A lot is going to be changing soon when it comes to Google's organic results.
We’ve had a good ride, we SEOs (and our clients.) SEO has been relatively stable now for many years – an we’ve made huge progress for our clients using white-hat methods for organic traffic and ranking.
But soon, depending on your market, you should expect to see between 20% and 80% of your organic traffic go away little by little inversely proportional to the release and usage of Google’s and Bing’s SGE interface. It’s my prediction that the usage is going to be very large – perhaps 40% or more of queries within a year or two.
Here are some factors we're facing with SGE:
- Meaningful SEO organic performance analytics are going to be broken. Even organic success (in the form of brand or product mentions) will not be visible anywhere.
- Click throughs on snapshot and other links will remain as organic traffic, but how these show up will be changing.
- Google has held true to their plan since Google IO, so I don’t think this will remains an experiment never to be released. In fact, we are hearing of more users seeing int – even Google Workspace users.
- Google will not add many links to SGE results because this is a legal liability – they become the advisor – and presenting the answer is an endorsement of possibly illegal or inappropriate things.
- CHATGPT / Bing / Something will leverage the simplicity and convenience of Generative AI search results and undermine Google’s lead in knowledge retrieval if Google doesn’t go all-in on this.
- Google will get more ad revenue with SGE since it the current design takes up so much real estate above the fold.
- Voice search and conversational-generative AI are a formidable combination that we’ve never had before (No, Siri and Alexa aren’t even close.)
Ok, What Should We Focus On?
This is a fast-evolving set of recommendations – but for the most part, a concentration on helpfulness, speed and becoming very familiar with SGE generally are good ways to spend time. Other focus areas we think are worth considering are here:
Focus: Go for the Snapshot – Pillar Clusters Seem to Dominate Search Generative Snapshot Links
Content from subject matter experts (SMEs) that embodies E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) is increasingly prevalent in the SGE snapshot.
Focus: Avoid Time-Wasting Web Redesigns and Procrastination Related to Content Work
Many website related activities sap precious budget from the critical SEO/content marketing program, despite the business-saving levels of urgency. Don’t let it happen to you.
Focus: Get to Brand Queries – The Yet-to-be Disrupted Search Result.
Prioritize getting users to brand-specific queries swiftly in whatever way you can. This might be through dark social, events, promoted content about trends, top-10 lists, and other authority-highlighting pillars.
Focus: Double Down on Helpful Content – Increase Emphasis on Subject Matter Experts and EEAT, Not “Corporate Voice” Content.
Now is not the time to cheap out on content or ignore content marketer’s advice. Google’s Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust algorithm is rapidly favoring content and perspectives from trusted subject-matter experts over corporate narratives and sales-oriented content. Helpfulness must be taken very seriously as a measure of quality. We have been advising on helpfulness since 2009.
Focus: For Informational Queries, Adopt Featured Snippet Optimization Guidelines (We’ve been advising this since 2010)
Target question based and how-to queries with your content, and provide short-answer-then-long-answer content format strategy with sell-also clusters. This is nuanced so let me know if you’d like an explainer for your business’.
Focus: Become a Prompt Master. Understand the Evolving Buyer’s Journey Expressed in Prompts
Explore the growing trend of delaying Sales language until the final stages, while maintaining robust content support throughout the journey as prompts are appended. Review all of the follow up questions being suggested.
Focus: Expand Link Building Initiatives:
Links seem to continue to serve as significant authority markers, both for validating large language model predictions and traditional organic results. The helpful content / EEAT content strategy also supports link acquisition success so the two should be coordinated.
Focus: Utilizing Search Ads to Prompt Brand-Centric Searches:
Recent iterations of SGE (as of July 2023) have been observed to largely respect “brand queries”, offering an immersive brand-centric experience within search results. Search ads will provide a way to boost the association of the brand with certain types of content – and it will be critical to build awareness. Search ads will be presented with SGE offering brands awareness even if there’s no clicks.
Focus: Evergreen Retargeting Strategies:
Retargeting audiences present a valuable marketing tool, enabling brands to navigate the constraints of third-party audiences.
Focus: Enhancing Structured Markup:
Generative AI results and highlighted search snippets are showing a preference for content with backend structured markup. This trend is particularly evident for formats like how-to guides, FAQs, and similar content types.
The big question mark that remains is – how many people will use Generative AI Search Results?
Ever since I started using Generative AI via Chat GPT and especially the OpenAI API, my workday has been transformed. I grow weary with standard search results like I haven’t in the past.
My Answer to the question above…It’s too clean and convenient for people to reject it, and they don’t care about your organic results. I think adoption will be wide-spread and fast.