SEO Traffic Will Drop 15–20% With SGE

0:00So Neil, I read this report about how SEO traffic is going to go down by 15 to 20 % over a period of time. Did you read this one by Insight Partners? This is the venture or the VC firm? I have not read it. I'm curious where they're getting their data from. Here, let me read it here. I'll share my screen over here. But just so you know, here's in their portfolio, here's who they've invested in. So Calm, Checkout.com, Kaseya, Divi, Udemy, Pluralsight, which went public. So check this out over here. How do they know it's 15 to 20 %? That's like their projection. I think it's a nice headline to go with.

0:35Generative AI SEO and what leaders should know. Google search in the future. So if you come down, I'm going to scroll over here. So basically, if you look at the screen over here, do you want to explain what's happening? This is before and this is after. Yeah, they're pretty much saying with Google, you had paid out of the top left, then organic, then stuff from Google. And on the top right, you had stuff from Google, then more organic and more stuff from Google. On the right image, you have paid at the top, then stuff from Google, then organic. So pretty much it just gets pushed down more beneath the fold.

1:07You basically have, if you look at the screen here, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So you basically have like a 40 % increase in Google owned properties on the search result pages now. Like paid is still up at the top. In fact, it looks like it has a little more real estate. And so the one right below paid now where my cursor is, that's the search generative experience, right? So that's where AI is generating a response for you. And their theory here is that so insights independent research has found that only 57 % of links cited by SG are from the first page of organic results. And I think they're saying that they believe this is going to continue to grow over time.

1:43And they think that every time there's a Google algorithm update, there are winners and losers in the market. Panda in 2011 demolished eHow, cutting their traffic by 50%. So they think something like this is going to happen across the industry. And here, here's what it says. You can go ahead and read this if you want. Expect search traffic to declines of up to 25%. So web traffic will likely decline more importantly than just the algorithm update. The evolution towards a zero click would mean less traffic coming to your webpage, insights analysis across our portfolio, and conversations with other leading experts put the expected drop in the range of 15 to 25%.

2:17Some of that loss will be low quality traffic that was never going to turn into real revenue, but some will not. So, I mean, they're pulling from their portfolio. That's the data. And they're talking to some experts, which I think we can discount. So what are our thoughts on this? Well, first of all, did you ever see the Danny Sullivan quote? Google has driven more traffic since inception each and every single year. I'm paraphrasing here, by the way, even with all the changes they've done. Because what the X factor that a lot of people aren't taking into account is when Google makes all these changes, like you type in Las Vegas weather or Los Angeles weather, and it shows you the weather versus you going to weather.com, which is a change it made in the past, or when you type in 2 plus 2, it just tells you it's 4, versus you going to a website, these changes have helped Google increase in popularity as well.

3:03So even though percentage-wise you're driving less clicks to a website compared to each search, because they're improving the experience, they're also generating more usage on Google, which is increasing traffic to websites as well. That's something that a lot of people don't take into account. yeah and then relevant is the search liaison at google i just think you know i'm not saying we should abandon seo i just obviously it's gonna get it's hard right we've talked about how we wouldn't start with seo if we're starting today and i think it's where the rich the rich get richer type of scenario with seo now if you've built like a really strong foundation so here's what they said so what should leaders do so sge so search gender of experience is coming so again that's the ai response that those of you that have enabled it just if you haven't enabled it just type Google SGE and you go into Google Labs, you can enable it.

3:50And the worst thing you can do is nothing. You need to lay the groundwork now. Sources inside Google tell us that SGE will be rolled out in limited circumstances to a small sample. Google will use this to collect additional data, tweak the product, whatever. And then basically they're saying you got to be engaged, right? You should sign up for Google Search Labs and then you should experiment with Bing, right? Get your members of your team to start testing out the tool for themselves. Okay, fine. But at the end of the day, I mean, we've talked about not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think this is like a lot of word soup, in my opinion, at the end of the day, it's like, look, diversify, think about where your audience is actually hanging out.

4:22It's marketing one-on-one and think about getting good at those channels and not trying to do everything under the sun. It's what we talk about a lot on this podcast. So I wouldn't freak out about this. I think this is a little overblown and it's not going to happen overnight. So, and not only that, what they don't have is the increase in popularity of Google by them to making it better. What does that do to traffic over time. Yep. So look, Google has to protect their advertising business. They're not going to completely shun the people that are creating content, right? Because they need that.

4:53So we got to think about incentives at the end of the day. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, rate, rate, subscribe. It helps us grow and we'll see you tomorrow.