what is seo marketing

Welcome to The SEO Queen: We’re Here to Help Small Businesses Win Online

If you’ve been wondering what SEO marketing actually is — and why it still matters in a world drowning in AI headlines — you’re in exactly the right place.

At The SEO Queen, we exist for one reason: to help small businesses, especially the millions of Black-owned businesses worldwide, get found online, compete with confidence, and grow in ways that create real, tangible results. Not hype. Not gimmicks. Real results.

Before we get into strategy and step-by-step guides, we want to start with honesty. Because there is a lot of noise out there right now about what the internet looks like, where people are searching, and whether SEO still matters. So let’s look at the actual data — and then talk about what it means for your business.

The State of Search in 2026: What the Data Actually Shows

The search landscape has changed dramatically, and business owners deserve the unfiltered truth about what’s happening — not a sugarcoated pitch from a corporation trying to sell you on their new AI product.

Search Engine Market Share: Google Still Rules, But the Cracks Are Showing

Google controls 89.62% of global search engine market share as of early 2025, according to Statista. Bing holds 4.01% globally, and in the United States specifically, Bing holds 7.5% of the U.S. market — its highest share ever recorded. Meanwhile, privacy-focused DuckDuckGo commands 0.7% globally and a notably higher 2.28% of the U.S. desktop market, reflecting a growing demand among American users for search tools that don’t track their every move.

Here’s what the market breakdown looks like at a glance:

  • 89.62%  Google’s global search market share (all devices, March 2025)
  • 4.01%  Microsoft Bing’s global market share
  • 7.5%  Bing’s U.S. market share — its highest ever
  • 0.7%  DuckDuckGo global / 2.28% U.S. desktop market share

But here’s the deeper story: Google’s share just hit its lowest point in over two decades. For the first time since 2015, Google dipped below 90% global market share. That doesn’t mean Google is dying — it isn’t. But it does mean the monopoly grip is loosening, and where people search is evolving.

The Zero-Click Tsunami: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know

This is where the story gets uncomfortable for major corporations — and critically important for small business owners.

In 2025, roughly 60% of all Google searches end without a single click to any website. That means for every 1,000 searches on Google in the United States, only 360 clicks actually reach an independent website on the open web. In the EU, that number is marginally better at 374.

Zero-click search rate 2025:

  •  Mobile: 77% of searches end without a website visit
  •  Desktop: 46.5% end without a website visit
  •  News searches: rose from 56% to 69% zero-click in just one year
  •  Searches triggering Google AI Overviews: 83% zero-click rate
  •  Overall: 60% of all searches globally end with no external click

To put it plainly: Google is increasingly keeping people inside Google. Their AI Overviews, Knowledge Panels, featured snippets, YouTube integrations, and Google Maps results are all designed to answer questions without ever sending a visitor to your website. Clicks going to Google-owned properties like YouTube and Maps grew to 14.3% of all U.S. searches in early 2025 — up from 12.1% a year prior.

Google’s own branding for their AI Overviews feature says it all: “Let Google do the searching for you.” Translation: we’ll answer your customer’s question — and they won’t visit your website.

Where Else Are People Searching? The Rise of Social Search

Where Else Are People Searching? Search Has Left the Building

Traditional search engines are no longer the only front door to your business. A significant and growing portion of your potential customers — particularly younger buyers — are bypassing Google entirely and going straight to social platforms to find answers, discover products, and vet businesses before spending a single dollar.

The numbers tell a clear story:

Nearly 4 in 10 members of Gen Z in the United States now treat TikTok as their go-to search destination — ranking it above Google for product discovery, local recommendations, and how-to content. This is not a passing trend. It is a behavioral shift that is reshaping how entire generations find and evaluate businesses.

Social media as a whole now accounts for over 10% of all global website traffic, and in the United States that figure climbs to 15.23% — more than double the global average. Organic search still leads overall, but its share has declined by nearly 4 percentage points in less than a year as social platforms absorb more of the discovery journey.

Here is how the social traffic landscape breaks down right now:

  • Facebook drives 76.56% of all social referral traffic worldwide — still the dominant force
  • Instagram follows at 6.72% of social referrals, though its share has been slowly declining through 2025
  • TikTok holds 5.50% of social referrals — but its growth rate is the story. From January to August 2025, TikTok’s referral traffic grew nearly fivefold, the steepest rise of any platform tracked
  • LinkedIn accounts for 2.97% of social referrals — and growing, particularly for B2B and professional services
  • Pinterest drives 2.61% — highly relevant for visual products, home services, fashion, food, and lifestyle brands

Together those five platforms generate nearly 95% of all social-driven traffic to external websites.

What makes this even more significant for SEO strategy is that half of all Google searches — 50.3% — now return at least one social media platform among the top ten organic results. Reddit appears in 37% of searches. YouTube shows up in nearly 20%. LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest all make regular appearances. Your social presence is no longer separate from your SEO — it is part of it.

For small business owners, this means one thing above all else: your ideal clients are searching on multiple platforms simultaneously, and if your brand only exists in one place, you are invisible to a large portion of the people who are ready to find you right now.

The Real Story Behind the AI Hype

So what does all of this mean? And why does every major tech company seem to be screaming about AI being the future of everything?

The honest answer: major corporations are getting greedier. The deployment of AI technology is primarily driven by one motivation — cutting labor costs and accelerating time to market. AI lets corporations replace human workers, synthesize millions of pieces of content without compensating the creators who produced it, and keep users inside their own platforms rather than sending them to independent websites.

What gets called “innovation” is often consolidation. The zero-click phenomenon isn’t an accident — it’s a business model. Keep people searching. Keep them on Google. Keep them watching YouTube, scrolling through Google Shopping, clicking Google Maps. Every interaction inside the Google ecosystem generates advertising revenue. Every click that goes to an independent small business website is a click Google doesn’t monetize.

what is seo marketing

The truth about AI in search:

  • Google AI Overviews appeared in 6.49% of queries in January 2025.
  • By March 2025, that figure doubled to 13.14% — a 102% increase in two months.
  • 88.1% of queries that trigger AI Overviews are informational — the exact content type
    small businesses invest the most time and money producing.
  • 73% of B2B websites experienced significant traffic loss between 2024 and 2025.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s corporate behavior following shareholder interest. And it’s happening at the same time as rising inflation, increasing costs of living, and a global economy that is squeezing small businesses harder than ever.

A Note on Sustainability: Why The SEO Queen Takes Technology Seriously

We want to be transparent about something that most marketing companies won’t say out loud: AI as it currently exists is not a sustainable technology.

Training and running large AI models requires enormous amounts of energy and water. Data centers that power generative AI consume electricity at a scale that rivals small cities. The environmental cost of this technology is real, and it is being largely ignored in the race to deploy AI products as fast as possible.

At The SEO Queen, we actively work to minimize our technology footprint. We are committed to using as few data centers as possible, being intentional about the tools we deploy, and building a business model that doesn’t require burning the planet to serve our clients. This is not a marketing statement — it is a core operational commitment.

We believe that effective SEO does not require the most advanced AI stack, the biggest budget, or the most resource-intensive tools. What it requires is clear thinking, precise keyword strategy, consistent content, and a genuine understanding of what your customers are actually searching for. That costs far less — in money and in environmental impact.

So What Is SEO Marketing, Really?

SEO marketing — search engine optimization marketing — is the practice of making your business visible to the right people at the exact moment they’re searching for what you offer.

In plain language: it is the art and science of answering your customer’s questions before your competitors do.

Despite everything happening in the search landscape — the zero-click searches, the AI overviews, the social media shift — the underlying truth of SEO has not changed one bit:

Digital platforms are algorithms.
Those algorithms surface information when you use the right keywords.
Your customers are sophisticated — they know what they’re looking for.
You have to be specific. You have to answer the exact question they’re asking.
The businesses that do this consistently are the ones that get found.

Even in a world where 60% of searches end without a click, those searches still shape perception. Being present in featured snippets, AI Overviews, and social search results builds brand recognition that converts. The businesses that disappear from search entirely — that produce no content, build no keywords, generate no backlinks — become invisible. And invisible businesses don’t grow.

Yes, the game is harder than it was five years ago. Yes, major corporations have tilted the playing field. But the fundamentals remain: you need to be found. And the way you get found is by producing quality content built on the keywords your ideal clients are already using.

what is seo marketing

What This Means for Small Business Owners — Especially Black-Owned Businesses

The SEO Queen was built with a specific mission in mind: to make effective SEO accessible to the millions of Black-owned businesses worldwide. The data tells us that the organic search landscape is being compressed by corporate interests — and that compression hits small businesses and minority-owned businesses hardest, because they are the least likely to have large paid advertising budgets as an alternative.

When a plumber in Atlanta, a hair salon in Houston, a consultant in London, or a clothing brand in Lagos can’t be found on Google because they don’t have the marketing budget of a Fortune 500 company — that is an equity problem as much as it is a business problem.

We are responding to that problem by doing three things:

  1. Lowering our prices so that new and existing business owners navigating rising inflation can access quality SEO services without going into debt.
  2. Teaching what works — not hype, not shortcuts, not AI magic tricks — real keyword strategy, real content, real authority building.
  3. Operating sustainably so we can serve our clients long-term without contributing to the environmental costs that disproportionately impact the communities we serve.

What to Expect From The SEO Queen Blog

Over the coming weeks and months, this blog will cover everything a small business owner needs to understand, implement, and benefit from SEO marketing. We’ll cover:

  • What keywords are and how to find the ones your customers are actually using
  • How to write blog posts, web pages, and social content that rank and convert
  • Local SEO — how to show up for the people in your community who are ready to buy
  • Backlinks, domain authority, and how to build credibility over time
  • How to use YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn to multiply your SEO impact
  • Technical SEO — made simple and accessible, not intimidating
  • Honest analysis of AI’s role in search — what’s real, what’s hype, and what to do about it

Every post on this blog is built on a real keyword — the exact phrase your potential clients are typing into search engines right now. We practice what we preach.

Digital PR: The Game-Changer Most SEO Agencies Skip

Digital PR is not optional — it is an integral part of every SEO strategy we recommend at The SEO Queen. And it’s one of the most underutilized growth levers available to small businesses today.

Here’s why it matters so much right now. When most people think about SEO, they think about one thing: Google web search. Blue links. Page one rankings. But that is only one of four major vertical search channels that Google and other platforms use to surface information — and each one is a distinct opportunity to be found.

The Four Vertical Search Channels — All 4 Matter for Your Business:

WEB RESULTS     — Traditional organic blue link rankings
IMAGE RESULTS   — Google Images, Pinterest, visual discovery
VIDEO RESULTS   — YouTube, TikTok, embedded video in search
NEWS RESULTS    — Google News, press coverage, Digital PR placements

Being present across all four verticals quadruples your probability of being found.

Most businesses optimize for one, maybe two of these. The SEO Queen builds strategies that work across all four. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Web Results: The Foundation

Your website pages, blog posts, and service pages need to be keyword-optimized, structured correctly, and backed by authority signals like backlinks. This is the core of traditional SEO — and we cover it thoroughly in everything we do.

Image Results: Visual Discoverability

Your images — product photos, infographics, branded graphics, headshots — are all indexable. Google Image Search alone accounts for 22.6% of all web searches. Naming your files correctly, writing descriptive alt text, and publishing images on platforms like Pinterest creates a second layer of visibility that most of your competitors are completely ignoring.

Video Results: The Most Powerful Channel in 2025

Video is now the dominant content format across every major platform. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Videos appear in Google web results. Short-form content on TikTok drives discovery for Gen Z consumers. Every blog post The SEO Queen produces is designed to be repurposed as a video — so that your content works in search and in feeds simultaneously.

News Results & Digital PR: Authority at Scale

This is where Digital PR becomes a true game-changer. When your business is featured in online publications, industry blogs, news sites, and press releases, those placements do two things simultaneously: they build backlink authority that boosts your entire domain, and they make your brand appear in Google News results — a completely separate search channel that billions of users access daily.

Digital PR means actively pursuing press coverage, writing newsworthy content about your business, issuing press releases around milestones, securing features in relevant publications, and getting your brand mentioned across the web in ways that carry genuine authority signals back to your site.

For a small business owner, a single well-placed press feature can do more for your SEO authority in one day than months of incremental on-page optimization. Combined with a consistent content strategy, Digital PR is the multiplier that separates businesses that grow organically from those that plateau.

The SEO Queen’s Recommended Strategy:  Web SEO + Image SEO + Video SEO + Digital PR = Maximum Visibility Across All Four Channels. This is the only approach that fully leverages how search engines actually surface content in 2025.

Cultural Competency & Brand Voice: SEO That Actually Sounds Like You

Here is something most SEO agencies never talk about — and it may be the most important differentiator The SEO Queen brings to the table.

Effective SEO is not just about ranking. It’s about resonating. Your keywords can be perfect. Your content can be technically optimized. But if the words on your website don’t sound like you — don’t reflect your community, your culture, your voice — your ideal clients won’t feel seen. And people do business with brands that make them feel seen.

This is where cultural competency comes in. The SEO Queen is built by and for communities that have historically been overlooked, misrepresented, or spoken to in someone else’s language by mainstream marketing firms. We understand that:

  • The language your Black-owned beauty brand uses is not the same as a corporate skincare brand’s language — and it shouldn’t be.
  • The keywords your community actually searches for may be different from the “high volume” terms a generic SEO tool surfaces first.
  • Your brand voice — the way you speak, the references you make, the values you hold — is a competitive advantage, not something to sand down for mass appeal.
  • Cultural authenticity builds trust faster than any paid ad campaign — and trust is the currency that drives conversion.

At The SEO Queen, we don’t just optimize your content — we amplify your voice. Every keyword strategy, every blog post framework, every meta description we craft is aligned to how your specific audience speaks, searches, and makes decisions. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is a precision strategy built on cultural intelligence and genuine care for the communities we serve.

When your SEO sounds like you, and your content answers the exact questions your clients are asking, in the language they’re already using — that’s when the magic happens. That’s when organic traffic becomes loyal customers.

Don’t Take Our Word For It — Hear From a Real Client

The best way to understand what The SEO Queen delivers is to hear it directly from a business owner who has experienced it. Watch this video testimonial:

VIDEO TESTIMONIAL

Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/b36ItNiXyu8

Embed this video on your published blog post using the YouTube embed code for maximum SEO impact.

Want to read more success stories? Explore our full library of client testimonials and case studies to see the real results The SEO Queen has delivered for businesses just like yours:

Client Testimonials & Case Studies: https://seoqueen.com/seo-case-studies/

Something Big Is Coming: The SEO Queen’s Proprietary Technology

We have been building something. And we are announcing it this year.

The SEO Queen has been quietly developing our own proprietary technology solutions — purpose-built to serve small business owners with the kind of precision, cultural intelligence, and affordability that no existing tool on the market delivers.

We will not share every detail yet. But here is what we will tell you:

What The SEO Queen Proprietary Tech Is Built To Do:

• Advance your business with tools designed specifically for small and minority-owned businesses
• Deliver SEO insights and execution at a fraction of the cost of enterprise platforms
• Incorporate cultural competency directly into keyword and content recommendations
• Minimize technology footprint while maximizing output — because sustainability matters
• Give business owners the power of data-driven SEO without needing a team of engineers

We are building the tools we always wished existed. Tools that don’t assume you have a $50,000 marketing budget. Tools that understand your community. Tools that produce results without producing waste.

Stay close. Follow The SEO Queen on all platforms. Subscribe to this blog. When the announcement comes, you will want to be the first to know — because these tools are going to change what’s possible for small business owners worldwide.

Be First to Know When We Launch

Book your Power Session now and tell Zhe you want early access to The SEO Queen’s proprietary tools.

Ready to Start Winning Online? Let’s Talk.

The most important thing you can do right now is stop waiting and start building your digital presence. Every day your business isn’t showing up in search, a competitor is taking your potential client.

We know the search landscape feels overwhelming right now. Zero-click searches, AI overviews, rising costs, algorithm changes — it’s a lot. But here’s what we also know: people are still searching. Every single day, your ideal clients type their questions into Google, TikTok, YouTube, and Bing. The only question is whether they find you or someone else.

That’s exactly why we created the Reach More Clients Power Session — a direct, no-fluff conversation with Zhe Scott, The SEO Queen herself, where we look at your specific business, your market, and your goals, and map out a clear SEO strategy you can actually implement.

Book Your Reach More Clients Power Session

Speak directly with Zhe Scott, The SEO Queen, about your SEO needs.

→ Book Now: seoqueen.com/reach-more-clients-power-session

 

Already know you need a full SEO package? Explore our service options:

SEO Signature SEO Service Packages (with Digital PR): https://seoqueen.com/seo-services/

SEO Launch Phase Service Packages (without Digital PR): https://seoqueen.com/seo-launch-phase-service-packages/

Reach More Clients Power Session: https://seoqueen.com/reach-more-clients-power-session/

About The SEO Queen

Zhe Scott, The SEO Queen, is the founder of TSQ Marketing Inc., based in Flint, Michigan. The SEO Queen is on a mission to make effective, affordable SEO accessible to small businesses worldwide — with a particular focus on the millions of Black-owned businesses who deserve the same visibility, reach, and opportunity as any other business on the planet.

© 2026 The SEO Queen · TSQ Marketing Inc. · seoqueen.com · info@wpdev1.online · +1 (617) 475-0964

Sources & Research References

The following sources inform the statistics and data cited throughout this post. All data reflects research published between 2024 and 2025.

Search Engine Market Share

Zero-Click Search & AI Overviews

Social Media Search Behavior & Traffic

Primary Data Sources Referenced Within the Above Reports

  • SparkToro / Datos (a Semrush Company) — 2024 Zero-Click Search Study
  • Semrush — AI Overviews’ Impact on Search in 2025 (10M+ Keywords)
  • BrightEdge — Google AI Overviews Trigger Rate Research, January 2025
  • Similarweb — Zero-Click & Search Behavior Aggregated Data, 2025
  • Search Engine Land — State of Search Q1 2025: Behaviors, Trends, and Clicks Across the US & Europe

All URLs verified as of April 2025. The SEO Queen makes no claim of affiliation with any source listed above. Statistics are cited for educational and informational purposes.

Zhe L. Scott

Author Zhe L. Scott

Zhe L. Scott, is the THE SEO QUEEN. She is passionate about motherhood, music and marketing. She is the author of SEO Training 2017: Search Engine Optimization and Marketing for Small Business. She loves to play the violin, write music. In her free time she loves to spend time with family and friends.

More posts by Zhe L. Scott

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