This video addresses the changing landscape of SEO and website traffic, emphasizing that while traffic may be declining, businesses can still thrive by adapting their strategies. Eric Siu presents actionable steps to not only survive but improve website traffic amidst evolving search and marketing trends.
if your website's traffic isn't where you want it to be you're not alone the SEO world is completely changing especially with AI and thankfully it's changing in a way that actually gives you a stronger advantage than you might realize so today I'm going to show you steps to not just survive but level up your website traffic in a world of changing search and marketing trends i've been in the SEO space for 15 plus years helping small enterprise companies grow their traffic and I can tell you this is an unprecedented time with a lot of change still to come google usage is continuing to increase over time but the reality is you won't find a single SEO expert that will say that site traffic is skyrocketing and I talked to a lot of SEO founders i talked to a lot of SEO experts out there all of our traffic is either flatlined or it is going down when I think about SEO 15 years ago SEO was very much organic reach instagram back in the day YouTube all those things SEO was the only game in town and here's the thing the reason I want you to watch this video is I want you to understand that SEO is not going to die overnight website traffic is going down sure I'm going to show you how to win and how to make the most of this because while everyone is giving up they're running for the doors you don't have to do that if you watch this to the very end so let's start first by talking about keyword research strategies it no longer makes sense to target the highest volume keywords in your niche that used to be the game in town let's find all the high volume keywords that seem to be high intent they're relevant let's go after all those right that's not the game anymore what matters more than anything now is topical authority and the way I think about this is when I think about looking at my YouTube channel for example if I start talking about too many different things YouTube starts to ding me for that it's no different than your website you have to focus on one topic first it's not just focusing on keywords that's how you're going to win and another thing that you can do is programmatic SEO and programmatic SEO is a great way to target high intent keywords and provide a stronger user experience to searchers on your site let me give you an example of this so when you think about visiting Expedia they have millions of these pages fun things to do in Japan fun things to do in Rome trip Adviser does the same thing they have so many of these high intent pages that they create and that's why they rank for tens of millions hundreds of millions of keywords and that's why they're so big as companies right pso programmatic SEO is still a great way and now it's available to people like you and me i've been talking about this for the last couple years what you're going to have to do is you are going to have to design the templates for these pages and then you have to figure out what you want for each section on these pages i'll give you an example for our website we have these programmatic SEO pages or programmatic CRO service pages and we'll have AI scan the pages and figure out what content we want to recommend which client logos we want to put on there and how we want to adjust the call to action and then that directly affects our conversion rates pso is something that you can use and you don't have to build millions of pages or even thousands of pages even if you do a couple hundred or so it should help your business you should generate more conversions that way so as I mentioned earlier AI has made it way easier to move faster with SEO we've also built products ourselves so we have one called Clickflow and what Clickflow does is it will help you do a lot of the wrote SEO tasks that you don't like doing so for example finding internal links hundreds of internal links nobody wants to do that right it takes forever to find internal links what about consolidating content what about updating content those are all things that work in SEO today well what if you can create an agentic workflow that allows you to do that or you can create higher quality content at scale what I mentioned earlier was the trend of clicks that are going down over time on your website so again I want to reinforce that I believe website traffic is going to continue to decrease over time but Uncle Warren Buffett has always said that there are still good businesses out there you think of them as cigar butts they might have a few puffs left we used to pick up a lot of soggy cigar butts and I had a portfolio full of them uh and there were free puffs in them i made money out of that that's how I look at website traffic over the next decade or so website traffic is going down part of the reason it's likely due to AI overviews an example of this HRES which is an SEO product they actually released a case study that case study reports that website clicks are going down at least 34% to the AI overviews and AI overviews if you search on Google when you're searching for any keyword you'll see this AI generated search result and that occupies a lot of real estate and then that pushes everything else down that actually decreases website traffic because they get the answer that they want there so there is a shift now to optimizing for AI overviews and Google is favoring these AI overviews and so what I want to talk about is how you can actually optimize for them so one big thing that you can do is think about how these search engines rank things and Gemini is operated by Google and a lot of these LLMs you think about let's say Claude or Perplexity for example there's a lot of these products out there they actually look at Google's results Chad GPD is a little different they're partnered with Microsoft so they look at the Bing results and they're a little more diversified I would say what you still want to optimize for today is citations and what I mean by citations would be maybe the number of times that you're mentioned maybe the number of pages that you have maybe the number of reviews that you have these things all matter at the end of the Hey cuz there is a lot more compute that is going into these LLMs but also there's a lot more power that's going into these search engines where they can crawl a lot more things faster and they can quickly find out who you are the more time you spend creating content the more time you spend creating a product or service that is loved by a lot of people you're going to get a lot more citations and those are all little mini signals that go a long way not only that but when you think about optimizing you're not just optimizing for keywords anymore but you're optimizing for different types of keywords so longer tail phrases like I mentioned earlier people that are searching for these questions these phrases if you can occupy the answers for those that's going to help you be cited for these AI overviews right so you want to have the best answers at the end of the day because what's Google's mission google's mission still today is to organize the world's information so you want to make sure that you have the best information out there and if you have the best information out there AI or not whatever innovations come in the future you should still have a good shot at doing well so we just talked about links and another great way to get more links to your user website is by creating linkable assets that are actually helpful to your visitors and what I mean by that is I just mentioned Clickflow earlier so Clickflow is our SEO product we have another product called Carrot which is accountbased marketing software but we look at it as what are the features can we give away for free because if we give a lot of features away for free people will come in and use these and they'll talk about it to their friends if they get delighted by the product if the word of mouth starts to spread what happens is more people are going to link to it because people want to look good they want to link to resources that they want to be helpful to their audiences and they want to find the best resources out there so if you can create assets out there and you can just give them away for free even calculators you can vibe code a calculator using replet or cursor and you can just give it away or you can have a PDF that's created for you you can just give it away or maybe you have a guide that you can give away these are all linkable assets by creating these linkable assets that are actually helpful to your visitors again you're going to get more links coming to your website but I guarantee you you're going to create a lot of goodwill too and that's going to come back to you in the form of traffic and conversions for your business if you're in B2B here's the deal linkedin accountbased marketing sucks but it doesn't have to with Carrot it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads so you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works so if you want to learn more just go to carrot.ai and you can join the weight list again it's carrot k a r o t.ai AI and we'll see you on the other side attention is shorter than ever so if you want to make sure that your blog content is actually interesting yes your blog content still relevant again cigar butt website's not dead yet right but if you want your blog content to stand out you've got to think about how you can have unique data or a unique perspective that you can put out there but not only that you got to make sure that your blog looks interesting you can use Chat GPD images chatg images will generate interesting images that you can put on your blog and you could have chatp take a doc of whatever your blog post is and ask it to generate images for relevant sections for your blog have it do the work for you right the other piece is you can leverage Gemini gemini allows you to create interactive bubble charts and you can say "Hey create an interactive bubble chart for me showing me how ad spend has evolved over time it used to be Google and then it evolved to including Meta to including Amazon to including Pinterest and it shows you over time you can create this interactive bubble chart right and then if you have really interesting data you can put your data in there and have Gemini make that bubble chart for you and then what you can do is you can not only put it on your blog you can share it on LinkedIn you can share it on X wherever there's good organic reach you want to be sharing it there too so then you can be doubling down because what you ultimately care about is not you're not beholden to just Google but you are looking at things from a larger perspective which actually leads me to my next point which is search everywhere optimization so SEO used to be called SEO for search engine optimization you have to think about it now as search everywhere optimization the only game in town is no longer just Google it's Instagram it's Amazon it's app store optimization it's Gemini it's ChatGpt there's so many different channels to optimize for because attention is so fragmented today what that means is you've got to evolve your strategies it's a lot more than just Google now and what that means for us for example me creating this right now you might be listening to this on a podcast but you might be also watching this on YouTube or you might even be watching this on LinkedIn so we think about posting all this content natively to other platforms again we're not holding anything to be too sacred wherever there's organic reach you have to take advantage and you have to play natively for each platform so you can't just take this and just repost it and just hope it does well you have to play every channel according to the most optimized strategy so this is also known as the meta not meta the company but the meta right there's always an optimized way to play for each channel and that's how you have to think about you got to be dynamic and I'll tell you this being an SEO for over 15 years I've seen the same SEOs continue to struggle because all they do is they specialize in one channel you actually do have to put your eggs in multiple baskets here and then you have to wash them like a hawk it can't just be one basket the harsh reality is traditional SEO is dying but it's not completely dead and if you want to continue to derisk yourself bringing your conversion rates up also matters more than you think and so what I mean by that is SEO and CRO so conversion rate optimization they go hand in hand and the example I gave you earlier from PSO so we've created hundreds and thousands of pages for our clients but also for ourselves as well and so we have a lot of these pages again I mentioned let's say we might have e-commerce agency in Los Angeles or digital social agency in New York those are examples of longtail high intent keyword services pages that we're trying to optimize for for my ad agency Single Grain we have to think about how we can make them unique at a scalable level and so what we do is we have AI scan all of these pages instead of saying get a free consultation for our conversion rate optimization page it might say optimize my conversions and they'll click on that call to action when we do programmatic conversion rate optimization it's a form of conversion rate optimization our conversions go up by 50% and so what I'm saying here is if you're going to optimize a lot of these pages are going to try to bring traffic up you also have to be looking at conversion rates and so that doesn't mean just for your website traffic that means for all your other channels too and a lot of the stuff that we haven't gotten to in this video maybe we'll get into another video is how good is your offer how good are you optimizing playing natively for these different platforms and that's what it is ultimately so traffic trends are shifting and they'll continue to shift over time and as long as you continue to adapt as a marketer it's not going to matter you just got to make sure that you adapt and so if you're interested in continuing to learn and adapt you can check out this video over here on how to rank number one on ChatGpt Claude Gemini Perplexity fast [Music]
