Shall we still go "all in" SEO?
from marketing generalist (and customer advocate) point of view
If you put all eggs into SEO organic traffic basket now, you are making a huge mistake.
Founder reached out to me recently, he wanted to optimize his startup’s lead gen.
Aka grow the pipeline. In our 30 min conversation I learnt, that:
Their software is a 6 figure multi year commitment,
Only a very few people in the industry know them,
They tried paid ads, events, branding, conferences, but nothing worked „well“,
The best working channel is SEO, but organic traffic is declining
Yet SEO is where they spend 60-70% of the time - to fix it.
Here is what I told him, and thought it was also worth to share with you all.
For now SEO still works, as not everyone and not everywhere has adopted AI tech. But in the next few years SEO growth as we know it, will disappear. Keywords, rankings, random backlinks purchasing in bulk - a lot of is taken by AI traffic both in the google main screen, as well as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude.
So if you are chasing „best“ keywords,
Fanatically trying to find loopholes,
Optimizing for traffic,
You are ALREADY losing business.
Please, stop.
What you can do instead:
1. Understand how your actual buyer makes decisions.
Talk to them every week. I mean, literally. Don‘t send a research team. Invite for a coffee and don‘t pitch. Listen.
You will hear about not advertised small industry events, pains of purchase and procurement process, industry recommendations and gossips, even how they talk about the job the software has to do and how they name it in their words.
Don’t skip this.
2. Come up with list of channels to test.
Set up structure Notion/ Google sheet, constantly add new ideas and angles. You need to have a wider list of channels to test, to be able to see - what works initially, gets traction, what you are able to execute. You need to go wide, before you go deep.
Some example hypothesis:
- small industry events up to 100 people are best to network and get „right“ contacts
- paid ads shall drive to educational / free webinar (not about the product, about the „pain“)
- clients invited to webinars or events as speakers will be best advocates
These are things you want to test and these are quick to set-up within a month and see if it drives any results.
3. Test and scale.
Focus on content across all platforms: organic socials, ads, events, webinars, landing pages. Future of multichannel marketing is already happening.
Use that SEO keyword tracking and optimization “fanatism“ for testing. Reuse the content you would write for articles to use across channels.
4. Learn, fix and scale.
If it did not work once, don‘t blame your CMO. Most tests will fail, that’s why we test in the first place.
Think: why it did not work?
Wrong event? Wrong client case study?
Unclear message?
5. Once ready, focus on building a brand. Long term
Publish on Linkedin, apply to speak at conferences.
Invest in relationships with media, influencers or hire an agency once your finances allow.
Think alternative formats: podcasts, newsletters, youtube overviews.
This will create trust, and so much needed high quality backlinks.
Just do it slow. Step by step.
And remember to always focus on your customer and their business. Not yours.
AI gives us now so many opportunities to test and learn fast.
Let‘s use it for good.
World does not need another useless keyword optimized landing page, it needs context, helpful information and customer centric marketing.
Amen.
PS. And no, I don’t think SEO is dying. It’s massively evolving. But hoping and praying on figuring one channel out using old way of working? That’s a definite way to failure.