Neil Patel: You Can Get More Sales With Less Search Traffic

This Condé Nast example that you're using, I just approved the outline for one of my next presentations and it has that early on in my slide deck. Nice. And it breaks down how they try to look at it as single-digit percentile. One caveat I want to give you here is for everyone listening, Condé Nast is a publisher. Their monetization model is very different than most businesses, right? Most businesses that I know are not publishers. I agree it's really hard for publishers. If you're in e-commerce, you're selling a service or a product or whatever it may be that's non-publishing, I think SEO traffic is still really valuable, but you don't need the views that a publisher does. A publisher typically makes money from ads, so they need the traffic to then go sell ad inventory, typically on a CPM basis. A company, you don't need the traffic. You need the sales. And what I mean by that is if someone does research on your company through LLM or even Meta's AI or through an AI overview and they see your brand, but they don't click over right away, right? Because typically when people did research in the old search model, let's say there's 10 blue links, they may click on 5 or 6, decide what site they want to go with, and then they go back to the website. So they clicked on those 5, 6, then they go back to the one where they want to make the purchase. In today's world, if they don't click, but they understand about your brand and product and the reviews and the ratings and what others think, and they know they want to go with you, it's okay if you don't get all that traffic, but you should still be able to generate more sales, not the same amount, not less. You should be able to generate more sales with even less traffic. That's a pattern we're seeing when people are doing their marketing right. So in a non-publisher world, you still need to rely on search traffic, whether