Traditionally SEO is about improving organic traffic and little else. The idea essentially being build a taller billboard than your competitors that says basically the same thing, and make sure you can place it somewhere that every vehicle on the highway sees it.
Now those places are for paid results and/or Generative AI
Which means if you have an infinite scroll, and you rank below 5 let’s say, you might still be getting impressions and improving rank but is that doing anything meaningful for your traffic?
I think SEO needs to focus on
1. Intentional content campaigns that use UTM codes to track attribution and movement between channels and to point of sale. Set KPIs around clicks, drives to POS, and improving quality scores for paid search.
2. Supporting paid search to make that spend more efficient rather than replacing it
3. What about AI results? Calm down, that’s not finished being built yet. In the meantime, create useful content and you’ll inherently get more visibility in those areas and again measure your clicks—you can’t really control those impressions.
^this one probably will be ignored by large businesses that have to measure everything but if it were up to me I’d create an estimated number based on impressions I can’t attribute to anything else or samples of branded terms that do clearly appear in AI results. Or social listening.
That’s pretty much it. SEO ain’t dead, the industry just needs to revolutionize.
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