Jamie Marsland is my favorite source of WordPress info and he recently posted an interesting video on Wix.com marketing versus WordPress. He talks about the spectacular marketing team behind Wix everything they are doing right in content marketing. He then voices some very valid concerns that WordPress, the free, open source alternative, might have a hard time competing for attention.
I think this is a larger problem as commercial marketing teams become more savvy at ranking for search, video, and mindshare in general. I have noticed lately that even Google seems to be struggling against the masters of SEO.
I just did a search on Google for “how to build a new website.” The first set of results “above the fold” (before I needed to scroll) are Google sponsored links. I fault Google for that. Their sponsored results are huge now! Next, I must scroll through the Google AI response for which, I usually have no interest.
I then finally see the first organic result. Can you guess who it is? You guessed it, Wix.com. Well done, Wix marketing team.
I continue to scroll through the other organic results and even click a few pages in. Based on the Google search results, I could imagine how a budding web developer might get the impression that you must use a commercial website builder to build a website. There is little mention of WordPress.org software in the search results, much less, opening a text editor and writing some HTML!
I am concerned that unbiased content and free, open-source software options are getting lost in the noise of the content marketing machine.
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