The Future of SEO When No One Visits Your Website

SEO is going through the biggest shift that I've seen since I started doing this in 2015. For the last 25 years, the playbook was simple: rank higher, get more website traffic, turn that traffic into leads, and track it back to revenue. But what happens when people stop visiting websites? AI overviews, Google AI mode, ChatGPT all give people answers, also give people recommendations, and they can even give your phone number without people clicking to your website. So does SEO still matter? Absolutely. but website traffic might not. In this video, I'm going to show you what winning in SEO looks like right now, including real examples, how the content that you need to be creating is changing, and how to track performance when website clicks disappear. By the end, you'll know how to measure SEO in the AI era, how to hold your marketing company accountable for performance, and how to make sure that you're gaining leads from the shift, not losing them. All right, before we get into the new stuff, let's just review what the old SEO scorecard looked like. So before, You get some keywords, you create some content, got some rankings, website traffic, and leads. You would do a bunch of keyword research and create the content around those keywords. Then you would track your rankings and then see how much organic traffic you had to your website or where the traffic came from. And then you would ultimately get leads from your website. And potentially you could track that all the way back to the keywords and content that you created. And when you ask yourself, is our SEO working? You used to have a very traceable answer. Is this going up? Is this going up? Is this going up? Is this going up? Is this going up? SEO is working. And you would have some type of like a measurable like this, which is a bunch of keywords, and then you would track every week, are my keywords rankings going up? Like this one has 10 keywords in position 1, and this one has 44 keywords in 2 through 5. And this was the way it was, right? 25 years. However, right now the destination has changed. 68% of searches now end with 0 clicks, which means people don't go to websites. Google is shifting more search volume into AI mode, and people aren't landing on your website as a destination anymore. Google's keeping them inside of AI mode. So before it was, they go to Google or ChatGPT, whatever, then they end up on your website, and then they turn into a lead. Now people ask questions on Google or AI search, and they get an answer, and then they turn into a lead somehow. And this is fundamentally what's changing with SEO and why the playbook is changing. Google also changed on their search homepage this button right here. Before it said search and you went to 10 blue links, now it says AI mode and you go into Google AI mode. On top of that, this is just from a couple months ago, Gemini just crossed a billion users. ChatGPT has already crossed a billion users and Gemini, you can see they're growing over time here. They're at 24% of the AI search assistant era and ChatGPT is at 46% and Claude's at 10%. So this is not a dying trend. If anything, billions of users are using this, and it's why the game plan has to change with how we do SEO. So what does winning look like now in the new way to do SEO? First, if traffic isn't the only goal, what do we track? Because before it was keywords, content, rankings, traffic, leads, all of those things. Google Search Console said, hey, we need to change how we are tracking things on our side so that way we can show people what's winning inside of AI search. So now they're showing generative AI results, and I'll show you a couple examples of this, but they're actually showing what content is being pulled into generative AI so that way people can know that this is good and create more content like this. They also rolled out social media that you can actually connect with Google Search Console. So you can connect your YouTube, your Instagram, your X, and your TikTok so you can see that content being pulled into AI search straight inside of Google AI mode. And now they're trying to tell you like these things are now data layers feeding into AI mode. The goal is not the click. The goal is the content so that way they can use it inside of their recommendations and answers. So here's a real client example. This is a company we started working with 60 days ago. We've been adding one new piece of unique content every single week. And this generative AI feature, they're rolling it out in beta. So this, like we literally just pulled this last week. These yellow checkmarks right here are blogs that were uploaded this month. And you can see this blog post right here. You might not be able to see it, but I'll just read it to you. It says, why is there a puddle around my sprinkler head if the system hasn't run recently? And this has 496 impressions in the last 28 days. This is more than their homepage. And you can see these yellow checkmarks are recent blog content. And this is from generative AI showing that this content pieces are being pulled into AI answers. Here's a remodeling company we work with. You can see similar thing. Last 28 days, beta generative AI features. How do you know if your shower pan's leaking? How do I convert a bathtub into a walk-in shower? And you can see the impression shares for these content pieces being pulled into AI search as answers. Now, this is the biggest crux of this whole conversation is the attribution problem because it's like, cool, okay, I need to make better content for, you know, non-commodity content, which we're going to talk about the content thing in a little bit, but Fundamentally, this is the issue. Before, you could track keywords, you could track clicks, you could track website visits, you could track form fills, and you could track sources tracked. You could say, okay, this form fill came from this blog post, this form fill came from this keyword, and all of this was trackable. But now AI answer happens, right? They pull some information in, they give you an AI answer, and then maybe they mention you like, hey, call these people. And then the customer calls you, but you can't see the source. You can see how many times did I show up in an AI answer? You know, was my— did I share a voice? Did they mention me for that specific keyword or prompt? Which we're going to talk about this in a second. But what you can't see is that this prompt or information that they gave, that they mentioned us for this, and then they ultimately called us from this, and then the source is unknown. This is why it gets very, very murky with the new way to track SEO. Now, let me just be clear. I don't care about impressions. I don't care about leads in isolation. What I care about is revenue. I used to be director of business development at a home service business, and all I cared about was growing revenue and profit. All I'm saying right now is that the playbooks are changing. And before, when I was paying for this and doing this kind of stuff, it was very easy to track. What I'm telling you is that people are shifting to AI search and the ability to see what we used to be able to see is going to get very murky, and that's why we have to change the playbook, not only what we're doing, but how we're tracking it and the visibility we have. So what do we need to look at right now? The first thing, and this is kind of the new proxy, is this right here. Can we see the answer or the prompt that people searched, and then how many times did they mention us for that exact thing? Because fundamentally, if they showed us as the answer and they mentioned us, usually people are going to reach out to us from that. And this is what they call mention rate. It tracks how often your business is mentioned across target prompts and keywords inside AI answers. The other one is share of voice, and these are the 2 closest signals that we have to how often AI is recommending you. And it, it would not hand you— it won't hand you exact attribution back, right? It won't be able to go this whole thread through, but it will be able to get you at least halfway there, and it closes the gap between content and revenue. If you can't trace the exact customer, at least prove you're the one being recommended. So here's an example of what this looks like. This is a client of ours. We track 10 prompts here. These are different, like, you know, things people ask. So this one is, I need a landscaping company in Coram area that can design low-maintenance flower beds and handle ongoing seasonal maintenance on a monthly budget. This SOV up here is share of voice. So out of all the things that they said, answers-wise, They used 24, 23.8% of this business as their share of voice. So they pulled in, let's say, a YouTube video, they pulled in a blog post, they pulled in an Instagram post, they pulled in a review, whatever. 24% of the answer was them. Now, this is mention rate. Based off of this prompt, I need a landscaping company in the Quorum area that can design low-maintenance flower beds and handle ongoing seasonal maintenance. 90.5% of the time they mentioned our business. So when we think about the AI answer, how many times share a voice, the mention rate, 90.5% of the time. If you are looking at keywords, keywords, you know, they're slowly fading away. What we need to look at now is the conversations people are asking, and then how much do they trust us? The old SEO scorecard measured traffic. The new SEO scorecard measures influence. And that's what this is. This is literally influence. How much do they trust our content that they want to share us? And how much do they actually mention us? based off of what people ask. And then if we go back a step further, it's the content that we're creating. Are they showing that? And what content are they showing and why? So, the metric that doesn't lie, and let me just be clear on this because this, let's see if we just zoom way out, is people that are running this old playbook and we're in this weird time right now, right? Attribution is murky. SEO is changing. The playbook that we've done for 25 years is changing. If we zoom out, the metric that will not lie to you and if I can stress this enough, is lead count and job count. What I would recommend today is tracking leads year over year and job count year over year. And you can look at this every single month, January year over year, jobs year over year. And the reason is because this is a signal that SEO is either working or it's not working. You could roll it up and say, you know, if I take out my ads and I take out some of these other things and I just look at SEO, is this up or down? And if it's down, maybe your SEO is the game plan that you're running is not working. And the reason I'm saying this is because businesses that skip this watch leads quietly dwindle with no idea why. What I don't want for our clients and for you watching this is in 2027, 2028, 2029, slowly you start feeling like, man, my business is shifting and my SEO isn't working as well and I feel like my leads are going down. And it's because the way that you track SEO and the way that you do SEO is fundamentally changing. from what I just showed you. So don't skip this number. You won't know your SEO stopped working until it's too late, and you'll just slowly feel this bleed happening. Now, let's shift gears a little bit to how do I actually win at this? Because for now, it's like, okay, I need to track this new stuff. The old playbook's not working, so what do I need to do? But let's talk about how to actually win in the new era of content and SEO. So the old SEO scorecard measured traffic. The new SEO scorecard measures influence. We just discussed that. So what do we need to do? AI search recommended content versus keyword old school content. Fundamentally, we need to create content that's going to help us show up in AI search. And the old content that's jammed with keywords is actually dying, and Google tells us this. So this is Google's help doc. You can see apply foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search. They put out this white paper on optimizing for generative AI, and I highlighted it right here. What do they want? Create non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first. So the summary of this is commodity content— so don't make this— is 7 tips for first-time homebuyers, is often based on common knowledge which could originate from anyone, and typically adds little unique insight for readers. In contrast, non-commodity content such as why we waive the inspection and save money, a look inside the sewer line, provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary. Here's what you need to do. Don't create commodity content, create unique content. So what is non-commodity content? What people think it is, and if you're paying a marketing company to do this, this is what they're probably doing for you and it's wrong, is, okay, let me go and figure out the keyword or the prompts or what people are asking. Then let me go to ChatGPT and ask it to write a blog post that's 1,500-word article that jams a bunch of keywords in. The problem is that there's no information advantage. Anyone can create this. And Google already has thousands of versions of it, just like it just told you. And this is why we have to change what we do. The question isn't how much content you can create with AI. It's not about just jamming a bunch of things into your website to see what sticks. It's what information is your business can contribute that AI didn't already have. Can I identify questions that people are asking and unique content that is real that AI would want to use because it trusts it? So Where does unique content come from? Your customers, what they're focused about, what they're worried about, what they're comparing, what they're hesitating on, what they've already tried. So here's a basic foundational game plan to create content that will help you in AI search. 1, isolate your customer conversations. Go to your customer conversations, your calls, your sales calls, any conversation that you have with a customer. Identify the real questions, layer in company experience on top of those questions, use unique content. This is going to be unique content because it's real customer questions with your specific company experience. Then create that content and post it. And this is AI search visibility. This is what you will see your impressions happening in that generative AI report, and you'll get share of voice and mention rate. So here's the best process for SEO content now with AI search. 1, ingest customer calls. 2, extract customer intelligence, questions, objections, comparisons. 3, compare against existing content to find the gaps. This one is very important because a lot of times when I talk to people, they say, okay, well, my customers say the exact same things. They say, how much is it going to cost? When can you do it? Those are 2 questions. There are probably thousands of questions that are happening that you don't know about because you're not ingesting your customer calls. Especially if you're the business owner, you don't have boots on the ground, right? I had 28 technicians. I would ask my 28 technicians, what are customers asking you? And they would have nothing. I would barely even get them to send me pictures, let alone what are my customers saying? This is why you need to be recording these things. And then you need to compare against existing content that you've created versus gaps of things that you've never talked about. Then you need to prioritize by real customer demand, not keyword volume. This is a big shift. Before, we would say, OK, well, 1,000 people are searching this keyword, and it was very subjective to keyword volume. When we shift to AI search, right, people are not just searching for HVAC repair near me, they are searching conversationally. And Google put out another support document that said in AI mode, queries are 3 times longer. So it's not just HVAC repair near me, it's my thermostat is on and there's no air blowing out of my vents. What's going on? So this is why we need to prioritize real customer demand. If 12 people ask this question last month and we have no content answering this question, that's a gap. This is how we prioritize real customer demand. Then we add proprietary knowledge, technician experience, pricing, local nuance, unique things that again is not commodity. And then we create the content and you can have AI package the expertise, it, but it doesn't invent it. Most important. And then we publish and measure with whether Google is actually using it. Now you can publish on YouTube, you can get hooks, right? You can create content, you can publish on Instagram, you can publish on your website. These are all data layers feeding into AI search. Now, this best process for SEO content right here, we actually built an agent that does this automatically for businesses, and I'll put a link down below. It works great for home service businesses, which is our target audience, and it does all of this. We run it for our clients. You saw the use cases. But it does all this automatically, takes your calls, does the research and everything. You can check it out below. Now, I want to side-by-side this for the new SEO loop. The old way is, let's do some keyword research. The new way is, let's figure out what customer questions are actually happening. Then before, we would just create some content based off of keywords. Now it's, don't just create some content, it's use unique business knowledge to create content. Before, we would track our rankings. Now it's like, okay, is this non-commodity content that can actually be shown in AI search? Before it was, okay, is this getting traffic to my website? Now it's actually, let me go and see, is this being shown in AI search? Do I have any share of voice? Do I have any— am I showing up inside of generative AI? Then before it was, is a lead coming in? And now it's like, do I have share of voice? Do I have mention rate? Do I have more customers and leads coming in? It changes the way that SEO is done from before to now. All right, let's recap this. How to win on SEO. Before I do this, if you own a home service business, you're like $1 million to $10 million, this is exactly what we do for home service businesses. I'll put a link down below. I'd love the opportunity to at least talk with you, benchmark what you're currently doing, and show you what the future holds for SEO and how we are helping our clients win in the next era. All right, so number 1, track generative AI visibility, not just keyword rankings. If you're working with a marketing company and they are not tracking or at least looking up generative AI visibility and talking to you about it, it's not good. Keywords is one thing, generative AI visibility is another thing. 2, mine real customer calls for questions people actually ask. If you're working with a marketing company and they're just creating generic ChatGPT stuff and they don't know anything about what your customers are actually asking, that's probably a problem when we think about commodity content versus non-commodity content. Number 3, add proprietary knowledge AI didn't already have. If your marketing company is not interviewing you or getting information from you or from your calls or from people, how is it going to be able to market you with non-proprietary knowledge that they don't know anything about? So you need to make sure that this is available to be used. Publish unique and non-commodity content on a consistent cadence. Don't just post things to your blog, right? Create YouTube content, create Instagram content, because now share of voice matters more than ever, and they're pulling in from all these different data layers. Number 5, measure whether Google's actually using what you publish. Use Google Search Console. Now you can see generative AI for my website, generative AI on all these social platforms. Are they using the content or not? Is it helpful or not? And then the last thing is track your leads year over year to ensure leads are not fading away. Make sure that when this attribution is broken, that you don't just magically have leads dwindling away. All right, well, thanks again for watching. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. I post content about growing local service businesses, AI search, SEO, ads, all that fun stuff. And if you have a question or comment, drop it below. I love getting comments and questions because it helps me make more content in the future. Thanks again. See you in the next video.