SEO is a by-product, not a product worth your focus 

If you’ve noticed some changes in your organic traffic or changes in how you appear in the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) over the last year, you’re not alone and it’s probably not your fault. With Google going all in on their AI Overviews in which they scrape the internet and offer content summaries to users, the limited space that was once occupied by “blue links” is now mostly relegated below the fold. Enhanced SERP features like People Also Ask, FAQs, image carousels, video carousels, map packs, and knowledge panels crowded out traditional organic search while giving site publishers other avenues to rank organically; now with AI Overviews the chances are pretty slim that your web content will rank “above the fold” for an organic search result.

This trend is not new, as enhanced SERP features have been around for over a decade, and search ads have long replaced organic results at the top of the SERP. What is new is the rate of change and the acceleration of AI Overview content. The icing on top of this cake is that AI Overviews don’t necessarily reference your site, and even if they do, you’re not guaranteed that a user will click for more details on your site. So why invest time and money into a strategy to get your content to rank for terms that may never get any user traffic?

Zero-Click Results & The New SERP

It’s a brave new search world and that world is dominated by paid advertising, AI Overviews, and zero-click results. Because of these factors, spending valuable time and resources on trying to get your content to rank for is foolish. And you know what the old adage about a fool and their money is, right?

Don’t Waste Your Time Optimizing Your Content for Organic Ranking

So what should you do? Get back to the basics of describing what you do or offer and create content that engages your audience and gets them to convert.

Create content that has value that people will want to subscribe, share, or engage with on social media channels. By doing this you own the distribution, and you have better insights into how people consume and engage with your content. So where should you create this content?

• First, create engaging audio, video, and short form written content on social media and cross-promote it widely between your socials and your website. This will get you links from high authority domains.
• Second, create your long form written content in a newsletter that you send to subscribers. Promote your newsletter on your website and on social media, and via other channels both on and offline. This will give you a picture of who’s engaging with your content.
• Third, focus your efforts on building out and constantly updating your Google Business Profile to ensure that it has not only the basic data about your business, but that you have ample photos, updated events, descriptions, categories of your services or products, frequently asked questions, review responses, and more.
• Fourth, create localized content that addresses the bottom of the marketing funnel

The old ways of approaching SEO are dead. That doesn’t mean organic traffic is dead. It just means you have to come at it differently. Page performance and technical SEO do matter. Keywords matter. Backlinks matter. But how you achieve these things is different and what you should be doing is different too. You need a strategy that’s a multi-channel approach, where SEO is the by-product of your social, email, and other engagement tactics, not the focus.