Is AI Killing SEO [Again]? | Seer Interactive

Download Wil's Assets

[Pro Tip] Use this website to break the transcript up into 3 pieces. Then feed it to ChatGPT. Try this prompt:

What is a first step that I can take to understand if my search marketing is being impacted by AI-Driven Search based on Wil's transcript?

The Great Reset Overview

AI is the new "death of SEO"

SEO has been "dead" or "dying" since before I got started in 1999.

[Source: Search Engine Land]

Mayyyyybe it's just an industry that changes a lot. And we need to be experts at adaptation. Over the years, Seer's revenue gains tended to pop after bouts of SEO death threats:

SEO keeps dying but seer keeps growing

At Seer, we're all in on AI and the disruption it brings. And we need to understand that disruption. There's a lot of noise and buzz around these changes, so our job remains the same as it always was -- used data and the tools we have to lean into FACTS over frenzy.

What are the 'Jobs to be Done' (JTBD)?

1. Remove friction in user experiences

The philosophy behind engines like Google, ChatGPT, and other AI-driven platforms can be deeply rooted in the concept of enhancing user experience by minimizing friction.

Friction Example: "Black Primary Care Physician" query

Taking the top 4 PPC results - none of them had a good page to be showing up for "Black Primary Care Physician"

But now we run the #1 organically ranked page - the one that Google does more work on to make sure the experience matches what the user is looking for:

You now know that if the brand you're working with has the philosophies and infrastructure to support the Black experience, you can provide a much better experience for those users. Because what they're getting now is garbage:

2. Have more hypotheses

With search data, we have audience insights that other teams dream about. Use that data to drive new hypotheses about your users and work daily.

Examples:

"Black primary care physician" landing page experiences are bad
I think Wikipedia will be one of the first sites to be disrupted by Chat GPT
If we know "best" queries are better suited for Chat, can we create a disruption signal for clients?

3. Build mini-apps

With the introduction of AI tools to our stack, quick testing of hypotheses is at our finger tips.
Take all those hypotheses you have and build mini apps / analyses that help you understand what is worth moving on.

Example: Take the hypothesis from above: If we know "best" queries are better suited for Chat, can we understand what clients have more disruptable queries they rely on (i.e. that drive $)

You can do this in a semi-automated way with ChatGPT:

At Seer, we take it one step further and automate the data, at scale, across all clients with our data platform.

Show me all PAAs that contain words like best, vs, compare, etc:

Add in some "Real Company Shit" by including % of cost and conversions:

Now the conversation with our clients becomes about "when do you want to be alerted? At what %age of cost and / or conversions will this start to be something you want to strategize around"?