Clicks are down from search. Wtf are you gonna tell your SEO clients?
First of all, 'clicks' is a metric, a KPI of SEO. Not the whole picture.
The purpose of SEO is multifaceted, especially in todays era of organic marketing.
As we move into a world of AI overviews and multiple interfaces (other than Google traditional search), we need to move away from being obsessed with clicks.
This is somewhat annoying because now the ROI is not as obvious, we cannot track sales back to clicks from particular channels or search terms.
But we can still report on how we're showing up in AI.
We'll just need a new metric, and I that will be 'Share Of Voice', or 'Visibility'.
This should be measured across the topics that are relevant for your brand or content.
Of course, 'prompts' are very conversational and unpredictable, so we cannot track visibility across every prompt, this would be futile.
What we need to do instead is track a collection of prompts (10-15) within a topic.
For example, topic: 'Link Building Service'
Prompts: 'Can you tell me a good link building service?' ' What is the best link building service?' 'I am looking for some backlinks services in the US, give me the top 3', etc.
This gives us an (almost) objective lay of the land if we track visibility across all of these prompts, from different IPs, multiple times across a timeline.
LLMrefs does this well, and fairly cheap, so check it out. (LLMRefs.com - no affiliation)
Now that you have solved the reporting - you'll need to tweak your SEO campaigns slightly to focus more on GEO.
Let's not get all excited and say GEO is a whole new thing, it isn't. It's just SEO, or if you zoom our far enough, it's just marketing.
That being said, there a couple of things to focus on a but more in GEO.
1. Being included in listicles and reviews, particularly those ranking.
2. Having a good sentiment around the brand on review sites and forum discussions (Reddit & Quora)
3. Having an exhaustive knowledge base about your services and products on your website - the more AI knows about your services, the more it will talk about it.
And that's pretty much it.
It's SEO as usual for the most part, but reporting is going to get a little more 'interesting'.
Rankings/traffic from search isn't going away at all. We just need to augment the traditional reporting with some Visibility reporting too.
Unfortunately, we need to expect a lot of the outcome from that visibility will not ever be able to be scientifically attributed.
But more people than ever are using search, or AI tools. And the AI tools in particular are converting 2-3x better than traditional search.
So it's not time to shy away, just because reporting is harder. It's time to double down.
PS. I have a Notion Doc with all the details on how to sell GEO (or AI SEO) to your clients, I’ve already sent it, but if you missed it and want it, reply to this email with ‘GEO’ and I’ll send you the link.
Cheers
Joe Davies
Work with me 1:1 (waiting list)