether it’s to achieve a strategic business goal, like customer growth, or overcome a prominent challenge, like inefficient processes, you need a clear purpose.
Determine exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your website and why it’s being developed. A big part of this will also relate to delivering on a specific need or solving a specific problem for your users as well.
Thinking of how it will help your users in a valuable way will make it easier to understand what sort of features and functionality you’ll require.
List all your requirements and use them to create a project brief
Once you’ve completed that first step, you’ll already see a list taking shape, with requirements for design, usability, capabilities, and so on.
Note down all those things your website needs to do and use that to create a project brief. This is a simple written document containing all the ideas you think are relevant to your site, including both functional and non-functional requirements.
The purpose of this is to make your request as clear as possible for the design and development agencies you speak to.
The more specific and detailed your brief is, the better, and that includes things like your initial ideas for cost and timelines. This will help ensure your agency will deliver what you’re asking for on time, within your budget, and matching your specifications. Without a clear, specific brief, you could wind up disappointed and maybe even over-spending.
Evaluate the options for a technology platform to build on
Most websites on the Internet are built using a content management system (CMS). This is almost certainly the type of platform you’ll want to use to create, edit, and publish all the content on your website and manage things behind the scenes.
Every business is unique, and every bespoke development project is different, so you need to use the work you’ve done in the previous two steps to help you select the right CMS.
By this point, when you’re evaluating platforms, you should already know your objectives, your requirements, your users’ needs, your budget, your existing technology stack, and so on.
Take all these factors and use them to determine which CMS is the best suited to deliver exactly what you want.
Something that’s important to note is that integrating a new website with other systems can be complex, particularly if you’re building your site on a new platform rather than an existing one.
When planning a bespoke development project, you’ll need to consider how easily your new platform will integrate with your other systems.
We recently produced a helpful series of articles comparing some of the leading CMSs for enterprise website development. You can read those here:
Find the right agency partner to design and develop your site with you
As mentioned earlier, you’ll likely need to find a design and development agency to partner with in order to create a bespoke website.
Building, managing, and supporting a high-performance website in the current technology landscape is extremely difficult, especially in a strictly-regulated industry like healthcare.
Not only should you look for a partner with a proven track record of delivering bespoke websites, you should also try to find one with healthcare sector-specific experience as well.
Which agency you choose will have a significant impact on whether your development project is successful, but also on whether or not your new website is successful in the long-term as well. It’s a decision that mustn’t be taken lightly.
Some of the qualities and capabilities that are important to look for when assessing your options for an agency partner include:
What Does a Bespoke Website Require to be Successful?
Once you’ve found a CMS and an agency you’re comfortable with, the next step will be to design and develop your bespoke website.
This will involve working to the requirements you noted in your project brief, but there are also some essential qualities and characteristics of a successful website in the current digital business landscape:
Enterprise-Grade Hosting
Ensure your agency can provide enterprise-grade, secure hosting, ideally with managed services, from a trustworthy provider. Not only is your hosting environment responsible for the security of your site and protection of your data, but it can also influence the speed and performance of your site.
If you’re in a position to build a bespoke website, you’re likely going to be dealing with a high volume of data and a large audience of users, so it’s important that you have a hosting service that can manage that without any disruption to your services.
User Experience
Whatever services or products you provide to companies in the healthcare sector, a great UX is the foundation of any successful website. People working in almost all industries now expect the same convenient consumer-grade experience they receive from the technology they use in their personal lives. Your website needs to be as quick and easy-to-use for your visitors as apps like LinkedIn and Amazon.
This also applies if the sites you’re looking to build are internal-facing for employees. Workforces now also demand a seamless experience with company systems, and providing this will create gains in efficiency as well as competitive advantages.
A great UX usually leads to a strong ROI.
Performance and Functionality
Your website connects you directly to your clients. Flip that to your client’s perspective, your website is a direct reflection of the quality and professionalism of your services.
If your website is slow, or doesn’t give your users what they need in terms of performance or functionality, they won’t hesitate to look elsewhere.
Security
Businesses today run on data. The data of your clients, partners, and your own critical data will be at risk if any technology attached to your network is not secure.
As mentioned earlier, you need to make sure your site is hosted in a secure environment with robust data protection measures in place. But security isn’t just about hosting. Security also comes down to a wide range of best practices, like regularly testing your site and updating your platform.
When your clients and partners are working with highly sensitive medical data, all your technology must also be highly secure and compliant with industry regulations.
Again, these are all critical things that your agency partner should be experienced enough to handle for you.
Personalisation
Personalised user experiences are becoming increasingly important for businesses to deliver to their clients and employees these days. One of the key advantages to a bespoke website is that you’re able to provide each of your users with personalised content and services, tailored to their needs, at each stage of their user journey.
Scalability and Agility
More often than not, a bespoke website is a key point of differentiation and an enabler of business growth. When you begin to achieve that growth, your requirements will evolve and your website will need to be agile enough to adapt easily without disrupting business continuity.
When planning and building your new site, ensure it’s developed with long-term growth and seamless scalability in mind.
The Benefits and Advantages of Bespoke Development
If you’re able to follow this process and incorporate some of these qualities into your new bespoke website, you’ll have something completely unique to your business. This should set you on the right path to accelerated business growth. But a bespoke website, once built and deployed, can begin to deliver a range of additional benefits and advantages too. These include:
The Healthcare Sector Runs on High-Performance Websites
As technology continues to evolve and drive more disruption, it’s becoming increasingly important to keep up with the resulting trends. A bespoke web development project allows you to reach beyond the limitations of a basic website and give your users exactly what they need from your services.
It also enables you to create a high-performance website that’s entirely unique to your business, differentiating you from your competition.
In the current healthcare sector, it’s easy to appreciate why this is quickly becoming a necessity, rather than a “nice-to-have” for many leading businesses.
Discover how global healthcare group, Clanwilliam, used bespoke design and development to take their brand to a new level and transform the capabilities of their marketing.
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Digital Business
2 March, 2023
Harnessing Your New Website’s Full Potential by Taking a Block-Based Approach With WordPress
Did you know you can use a block-based approach with your WordPress website to gain more value from the platform, with significant advantages in flexibility, scalability, and ease-of-use?
In this article, we’ll explain what blocks are, how they work, and how you can use them to build enterprise-grade websites quickly and efficiently, without compromising on quality.
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WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world right now, and it has been for a while. Unfortunately, though, some people still have the wrong impression that it is a CMS that can only be used to build more simple websites that do not have any real complex functionality or integrations, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, WordPress is far more intuitive and robust than most realise. The fact that around 45% of all websites online today are built on the platform goes a long way to prove that. WordPress also provides more scalable, agile capabilities that are perfectly suited to building enterprise-grade websites if leveraged in the right way.
There are intelligent – but still very straightforward – ways to use WordPress that can unlock more value from the CMS. If done with the right guidance, this can make WordPress a far better option than the more traditional, rigid approach of building websites.
This is an opportunity most large businesses are currently missing out on. In this article, we’ll show you how using blocks is a more flexible approach that can provide you with a wealth of benefits.
Understanding How Using Blocks In Your Website Backend works
In 2018, WordPress released a new block-based design and editing user interface (UI), known as Gutenberg. Instead of the typical page creation and editing functionality of a CMS, where you’d input text and images into a rich text editor, you can now build your site by creating and using a set of components. Components are blocks of code which have pre-defined style and input types.
Each component is named, to denote what it is from the perspective of the front-end of your site on the web page.
Note: Some agencies only provide a list of block names, but here at SoBold we also provide screenshots of each block so you can see it first. This makes the process much easier and saves you a great deal of time.
Each part of each web page is made up of these components, as pictured below.

However, taking a bespoke approach, you can design and construct unique blocks that are entirely your own. Blocks or components can be built for you by your agency so they’re bespoke to you, your style guidelines, your design preferences, and so on. And, when building your site, you can go into your pre-built components and edit things, like changing background colours, adding images, adding text, and so on.

This can be set up for you by your agency, so you have everything you need to create, edit, and publish new pages with your pre-built blocks. Anytime you need to create a new page, you just have to pick the appropriate components and place them in the correct position to quickly and easily build the page.
The Business Benefits of Using a Component-Based Approach
Scalability
Scalability is one of the greatest benefits of using these blocks, especially if you are wanting to continue to build out your sitemap and build out the content.
This scalability is where WordPress really shines, enabling simple, rapid, virtually limitless scaling of your website with a high level of accuracy. This is a cost-effective way of growing without having to compromise on the quality of your design.
Flexibility
Blocks provide you with a great deal of flexibility in building, editing, and structuring of pages as well. The ability to customise all your components, along with the intuitive drag and drop functionality, allows you to effortlessly adapt and expand on your website.
Efficiency
Building components, and repurposing them repeatedly across your website, is a highly efficient way of growing your site. It also makes it very difficult to make mistakes or take a wrong turn.
This efficiency of reusing blocks across your website will free up time for you to develop innovative new features, or focus on improving the service and experience you provide your clients.
Ease-of-Use
If you have non-technical members of your team who would benefit from using WordPress, blocks will almost certainly improve the usability of the CMS for those people.
An easier design and editing function helps more members of your team create web pages within clear, pre-set brand guidelines. That’s another aspect that frees up more time and resources to focus on higher value tasks.
If you’re working with a design and development agency, this also makes it much easier for them to be able to train you and enable you to use the platform to manage your site.
Faster Time-to-Market
All this efficiency and ease-of-use will enable you to achieve a faster time-to-market for new web pages, extensions of your site, or even entirely new websites.
That can, in turn, create competitive advantages for your business, particularly if your competitors are working with CMSs that are slower and harder to use.
Whether it’s you or your agency handling this, you can create and publish new web pages quicker than you could with any other approach.
Lower Costs and TCO
As a result of all of the above, you can reduce costs on development and design, and achieve a much better total cost of ownership (TCO) with the WordPress platform.
Something that takes an inexperienced agency days to complete with the classic design approach can be done in hours using bespoke blocks. This drastically reduces development costs and gives you a lower TCO in the long-term.
The Importance of Finding a Capable Agency Partner
As mentioned earlier, bespoke blocks provide you with a proven way to unlock more potential with WordPress and gain greater value from the platform. However, in order to do that, it’s important to find the right agency partner. You’ll need an agency with enterprise-grade expertise and a certain level of skill to guide and support you through this process.
Taking this approach to building WordPress websites is nothing new, but the real value here comes in creating blocks that are completely unique and specific to you, then enabling your team to use those to scale your site.
Many WordPress agencies may lean on the generic block editor. But to get this right, you should push beyond that to find a partner who can educate you on the opportunities of using a bespoke design system to build a high-performance website that’s effortless to manage and edit.
A great partner will also facilitate this for you in a way that ensures you have control, removing the risk of any users making mistakes with the flexibility of this system. You won’t need to worry about the integrity or quality of your site being spoiled because all your components will be built specifically to prevent that.
You’ll gain tremendous value from receiving an intuitive, quality website that you can easily grow at will, but one that’s also managed and supported by an experienced partner. Sticking to these blocks helps you stay within brand guidelines, adhere to best practices, and keep your site consistent.
You then have the choice to manage, edit, and expand your site yourself, or rely on your partner to do it for you quicker, easier, and more efficiently than they would with a traditional CMS.
Making the Most of Your WordPress Platform
Modern businesses today require a powerful, sophisticated CMS that can deliver great websites at scale with enterprise-grade performance. WordPress is a platform that’s built to provide all those qualities and more. Embracing this block-based approach is the most effective and efficient way to achieve that.
With a skilled agency partner to help you maximise the value your business gains from the platform, you’ll quickly realise just how well WordPress can deliver agile, intuitive websites.
If you’re in the process of evaluating platforms to deliver a bespoke web development project, check our comprehensive guide to assessing and selecting the right CMS here
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Announcement
24 March, 2020
SoBold’s response to COVID-19
In response to COVID-19, we’ve put in place a number of measures at SoBold to make sure we can continue to provide our services to our clients around the world as well as do what we can to help contain the spread of the virus.
It’s helpful to reflect on the fact that we offer a service whereby the performance and outcome of work produced will not be affected at all.
We’ve moved to full-time remote work
SoBold has decided to close our office in London and have our employees work remotely until further notice.
We’re doing this in an effort to help prevent the spread of the virus because, while most SoBold employees are healthy and not in the high-risk category, we appreciate that is not the case for all of those around us, or in the wider community we live in.
We have a responsibility towards these people, including others who work in our building and those we come into contact with during each others’ daily commute.
We’ve set up enhanced support for remote work
We don’t believe it’ll cause much disruption to the rest of the team and business.
Most of our clients, for example, will be familiar with remote meetings; we regularly host virtual meetings between clients and SoBold.
All team members have access to reliable remote conferencing and workflow tools, so they can speak to anyone either within SoBold or outside of the organisation, whenever they need or want to.
This means we can continue to frictionlessly share and work collaboratively cross-functionally, with the ultimate goal of always delighting our clients and partners.
Free support to those directly affected by the closure of their businesses
We want to give back and help businesses and individuals that have been so badly damaged by the closure of their shopfronts, gyms, restaurants and other businesses in the hospitality industry.
We are offering free website help to these businesses during these tough times.
If you would like to get in touch with a team member about this, please email hello@soboldltd.com
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Industry News
14 March, 2025
Google at a Crossroads: Declining Market Share, Stock Slump, and the Future of SEO
For over two decades, Google has been the dominant force in search, shaping the way users access information online. But recent data and a declining share price indicates Google’s once-unquestioned supremacy is beginning to show cracks.
As of January 2025, Google’s market share had remained under 90% for four consecutive months, sitting at 89.78%. This decline marks a significant shift, as prior to October 2024, the last time Google’s market share dipped below 90% was in March 2015. Meanwhile Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has seen its stock price fall 20% (as of March 11, 2025) following a disappointing earnings report and volatility in the US stock market.
While Google remains the dominant player, growing competition from other search engines, AI-driven search alternatives, increased scrutiny over search result quality, and evolving user behaviour all raise serious questions about the company’s long-term future. SEOs, digital marketing professionals and businesses must take note of these shifts and prepare for a changing landscape.
Google’s Declining Market Share: Key Trends
Google’s market share had been above 90% since 2015, but the recent downturn suggests a gradual erosion of dominance. October 2024 marked the lowest point in over a decade (89.34%), highlighting a downward trajectory that coincides with competitors like Bing and Yandex making small but notable gains:
A recent study of UK and US users found 27% now prefer AI chatbots like ChatGPT over traditional search engines. AI-driven search alternatives are altering user behaviour by providing direct answers without the need for traditional search engine result pages as tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), deliver instant, research-driven responses, reducing reliance on Google for informational queries.
This shift to LLMs and AI platforms is underlined by data showing:
In response, Google has started integrating AI into its search experience via the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), or AI Overviews.
However, reaction to Google’s jump into AI has been mixed, with concerns over bias, accuracy, and its role in increasing zero-click searches, leading to outcry from the SEO world and from companies harmed. Education platform Chegg is suing Google regarding Google’s AI Overviews, alleging AI-generated content is infringing on their educational material. There are numerous examples of AI Overviews providing users with incorrect information, including suggesting users can eat rocks, stick cheese to pizza with glue, and misattributing awards to different musicians, including claiming US indie musician MJ Lenderman has won 14 Grammys, when the true number is zero, which corresponds with a recent Vox Media survey found that 42% of respondents believe Google Search is becoming less useful. While Google’s lead remains substantial, the shift suggests that users are actively exploring alternatives—not just AI tools, but competing search engines as well.
Anecdotal evidence from popular forums like Reddit suggests growing dissatisfaction with Google’s search results. Users have expressed frustration over declining result quality, increased ad placements, and ineffective AI-generated search responses:
But for now, this criticism is not slowing Google down. Recent data claims AI Overviews now appear in 42% of Google search results, and last week Google announced AI Mode, search results pages which now only exclusively show AI-generated results.
The Search Landscape has vastly changed in a short amount of time, with SEO professionals and businesses reliant on Search left no choice but to adapt to these changes. From our recap of BrightonSEO back in October 2024, we reported that when an AI Overview appears in a Google search, organic click-through rates (CTR) drop by 70%. By January 2025, a new study has revealed this estimated CTR decline to have reached 84%.
SEO isn’t dead or dying, but is evolving at a faster pace than we’ve become accustomed to. Declining CTRs due to more AI Overviews means data optimisation is more important than ever, as is having the knowledge and resources to capitalise when opportunities arise.
This evolving search landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for SEO and digital marketing. With AI reshaping user behaviour, businesses must consider multi-platform strategies and optimise for AI-driven search as well as traditional search engines. SEO remains essential, but the rise of AI-driven platforms underscores the importance of conversion optimisation and data analysis. Businesses need to make the most of their traffic, and the utilisation of tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Looker Studio for tracking user behaviour and refining marketing strategies has never been more important.
Google’s Stock Price Downturn After February’s Earnings
At the time of writing, Google’s parent company Alphabet has seen its stock fall by 20% since its most recent earnings report. Revenue growth in key sectors, including cloud computing, fell short of expectations which fuelled investor concerns as Wall Street firms cut Alphabet’s price target, citing increased competition and AI disruption. This includes Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Citi. Analysts have explained this is due to tougher year-on-year comparisons in search revenue and anticipated increases in expenditures, such as higher spend on AI to adapt to the changing market.
Google remains the dominant player in search, but its supremacy is being tested as alternative search engines, privacy-focused platforms, and AI tools gain traction. The company is heavily investing in AI and cloud services to counteract market shifts, including plans to increase capital expenditures with $75 billion earmarked for AI development and expansion. Google has also invested $3 billion into Anthrophic, and have been boosted by the Department of Justice recently deciding not to proceed with a plan that would’ve required Alphabet to sell its stakes in AI firms.
Google is heavily investing in AI and cloud computing to maintain its competitive edge, but its cloud division’s underperformance and search revenue expectations raise questions for Wall Street, investors, SEOs and businesses about its long-term dominance. SEOs and businesses must prepare for a future where Google is no longer the sole gateway to online visibility.
Of course, there’s wider geo-political uncertainty and volatility in the stock markets stemming from the policies of the Trump administration. But this sort of stock downturn and decline in market share isn’t a surprise to many within the SEO community. SEOs and businesses crave consistency and stability, and the flurry of sweeping changes from Google over the past two years has provided anything but.
So what does the future hold?
Google’s declining market share reflects a broader shift in how users seek information. While AI-powered search tools and alternative search engines continue to grow, SEO remains crucial. The past year has seen the term Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) coined, focusing on optimising content for discoverability by LLMs. For marketers and businesses, this marks a wider shift, from not just ranking well in search results, but adapting to the evolution of user behaviour as LLMs continue to gain precedence.
Companies must adapt by:
The search landscape is changing, and businesses that evolve alongside it will be best positioned for success. At SoBold, we can help you navigate these shifts and develop a strategy that keeps you ahead in an AI-driven digital world.
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Company Milestone
10 June, 2021
Clutch recognizes SoBold as a top web developer in the UK
As a web developer team, our responsibility is in providing support to other companies. We make sure that websites look and work well for the businesses that need them. Our team serves as an expert extension of our clients so they can focus on their actual operations.
We take pride in our work and it looks like our efforts are paying off. We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been given an award. SoBold was named as a top UK web developer by Clutch for the year 2021.
Clutch is a ratings and reviews company that uses a unique verification process that ensures all of the content on their platform comes from legitimate sources. They then leverage this information to create ranked lists of the best performers in every industry around the world. The best of the best then get an award.
The best part of all this award is that it’s not decided by a panel of faceless judges. It’s based on the reactions of the people that worked directly with us. They’re the people in the best position to judge or critique our work. In fact, here’s what our Director had to say when we got the news.
“We are absolutely delighted to be chosen as one of the leading WordPress Development agencies in the UK by Clutch and look forward to continued growth and development to fulfil our potential.” Will Newland, Managing Director, SoBold.
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