How AI is Changing SEO?

🔥HOT TAKE 🔥

AI isn’t killing SEO.

It’s rewriting the rules.

And the ones who adapt? They’re gonna win.

So to help you level up your knowledge, I had Mike Witham from 97th Floor on The The Marketing Millennials podcast.

He’s helped brands like LG, Ancestry, Discover Card, and Dell DOMINATE search.

If you want to understand SEO, Mike is my go-to, and I’m glad he came on the podcast.

Here’s the need-to-know on S-E-O from Mike:

1️⃣. Reports of SEO’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

“If you’ve been in Marketing for a while, you know that so-called SEO ‘experts’ and Marketing influencers are always declaring that SEO is dead for a different reason every five minutes.

There’s been a lot of suspected murders of SEO, right?

It was just a couple of years ago that TikTok was going to kill SEO. That was going to be our new source of information and search.

Most recently, AI has emerged as a credible threat. 

But that doesn’t mean SEO is dying.

As long as there’s search engines, there’s going to be opportunities for people to take advantage of them, optimize them, and get exposure through them

(I feel like I hear “SEO is dead” every year. The truth is that it’s evolving. It’s not as simple as keyword-stuffing a bunch of blog posts. And that’s a good thing.)

2️⃣. Don’t fight AI, use it. 

I love using ChatGPT for keyword and audience research.

Many of my clients, working in an agency, are experts in fields that took them 10 years to master at Ivy League schools.

I’m never going to go to those schools or be an expert in what they do.

But ChatGPT gives me a window into what their audience cares about, what they need, and how their product can solve their problems.

For example, I’ll ask ChatGPT questions like, “What does a data scientist do all day?” or “What challenges might a data engineer face when dealing with X or Y?”

That gives me ideas on meaningful content that I can have my content team produce that will rank for keywords that will bring in highly qualified traffic. ChatGPT is amazing for audience research. (…and tons of other things too 😉

But on the real, ChatGPT is the best for coming up with article ideas. Whenever I’m making content calendars, it’s a must have. )

3️⃣. Only aim for rank and you’re gonna tank.

Forbes has published numerous articles about air fryers, five, six, seven articles all about air fryers.

Forbes isn’t known for air fryers. It’s known for its financial advice, rankings, wisdom, and business acumen. Not for air fryers.

What’s happening to Forbes right now is that they’re struggling.

They did well in many areas because they were Forbes, ranking highly for whatever keywords they wanted to optimize for, driving traffic.

But now they’re facing a decline because they haven’t stuck to the areas where they have real expertise.

What you should leave behind is irrelevant content that you used just to drive traffic to your site.

It wasn’t helpful then, and it certainly isn’t helpful now.

Google wants to see expertise in your core subject and your unique perspective on it, not anything that you can’t directly tie back to what you’re offering on your website.

(Focus, focus, FOCUS. Everything needs to tie back to your core offering so focus on what you actually do, not just tangential clickbait… no offense, Forbes.)

4️⃣. Viva La Video!

Video is about being a real person on camera, telling a story, sharing information, demonstrating something, or giving a different take.

Just like you said, search engines can read that transcript very easily.

They can understand video content a lot better now.

Being there and taking advantage of that medium is huge for so many reasons.

But that one huge reason to go after is because you’re showing Google.

You are an expert in the field and it’s your voice, your content, and there’s no doubting that.

(I’ve been saying this for a while, but I believe that being present on video is going to separate the great brands from the good brands. Watch this space!)

5️⃣. Google ain’t going away.

Google is a verb in the English language.

It’s so ingrained in our culture to use traditional search engines, that it’s not gonna just gonna go away very quickly.

But I do think that Google is adapting enough to have competitors like ChatGPT and Perplexity where user behavior will start shifting towards those chatbots.

I do think that search and getting exposure from search will be very different in 5 years.

AI is going to be way more ingrained into our daily lives and into our culture than it is right now and way more widespread than it is right now.

Right now, there are two types of marketers:

⚡️ Marketers who understand AI.
🚪 Marketers who will get left behind.

Which one are you?

IN A MEME