IS SGE the NEW SEO? Is Your Marketing Strategy DEAD?

Search engine marketing dead is SEO? Is it really now a factor in you getting more business as a local business owner? In other words, you know, people have a problem, they go to Google and they search and you may have an article that shows up on how to fix the toilet or, you know, how often should I change my air filter? And you have an article there and they click into it and where do they go? They go to your website. And now you have website traffic that eventually could turn into a potential customer, because at that point you might have a special offer for, you know, maybe having their air conditioning repaired or serviced pop up on that blog. Well, that is about. Actually, it's not about. It's already changing. Hi, my name is Jeff Harrison and I own a company called Swing Point Meeting. We do, we do creative work for local businesses. In other words, we create content that helps get them more customers. And for years we have been building models for our customers that we create written content every week, we create a video, we put out posts on social media. And that's been working very, very well. But about, oh, maybe 12, maybe 18 months ago, I became part of a beta team or beta program with search and their AI searching model maybe 12 months ago. And what it basically does now is when you go into search, what will happen is at the very top, it will generate an answer to your problem. And what it does, it goes out and says, hey, out of all the content that's out there on the Internet, what is the best answer? And then it will take that and it will curate it into the best answer. Now, for us as people who are searching, that, that's fantastic because it's not making us hunt for that. It's that easy button, if you will, of search. But now here's the problem. What happens to the traffic now going to that website? What happens to those people who are really leaning and hoping that that traffic will turn into potential leads and customers for their business? Well, quite honestly, they've taken a crash hit. It's, you know, some of these, some people and we look at analytics and, you know, you can just search anywhere on the Internet and you see what this has done. We've seen, you know, 40, 50, 90% drop off in traffic because this is depending on this search traffic and making great content. Well, now what happens is they go out and they curate that content from Maybe the top 10 sources that answers that question of why is my toilet leaking? Or. Or why is my toilet running in the middle of the night? And they give you an answer and a solution. Now here's what I've seen over the beta testing that has made a difference during that time. What they do is off to the right side or on, it depends on what you're looking at. Whether it's a desktop or it's a mobile device. Is they'll give you references of where that came from. Like if it's an article, they'll have a picture of that and then they'll show the, the website for that. The idea being, hey, once you take a look at this, if you want to go more, here are the three sources that we use to generate this answer. Now, in theory, that makes sense because it's like, okay, I found out, I found out an answer and I'm going to go over and double check it on that website. Well, here's the thing. The idea is if those, and think back a little bit, there were things called snippets, they would take a little portion of, of an article that somewhat answered the question and they posted at the very top. This was kind of the holy grail because it went above all of the search engine results. And we were fortunate. We, we did this quite well for our customers. Get snippets. And we saw exponential growth because it was at the top. And it gives that feeling of, oh, this must be the best because it's at the top. So we saw, you know, a website grow from 300 visitors a month to over 10,000amonth by creating content and then getting them as a snippet and getting them ranked highly in Google. But here's the reality. It was only a snippet. It was like watching a trailer to a movie. We still wanted to see the movie, but with the generative AI it's called sge and that's. Excuse me, sge. And it's search.

Google search experience. Excuse me. And so what happens is that is a complete answer. So there's no need to go see the movie, right? Just get your popcorn and enjoy this answer. So what happens is we as creatures, who are we like instant gratification and let's face it, we do want the easy button. This is going to have an impact on those businesses that are relying solely on search engine results, even those people who are paying for those search engine results, I think. And again, this is being rolled out. If you're not seeing it yet, you will because this is what it's going, it's sge. And so what we're seeing is the drop off in traffic because now there's no need to go anyplace Else because our time is spent on Google. Well, there's a lot of debate going on with this of, you know, what should happen. You know, you're using my content to create your, to curate your answer. You know, how am I helping? How am I benefited from that? Well, right now you're not. It's a hope that they will still send traffic. But again, we've seen with some of our clients, some drop off. But here's what we've done for now. The last, I would say almost 10 years with our client. You know, when you look on the Internet and you see somebody says, hey, you should have multiple streams of income to grow your business or to grow your wealth, you know, real estate and, you know, drop shipping and whatever. Well, when it comes to your business and growth, the idea is, you know, if you're a W2 employee and you lose your job, that is your only source of income. It could be devastating. So if your only source of income is through Google search, It's like a W2 employee. The ramifications can be devastating because literally it's like one day the faucet was turned on, the next day it was turned off. There's no water coming out of it or it's just dripping out of it. And what drips out now has to, to satisfy the thirst of many local businesses, not just you. Well, as I say, for probably the last 10 years we've said, hey, we want to have multiple streams of income. The multiple streams could come from many different areas. And we've seen, you know, upsides and downsides of social media. Social media, you know, when we take something put on social media. I just saw this two days ago. There was a, there was an article out by Neil Patel and he talked about, I think it was almost 3 million, 2.9 million companies out there that, that put things on social media. They looked and said, okay, what kind of response are getting? Well, 59% of them had zero. I'm talking zero. The big zero. No interactions, no engagements, no comments, no likes, no shares. So that would lead them to believe, hey, this is a waste of my time, that's over. It's almost 60% of all your efforts going into one thing gives you no results. Well, at some point people can say, well, I'm not going to do that anymore. We saw this dropping off, gosh, back in 2018. And then with the, with the, the additional move of Apple and iOS 14, we said, okay, this has got to change a little bit. So what do we do? Well, we still post content for our customers. But we actually now we put out a paid piece of content. So we're paying to be up there and think of it like this. Instead of a search engine on how to fix my leaky toilet, there's an article there. We have a paid search that goes to the top. And so people are more likely to see that. So what's, what's the big deal with that? Well, that's another source of revenue. That's another source of potential traffic that could be turning into a lead that turns into a customer that turns into revenue. So that's a second source. And now you take that and you put it on multiple platforms. Let's say you put it on Instagram, TikTok, you put on Twitter. Those are all additional revenue sources or traffic sources that could bring them to your custom, to your, to your website that could turn them into leads and customers and revenue. But here's the big one. YouTube creating video content. And the reason I say YouTube is because YouTube is the second largest search engine. So what happens is, and I'll give you an example, way back when, before I was even in this digital marketing space, I was a golf professional. And my partner and I would make these videos on, you know, whether it be lessons or we do some product reviews and things like that. We have a video that we put out, gosh, now it's been probably 12 or 14 years ago and it still gets traffic today, even though that, that particular piece of equipment is no longer made. I get reports on that and you know, it's. And again, this is not, this is not something that we were trying to use to sell the product, but it now has about 100 and I think 130,000 views. Now some of you say, wow, that's a long time and only 130,000 views. We did nothing to generate extra traffic. We didn't do any paid nothing. We just made it. And what that did is it attracted people to us who then came and took lessons from us. So my point is the businesses can put up videos on how to fix a leaky toilet. How often should I, you know, change the filter in my air conditioner or whatever, whatever the problems your particular industry are dealing with and put them up on search. Now here's a cool thing. Google owns YouTube. So guess what? If you have videos that solve this problem and they're getting some traffic and they're, and they're done properly and they're high in the search engine on Google, or, excuse me, on YouTube, they're going to appear on Google search engine. Now you're saying, well, Jeff, you said we're not going to see any of that stuff. No, I didn't say that. I said the AI generated response is going to take the top spot and it's going to give some references, but below that are still going to be the organic returns. And when you and I see on the search engine a thumbnail, we're two times more likely to click on that because we would rather watch it than read about it. We'd rather watch it than read about it. And so if we can move them into that area, we're much better. Now there, there's oftentimes we might have three or four videos on a particular topic that we've done with a client that do very, very well. So now when they search for how do I, how do I fix a leaky toilet? But we might have three or four videos there and guess what? Three or four videos turn up underneath that AI generated response. And what does that do? Well, it puts this thought in the mind of the people searching that these people must know what they're talking about. They have three or four videos there. They really must be the authority in this, Let me watch this video. And of course in the video, you know, you're addressing the problem and then you have a call to action. You should have a call to action of hey, what do you do next? Here's my information and you know, give us a call and we'll come out and help you. Well, this is your other source of revenue that I feel like as someone who's been doing this for local businesses now for a dozen years that you should take a look at and create video. Now.

Do we use AI to make videos? Absolutely. Should this be done with an AI video? I would say probably not. We still want to have this human to human connection that gives us an answer. Now can we have supportive content around that created by AI? I think so. I think that would be okay. But if the, if the primary video is done with a human.

I think we're going to be better off with that.

So here's the good news and bad news. The good news is there are many streams that you can tap into to replace some of that lost traffic. And I think it's going to get, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. Yeah. Will there be pushback from businesses? Absolutely. Because here's the deal. I think they're probably going to pay more attention to their ad revenue traffic. In other words, those people who say I want to Be paid. I want to pay to be at the top of the search engine. I think there's going to be more attention given to them because let's face it, they pay. I can't remember the number, but it's, it's billions of dollars a year. I can't remember. I just saw that about a week ago. The, the earnings report and how much of that was from ad revenue. They're not going to go away from that. It'd be stupid, right? It'd be like us stopping making videos for our clients. It would be stupid. We don't want to stop doing that because it generates revenue for our clients and revenue revenue for us. So I think it's going to become more evident that more and more of these paid searches are being put up there. And who knows, it may be altered to now only generate a response, the AI response from paid traffic or from, from paid articles, Paid videos. Imagine that. Wow, that's, that would be crazy. I hope they're not listening. I hope Guru's not listening if they're not doing that. If they, if I thought of it, I'm sure they're already down the road with that. The, the, the bad news is if you as a local business are not generating multiple streams of income, specifically you still write blogs. I think you still do that. It still adds validity and it does have a search component that is not going to go away. You're just not going to be as bountiful in the traffic that's being sent because of what we've talked about. The second piece is you're adding that component of creating videos and doing it. Here's the thing, this is very low production quality. I'm standing in front of my black screen and I'm giving you some information. And it's information you can take and use today of saying, I need to make some videos, I need to go back and think, hey, what are the problems my ideal customers are dealing with and how can I solve them and how can I do them on video, man? You can just, you can just use your iPhone, right? You can use your iPhone to do that and post those. You know, shorts are, shorts are really the number. So if you're making 60 second videos, you're out on a, you're out on a call or you're with a client and, and you've just solved the problem and you want to create a quick video that's really good overproduce content. In other words, too flashy, too, too slick. We see that as, oh, that's another commercial versus, hey, we're just having a raw conversation and here's what happened and here's how I helped X, Y, and Z. So the bad news is, if you're not creating an additional revenue stream, you could be hurt financially tremendously.

So I want you to consider that if you need help with this, I'll put my information down below, reach out, and. And I'll help you kind of create a scenario that you can start turning these video or, excuse me, these articles into videos. Now, here's where it could get really dicey. If you are a company that says, I have a website, and that's really my only thing, and also I have a Google business profile, and that's my only thing.

You could be in a world of hurt because you have no legs for this table to stand on. Like, you don't have any content, you have no videos, you're not using social media. You're not doing paid advertising for your social content to get more traffic. You are a table without legs. Wow, that's brutal. All right, so don't find yourself in that situation again. My name is Jeff Harrison. Says here on the screen with swingpoint Media. We are a local digital marketing company. We kind of specialize in a few areas. We help H VAC companies. We also work with mortgage lenders and also primary care physicians. So if this is something you need some help with, check out my information below and let's see if we can help you out. All right, have a good day.