Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)

Sep 19, 2024 1h 55m 25 insights Episode Page ↗
Eli Schwartz, a growth advisor specializing in SEO and author of Product-Led SEO, discusses the significant shift in SEO due to AI overviews and LLMs. He explains how Google's integration of AI answers is changing search behavior and what businesses must do to succeed in this new paradigm.
Actionable Insights

1. Treat SEO as a Product

Approach SEO as a product question, with product managers thinking about the user experience and how to position the product for self-discovery journeys, rather than just a marketing challenge.

2. Cultivate User Empathy

Start your SEO process by deeply understanding your target user’s perspective and problems, asking what they would search for to find your product.

3. Validate User Search Intent

Do not invest in SEO if you cannot clearly identify what users would search for to find your product, as SEO is about appealing to that specific user intent.

4. Evaluate Online Conversion Potential

Assess if your product’s buyer journey is primarily online and self-serve; if it requires extensive sales interaction or multiple stakeholders, SEO may not provide a good return on investment for direct conversions.

5. Prioritize Channels by Conversion

If your product’s core conversion motion is sales-led rather than online, other channels like brand ads or influencer campaigns might yield faster and better ROI than SEO.

6. Focus on Mid-Funnel SEO

Shift SEO efforts to target mid-funnel queries, as AI overviews will handle top-of-funnel discovery, leaving opportunities for deeper, more specific searches where users have a clearer sense of what they want.

7. Align SEO with Buyer Journey

Create SEO solutions that directly address mid-funnel problems within the buyer’s journey, ensuring your efforts remain relevant and effective regardless of AI overview changes.

8. Define Clear SEO Conversion Metrics

Clearly define specific business-relevant conversion metrics for your SEO efforts (e.g., MQLs, dollar conversions, phone calls) rather than relying solely on top-of-funnel rankings or traffic, which may not indicate business value.

9. Avoid Traffic for Traffic’s Sake

Do not generate traffic to content that doesn’t convert, as Google doesn’t inherently reward high traffic if it’s not useful or relevant to your business goals.

10. Build SEO as a Product

Envision and build your SEO solution as a product, requiring design, engineering, and product management resources, not just content creation, to serve the SEO user effectively.

11. Design SEO Assets Strategically

After understanding your user, decide what specific SEO asset (e.g., programmatic page, content) you need to create to meet their search intent and solve their problem.

12. Set SEO Milestones

Treat SEO development like a product roadmap, setting clear milestones for ideation, building, and shipping, then track progress against these to assess effectiveness.

13. Favor Programmatic SEO

Generally, programmatic SEO is a more effective and scalable approach than editorial content for many businesses, especially when there’s a clear user use case and data sources.

14. Programmatic SEO for Scale & Use Case

Implement programmatic SEO only when there’s a clear user use case and potential for scale, ensuring the generated pages provide a genuine solution and are not just content for content’s sake.

Focus on building a strong brand that naturally earns mentions and links, rather than engaging in artificial link-building tactics like buying guest posts on low-authority websites.

16. AI Overviews as Branding

View appearing in AI overviews as a branding exercise; if your brand is mentioned, it signifies successful branding efforts, but merely having your content linked might mean it’s being given away for free.

17. Prioritize Content Usefulness

Focus on creating helpful and useful content, regardless of whether AI is used in its generation, as Google’s primary concern is content quality and relevance, not its origin.

18. Use AI for Product Descriptions

Leverage AI to generate product descriptions for e-commerce sites, as this type of content directly supports product optimization rather than creating generic, less useful blog posts.

19. Follow Google’s SEO Basics

Adhere to Google’s best practices for SEO: build an understandable website, ensure proper internal linking, and create helpful, user-centric content, as these simple steps unlock significant initial success.

20. Assess Technical SEO Needs

Prioritize technical SEO only if you have a massive website with millions of pages; for smaller sites (e.g., a 100-page SaaS tool), it’s less critical and investing heavily in it could be a waste of time.

21. De-emphasize Page Speed Fixes

Avoid overspending on page speed optimizations unless you are in a highly competitive niche where marginal speed differences significantly impact user experience, as it often provides diminishing returns for most sites.

22. SEO for User Action & Business Benefit

Frame your SEO strategy around facilitating user actions that directly benefit your business, recognizing that the aggregate demand for these actions remains constant even if search volumes shift.

23. Use Top-Down SEO Forecasting

For SEO forecasting, especially for new market entries, use a top-down (TAM-based) approach by estimating market size and penetration, as bottom-up keyword-based forecasts are often inaccurate and underestimate potential.

Utilize keyword research tools for indicative trends and understanding user search behavior (e.g., spelling variations), but avoid relying on their exact volume numbers for precise forecasting due to their inherent inaccuracies.

25. Develop Consulting Skills (Moonlight)

If aspiring to be a growth advisor, build your consulting skills (sales, closing, retention) by moonlighting while keeping your day job, rather than immediately quitting to become an advisor.