Traditional SEO is DEAD: What to Do Instead

The $68 billion SEO industry is dead as we know it. And I'm going to show you how that's the case and how you can go about gaining more traffic for your business and ultimately driving more customers. SEO, also known as search engine optimization, has changed quite a bit from the beginning. Back in the day, it used to be all about creating content, building a lot of links, and that still matters today, but to a lesser extent because of the advent of AI. And the proliferation of AI, I should say. Now, people might be thinking, okay, well, if AI is really making a big push right now, is Google basically the company that has most of the search engine market share? Are they driving more or less clicks to websites over time? And the answer might surprise you because the answer is ever since 2020, you can see 2020, it went from 100% to 108% to 109% to 109.83%. It's continually going up. And this was an analysis done on 36,000 websites. And so just because there are other sources of attention that are, that are people, other platforms that are vying for attention, it doesn't mean that Google is dying. Google will continue to compound over time. As long as human beings are searching for things, there's always going to be an opportunity for growth for search engines, right? Now, there might be other search engines today, such as TikTok, Amazon, for example, Or YouTube, which is the second largest search engine. Some of you are watching this on YouTube right now. And so wherever there is search, there is SEO. And so I wouldn't say Google is necessarily, they're completely dead, right? But the old way of doing SEO, that is for sure dying, right? And you've got to adapt. And if you look at this overall, this survey was done on 5,300 people here in 2020 and surveyed 11,000 people in 2024. And so you can see, Search engines, 98% share. That was, you know, people were searching for questions using search engines, 98%. That was in 2020. Now in 2024, that has changed to 61%, and then 17% are using social media, and then 30% are using AI chatbots. So the behavior is changing. And what that means for you is just to understand that whereas 2020, 98% could be tied to SEO, you've got to diversify your traffic sources now. You got to think about going omnichannel. You got to think about posting natively to different platforms, and that's how you're going to win. So marketing 101 is really about thinking about where are your customers hanging out, right? And then from there, marketing is— your marketing's job is to bring people to the point of sale. And so in the past, people might have relied much heavier on SEO. Nowadays, it's got to change, right? So this is one of the major things that major shifts that's happening right now. Now, kind of similar to this, a lot of people are talking about, okay, Quora is gaining a lot of traffic, Reddit's gaining a lot of traffic, a lot of these communities are gaining a lot of traffic, right? And well, you hear a lot of SEOs talking about why community is the new SEO. And I think communities are interesting because if you look at this graph over here, you can see in the orange, this is Shopify's community. This is their subdomain. And you can see for HubSpot in black over here, that's continuing to move up and to the right. All these graphs are moving up and to the right. Even the Zapier form over here is moving up and to the right. Now, Reddit was getting about, I think about 1.6 billion visitors per month. And then after the recent Google updates, they're getting about 2.3 billion visitors per month just from organic. So that's 700 million visitors that they're adding per month. And that's a huge amount. Now, why are the search engines doing this? Why is Google doing this? It's because with the proliferation of AI content, they understand that human-written content, UGC, user-generated content, is much more valuable now. And what that means for you is, does it make sense to start a community? I think it does make sense for a lot of people to start a community because once you have a really good community manager, they're running things for you, they're causing all this engagement within your community, you're getting more organic traffic. But more importantly, community is a nice retention mechanism. It keeps people engaged, it keeps people interested in your business. And so people might come and buy something initially, but ultimately what they stay for is they stay for the community. And so I think community, communities are going to gain a lot of SEO traffic. You might gain more conversions, more word of mouth that way. You're going to gain more links potentially. But what's more important to, in my opinion, as a business owner, is you are going to retain more customers and it's going to drive more revenue for your business. And that has a bottom line effect. that you can, I think anybody here can align with, right? So this is one of our communities over here. This is the Agency Owners Association. And if you just go to marketingschool.io/agency, you can learn more about it. But this is the community that Neil, my podcast co-host and I have to help agency growth grow, agencies grow faster. And this has been working really well for us. And we use a platform called Skool, that's skool.com. If you want to learn more about it, you can do that. Now, There's a lot of talk about, especially in the last couple years or so, AI has become such a buzzword. I would encourage you to think about moving beyond the AI buzzwords, right? So yes, we're talking about SEO, you know, as we know it being dead, but, you know, even in the SEO space, a lot of people have used a lot of buzzwords over the years. And so AI has become kind of played out now. And so what we're trying to get at here is, is AI actually driving business results, right? And so, You know, just because there's this advent of AI doesn't necessarily mean you can just go on autopilot and publish. A lot of black hat and gray hat SEOs thought that that could have been the case a long time ago, that they could just run these article spinners, which would basically create a lot of variations of different articles that are available on the website, or not website, the web, and then they would just publish it. And then it used to be back in the days when search engines weren't as sophisticated, people can publish all this junk content and just rank really quickly, right? And then Google cracked down on that pretty quickly. It was pretty easy for them to detect the signals. But now AI, the AI has gotten so good that it's harder for search engines to detect that, right?

If you're an agency owner looking to break high 7 figures, 8 figures, or even 9 figures, the Agency Owners Association is for you. It's ran by my partner Neil Patel and myself, and we've been there, done that from an agency standpoint. And if you want to learn more about it, if you want to grow faster, get more clients, take yourself out of the day-to-day, just go to marketingschool.io/aoa.

Search engines, Google, for example, they have really smart people that work for them. And so they've gotten better at detecting it. And so humans back in the day thought they could just, you know, game the search engines. And even today, people think they could game the search engines. That's not really the case. As you can see here on this study, this experiment was run on 68 websites and created 744 articles. Each site posted both AI and human-written content. So you can see month 1, you know, the AI content, You know, what ultimately, what performed better over time, right? So you can see by month 5, the human-written content performed way better than the AI content. You can see, you know, 52 versus 283, right? Versus the beginning, it's, you know, the human content's still a little higher and then it starts to separate itself in month 2. And so at the end of the day, AI versus human-generated articles, you can go pure human, but what we found to work pretty well for us is AI-assisted, right? So even that's changing SEO quite a bit. It's like, okay, it's not completely AI, it's not completely human. It's really in the middle where we're basically adding efficiencies to how we do things. And we want a human in the loop to go about making the edits, right? So for example, for the Marketing School podcast that we have, we have a human in the loop that will handle the last mile. So maybe the AI will handle 60 to 70% of the work, but the last 30% or so, you know, the human will fact-check, the human will add stats, the human will add images or other media, and then the humans will add internal links. And then, you know, even with that entire workflow, we do try to automate it, which I'll get to in a second. We've tried to semi-automate it at the very least, right? So I believe semi-automation is the way to go. And then eventually, you know, full AI content, maybe, you know, in the next 5 to 10 years or so, but I think we're still a ways out from that. But even then, like, you know, SEO is shifting right now. It's going to shift even more in the next, you know, next couple years or so. And so this is what I wanted to get to when I was talking about, you know, internal linking, right? Internal linking itself is a very thankless job. And so internal linking means that you are linking to other— you have a website and you're linking to other sections on your website, other pages on your website. And then these are internal links because you're linking from your site to other sections on your site, right? An external link would be an external website linking to your website. So that's the difference. Now, internal linking is still very important because it signals to search engines what's important on your website, right? Or you're trying to help the search engines find certain things on your site. And so they're still very important. And so what we did in this scenario is, you know, if we want to automate it, instead of having the human do it, we can create an agentic workflow. And what an agentic workflow means is that you can have an AI agent. A lot of people like talking about AI agents. So AI agents will help you You can create an automation that will basically help you link to relevant other internal pages on your website, and that's going to help your other pages rank better, and you're sending positive signals to search engines, right? So that's one thing that we can certainly automate using agentic workflows. Again, people like saying AI agents. And so in this case over here, in the spirit of SEO, something that works really well still is updating your content, deleting your content, and consolidating your content. And so in this case, we created an AI consolidation agent, which is where you combine pages together. That in itself is a very thankless job too, because what happens if you look over here, you know, in the very beginning, you have to fetch Google Search Console data, and Google Search Console is an analytics tool that you can use to track your SEO results. And then from there, you can fetch Google Analytics metrics for URLs, tag recent URLs, right? And it does all these things over here, fitting Google Search Console data, fetch URL from data for SEO, fetch URL keyword metrics, determine page type from page data, and then we'll provide URL consolidation recommendations. So this jobs to be done over here, we have specced everything out, all the jobs to be done by SEO managers on our team, and then we're looking for things to automate over here. And then once this agent finishes, a human in the loop can check to kind of check off what URLs make sense to consolidate, and then it can move to the next agent, and then it can do the same thing over there. And then that's ultimately going to save you a lot of time. It's going to save you a lot of money as well, and you're ultimately going to be able to move a lot faster. So the next thing I wanted to talk about too is, sure, we're talking about the future, how the $68 billion industry has completely changed and how you need to adapt, but also we need to think about, okay, is ChatGPT actually driving sales right now? Well, if you look at this graph over here, search engines drive, you know, 31.2%, right? This is between— so these are 50 companies that generate between $10 million and $790 million in revenue. And so, you know, 31.2% say, okay, you know, search engines work, you know, and or are driving the revenue. And then, you know, 28.7% would be word of mouth, for example. But then you go all the way down here, podcasts are 1.8%, and then 0.3% are ChatGPT. And so I think this number's going to rise over time, but you know, this is just very early days right now, right? And I wouldn't say this is exactly a perfect survey because this is only done on 50 companies. And the delta between the 2 numbers, $10 million and $790 million, is extremely high. And this was done in June 2024. And so there's still a lot of time for this to play out. And I believe this number is going to go up over time. Generative engine optimization, that's the thing, right? So optimizing for the LLMs, like a ChatGPT or like a Claude, for example, or you can use other tools like Perplexity, which To me, you know, they use retrieval augmented generation or RAG to find things. They, you know, use search engines, they use other LLMs, I believe, but Perplexity is also certainly something that's very viable. But a lot of this is shifting. And so, you know, a lot of the old SEO stuff still works, but you have to pay attention to the future. You have to keep your one foot in the future and one foot in the past, you know, while things adapt. And eventually you can move your foot that's in the past over into the future as well. So you can be fully engaged there.

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So the last thing I want to call out here is around the future of marketing. And so to me, the future of marketing is you're going to see a lot more communities, right? In-person communities specifically are going to be more valuable and you're going to have in-person communities and Sam Altman of OpenAI fame, he has said that he believes in the next 5 to 10 years, communities will be even more valuable. I believe that to be the case. And I believe we're gonna see a lot more agentic workflows like the one that I showed you, and we're gonna have fully autonomous AI agents working for us. And I believe that the most creative people, they are the X factor, and creativity is never gonna go away. And the most creative strategic people, they're gonna have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of agents working for them, and they will be getting so many things done. And it's the reality is that resources are no longer the constraint. It's more so creativity is a constraint now. And so if you can afford to hire the absolute best of the best people, or you can create a mission where you can hire the best of the best people, that to me is the most interesting thing. And so I believe SEO is still going to be a thing, right? I believe that communities are going to become bigger and bigger. I believe YouTube is still a mega opportunity for the next decade or so. And I believe that using tools such as Replit, for example, Someone like me that's not technical, I can very quickly spin up an MVP or spin up a mockup and not have it take, you know, over 20 minutes or so. In fact, I can probably do this in 3 to 5 minutes or so. That's going to add a lot more leverage as well. I think things are just going to move a lot faster ultimately, and you just have to know how to play the game. And I think brands are going to continue to do well over a long period of time. And, you know, brands could be a company brand, that's certainly viable, or you can build a personal brand. I think that's great too. And I think data is going to continue to become more valuable over time. And that's what I would say. I would say it's those things ultimately. You know, I like to say at my company, Single Grain, the ad agency, you know, there are 4 pillars we're looking for and for the future, right? We're looking at building more technology. We're looking at having an unreasonably high talent bar so we can only, you know, have the top 5 to 10% of people that are running all these agents. We're looking at making strategic acquisitions as well. So buying other companies and we're looking at doing pay for performance, right? So You know, what we're doing, when you're doing marketing, you know, as an agency, you might be charging a retainer to a lot of people, but in some cases you can charge on a performance basis where, you know, you would take on all the risk as an agency and then you're getting paid per customer that you drive and it can be a lot more lucrative, right? So that's something, these are all things that you might want to consider. I'd recommend that you go back and rewatch this and because there are, I'm sure there's a couple things that you might have missed here, but the search landscape is shifting. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, it's no longer just Google, right? You saw earlier the graph, it used to be 98% in 2020, people use Google. Now it's 60-something percent and 30% goes to social. And you have people using other sources too, right? That's going to change significantly and you have to be able to adapt. The problem with most SEOs is that they don't want to adapt. And ultimately that's what's going to come back and bite them in the butt. And so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.

Thank you.

And, you know, don't forget to check out this next video over here that will have this, my full presentation from HubSpot. So go ahead and check that out. And that's HubSpot's Inbound 2024, where I talk about AI tactics and strategies that will 10x your leads and your customers. So that being said, I'll catch you later.