SEO is a fools errand that should be relegated to history books
People click-thru from social media and chat apps, not type
Hard disagree on this. How am I supposed to discover rentpath.com if I don't know I'm looking for it? But if I'm looking to "connect with prospective renters by offering powerful digital marketing and leasing solutions," like the marketing copy on their landing page says, I can easily see myself landing on rentpath.com.
Tell me: did you literally type "hacker news" into google in order to discover this site?
Or the search query you did use was shared to the data broker and now whats going viral to you already matches what you would have looked for
Not advocating for this, it also drives traffic and is whats happening right now
Its not important that rentpath or some other service you never heard of was what you picked, only their ad spend and ongoing virality is important as they rely on a predicted distribution of the population to be shown their service and click through
This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Search engines generally aren't sharing your queries?
Its not important which specific service shares what when they all use the same concepts or an analytics package they added happens to be doing that without the developer/executive’s specific knowledge