We’ve all seen it. Brands with healthy websites and excellent content have been watching their organic traffic from Google’s SERP erode for years. In a recent webinar hosted by Search Engine Journal, guest speaker Nikhil Lai, principal analyst of Performance Marketing for Forrester Research, estimated his clients are losing between 10 and 40% of organic and direct traffic year-over-year. However, a stunning bright spot is this: Lai said referral traffic from answer engines is growing 40% month over month. Visitors arriving from those engines convert at two to four times the rate of traditional search visitors, spend three times as long on site, and arrive with queries averaging 23 words, compared to the three or four words that defined the last decade of search. Lai asserted that the channel driving this shift deserves a seat at the CMO’s table.…