Website Clicks are Down. What does that Mean to Your Business? Is SEO Over? Ep. 144

SEO is changing, it's evolving. User search behavior is changing and that means our strategy must adjust too or we're going to struggle to get traffic to our websites. Yes, website traffic is down but that's not a reason to panic, if you focus on being visible where people are searching today. 

We're seeing a shift in search, more people are starting with ChatGPT or other AI tools and then moving to Google to complete their research and convert. 

Join me in today's episode where I talk about what's happening with SEO, how it will impact your business, and what to do so you don't lose out as SEO changes. 

Transcript

0:32

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna talk about something that I am seeing a lot of chatter, a lot of question, a lot of concern, and that is. Our website clicks down, and it's very, very likely that you are seeing a decrease in website traffic or website clicks, even if you've done SEO, even if your site is well optimized. And I want to talk about why that's happening and what it means for your business and what you can do to protect your online visibility. And what website traffic you are going to get. So yes, many of us are seeing website clicks going down. The reason behind that, honestly, is what they're calling a zero click search world. And what that means is that the majority of. The searches are now being answered by ai, at least those searches that are kind of top of the funnel. They're the general, the informational searches where AI is able to give conversational information, help somebody kind of start to understand what they're looking for, help them refine. Then maybe they go on from there. But what we're seeing is about 60% of today's searches do not actually yield a click to a website. That's a big number. It's more than half. Now, with those, what we're seeing is a lot of those searches are, like I said, they're answered by ai. So they're AI overview, AI mode. Maybe it takes somebody to YouTube. Or Google images or Google Maps if you have a local business, but they're not going on to another website, so only 40% are going on to click through to a website on any given search. Now, that doesn't mean. That SEO is dead, or SEO is over. What it means is that in order to stay relevant, to remain visible, to continue to have a business online, you need to be one of those websites that Google and now Chat, GPT, and others are referencing. You need to be one that is. Recommended by those AI search engines. You need to show up in AI overviews or AI mode, or when someone is searching on chat GPT, you need to show up there. So now you're probably wondering, okay, how do I do all of that? What does that mean, Rachel? So. There's two different types of SEO at play. So it's not that we're doing away with what I'm now starting to refer to as traditional SEO, and that's what I've been teaching you for years. That's key words and create great content and optimize so the search engines understand your content, all of that. What we also need to do, and we still need to do that because that's still important. What we also need to do is make sure that we are following AI SEO best practices. Now, if this is the first time you've heard it or you're just beginning to kind of wonder what ai, maybe you've heard people refer to it as, GEO, generative engine optimization, whatever you've heard it as, it's all kind of the same thing. If this is the first that you've heard of it, you are not sure what to do about it. I have a brand new guide to ai, SEO, how to get ranked places like AI overviews, AI mode chat, GPT. So if you're curious about that. I'll go ahead and run to the freebies tab on the website, etched marketing.com/freebies. You'll be able to find it right there so you can download it and that'll help you start to understand. There's also a free class that now talks about both Google and AI search, AI, SEO, and how we show up on Google and Chat, GPT, both, and it's really important that we are focusing on both. It's not one or the other. It's, and. Because consumer search behavior is changing. People are using both, and so we need to show up on both. The other great thing about AI is that ai, SEO is really building upon the foundation. We've already laid for Google and our traditional search engines. Because it also is looking for your site to be easy to understand, quick to crawl, um, fast load times, all the things we talk about. It's looking for you to have great content. It wants you to be a resource. It wants to have those EEAT factors that your experience, your expertise, your authority, and your trust. It wants all of that. It's not looking at keywords the way that Google is. So AI search is more conversational. It's not keyword based. So we aren't worried about keywords for the AI searches. We are worried about being more conversational, about having the content that people are looking for, answering the questions. We also wanna stay very focused, same as we do with Google, SEO. We wanna stay focused on really answering one question. Per blog post because that helps us have more information, which gives us a better chance of ranking in AI search. Now what we're finding. Is it sites that rank well on Google that have good traditional SEO foundations where their content has been formatted for AI are more likely to show up and be visible in AI search? So do not stop doing your traditional SEO. It's very important that we do both. What we're seeing is that consumer behavior, consumer search behavior is changing. This is going to fundamentally change SEO. So in the past, people really only searched Google or Yahoo or Bing or whatever search engine that they did. They went, they typed in keyword, maybe they typed in a string of keywords or key phrase, something more long tail like we've talked about. And 10 blue links showed up. Maybe they also saw some ads, or they saw some videos or images or a Reddit, you know, a Reddit thread, whatever. Today many people are starting their search. Using ai. So they're going straight to chat GPT and asking, Hey, how can I learn about doing X? How can I do Y? What can I do over here? And then chat GPT is helping them. Then they may be refining their search on chat GPT before going over to Google and searching. So I had a great conversation with some of my students recently, and one of them shared this had happened with her with a new Stu. With a new client. So she's a therapist. That client wasn't quite sure what type of help they needed, so they went to chat, GPT and kind of had a conversation with Chatty asking like, what do I look for? This is what I wanna work on. What kind of therapist do I need? Can somebody help me with this? And so. It helped them refine what they were looking for, so once they knew what type of therapist they were looking for, they then went to Google and searched for that type therapist, plus their local area because they wanted somebody local to them. They wanted in-person help. At that time, the website for my student. Popped up high, they clicked through and became one of her clients. This is what we're seeing happening more and more. We're seeing Google searches with an assist from ai, whether it's that somebody has actually started on chat, GPT. Perplexity somewhere else, or if they started with Google, but they got the information in the AI overview or now the AI mode tab. Then asked a couple of refining questions and then went to Google to actually click. So while we may be seeing an. Decrease in our search traffic or search volume or our website traffic from Google. What I'm also seeing is that it's a more experienced, more interested, closer to the conversion visit, so people are getting the information they need from ai. Then they're making the refinements. Then when they're ready to make a decision, they're going to Google to search, to visit the website. So what does this mean for you? It means that your content strategy really needs to focus on both topics that are going to be more likely answered by ai. And topics that are going to go to traditional search. So when you're creating content, you want to think about what is somebody going to ask in a conversational way at the top of the funnel, if they're trying to learn about me, they're trying to get information, they're trying to figure it out, you're going to want to create that blog post. Then you're going to want to think about what else are they going to ask? What else do they maybe need to know? How might they refine this query? You probably want to have a post on that or have that information in your original post then. You're going to want to think about what would they be searching for when they're ready to convert. So in the example of my student, it was what type therapy, and then how could they find someone in their local area? So taking that therapy type information from chat GPT, they took that information over to Google. Put that in and their website came up because not only was it optimized for the local area, they also optimized and had information on that particular type of therapy and the fact that they were in that local area. So when we're looking at this. Your key words are going to matter more for the content where your traffic is going to come from Google. So those pages that are further down at the bottom of the sales funnel, they're not going to realistically matter quite as much for the ones that are going to be answered in AI as. Especially if they're searching chat, GPT, perplexity, et cetera, because they're not dependent upon keywords. What's going to be more important there is the conversational tone. The way you're formatting your content, if you're using the right header tags, if you content is easy to read. There's all of the things that we need to do from an. AI, SEO formatting standpoint. And like I said, if you don't yet have it, and most of you don't because it's brand new, I have the AI SEO guide. It's on my website. Go to the freebies tab and get that, and it kind of breaks down for you what it is and how we do it and how we format for AI SEO. Now, I personally am seeing a lot of that assist. My content is. In AI and I am getting traffic from it, and so that's what I want for you because consumer behavior is changing. The last report that I saw said 66% of consumers expect AI search to take over traditional search within five years. I believe it was also 80% of them are, they prefer the experience in AI search, the conversational tone, that nature of it. Over the traditional search links. Now Google knows that their market share is at risk because of this. So Google has changed. That's why we have AI mode and why we have AI overviews, and that's not going away. At this point in time, Google does not care if they send people to your website. They're more concerned about keeping people within their ecosystem very much like it's been with social media algorithms for years. So in order to be one that is going to continue to get traffic and be visible and all of that, you need to make sure you're doing SEO for both AI and. Traditional Google. Like I said, the good news is traditional Google. SEO works for both. Then we need to look at how we format specifically for ai. That really is the bigger part of it. So if you've not yet done this, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, had, you know a new student who said it? Yeah. I listened to your podcast for like a year before I signed up. If you've been listening for a while, you're here. First of all, thank you. I appreciate that you are here and you listen, and you trust me to help you learn how to do this. Second, it's time to join me in the class because this is changing and it's changing quickly, and I don't want you to be left behind. If you've been working on this on your own and you've been trying to figure it out on, on your own. Take the free class. Learn a little more about how all of this is working. When you take the free class that gets you into the funnel, that gives you that discount so that you can join me in simple SEO content. You can get that$500 discount. Don't pay full price. There's a discount for you because you're here. You're within my world. You know who I am. You listen to the podcast, you come through that training class. Find out how to do this. Get signed up. Let's work on this together and let's get this taken care of for you so that your business can continue to thrive online even as everything changes. The other thing I'm gonna ask is if you're. Listening to this podcast and it helps you, would you do me the biggest favor and leave a rating and really a review that really helps spread the message about the podcast. The podcast app algorithms, love followers, ratings and reviews. So if you do that, if you have not yet followed or subscribed. Rating review if you'll do that, that helps me so much in the podcast app. And if you have a podcast, if you're not yet asking for those, make sure you do because they do make a big difference for you. Alright, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.