Ravi Mehta Q&A On Marketplace SEO Trends

14 Jun 2024 · 2 min

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This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube Q&A video titled "Ravi Mehta Q&A On Marketplace SEO Trends" (uploaded June 14, 2024). The excerpt is a short dialog between two speakers (a questioner addressing "Dave" and a respondent, likely Ravi Mehta). The questioner asks whether Google's use of AI in SERPs will reduce SEO traffic and hurt marketplaces; the respondent agrees it's a significant, ongoing challenge (citing travel industry examples such as Google booking widgets impacting Booking.com vs Airbnb) but not apocalyptic, and recommends focusing on non-SEO channels—growing direct traffic, app downloads, community, and converting one-time users into recurring users.

Hey, Dave, do you wanna come on?
Yeah, sure. My question was about how Google's incorporating AI into their SERPs. And my worry is that SEO traffic as a channel is gonna decline. And it seems like there's some like studies that have been done that back that up. And I have this fear that marketplaces in general, like they're not preparing for this. And I'm curious, one, do you agree that this is coming and it's a problem? And then secondly, like what would you recommend doing about it? My thoughts were increase your direct traffic, your app download, you know, downloads, and then also maybe build some community. But what do you think?
I absolutely agree it's a problem. You know, to some extent the problem has been unfolding for the last like 5, 7 years. You can see this very acutely in the travel space. Google has gotten increasingly aggressive about trying to handle the person's travel query on their site rather than having them go to TripAdvisor or Booking.com. They show hotel booking widgets and flight booking widgets, which you can sort of think about as generative responses in a certain way. And that's led to, you know, interesting evolutions in Booking.com's business versus Airbnb's business. Booking.com still depends on a lot of their traffic from Google, both from SEO and from paid search and have a relatively high CAC as a result. Airbnb is not as SEO dependent or as paid search dependent. They've been able to build a really good base of users that are using their product directly, in part because the searchability of their supply is such that you have to go to Airbnb. You can't search for it on Google, which is, you know, goes to some of the search advantage that we talked about. Earlier. And so I think this is absolutely a challenge for marketplaces. I don't think it's going to be apocalyptic. Like Google has too much wrapped up in their search business to kind of let generative AI completely undermine that business. But I do think it, it puts extra emphasis on marketplace founders to understand what are the marketing channels that really work and how do we do a good job of converting a one-time user into a recurring user so that we don't have to reacquire them in the future.