Jeff For Local Marketing warns that local businesses risk severe search-traffic loss if they fail to optimize websites for AI-driven search. He presents a case study: a client grew from ~300 searches/month to 8–10,000/month over ~18 months, but after a site migration that removed E-A-T content traffic collapsed to under 100/month for about eight months.
Questions this video answers
About 300 searches per month.
Between 8,000 and 10,000 searches per month.
About 18 months later (speaker's estimate).
For almost eight months, with under 100 views per month during that period.
Chapters
So just in recap today, I'm talking about how things are changing when it comes to search and specifically for local businesses who are really stand a chance of getting hammered on search engines. Meaning if you don't start optimizing your website for artificial intelligence to find you, you will suffer immensely. I'm going to give you one example of how what happens when you don't get search traffic. There was a company who had done really, really well. They started out with us and they had about 300 searches a month on their website. And then about, oh, I don't know, probably 18 months later, they had between 8 and 10,000. That kept that way for a long time. Then I left the company, somebody else went in, they changed the website. All the content we had on there, that, that the search engines loved to, to create expertise, authority, trustworthiness, it, it all went away. They didn't transfer to the new site. And literally if you looked at something like Google Analytics showing, you know, the traffic, it literally dropped off a clip just like this. And so for almost eight months, they were getting almost no traffic. I mean, I say almost under a hundred views a month for their website. Now think about that. If you had a store and you had traffic of 10,000 people coming through every month and it went down to 100, would that affect your bottom line? 100%. I make this example of saying, if this was that business, it's almost like we work to grow this great force, to give it protection, shade and safety.
