Setting Your Business Up for Success: Part 3 of the State of Organic Search 2024
Welcome to our third and final entry diving into the state of organic search in 2024. Part 1 examined the March 2024 Google core update, which was intended to adjust how low-quality, off-topic, poorly reviewed content shows within Google search rankings. Part 2 looked at the U.S. full rollout of the Google search feature, AI Overviews, in May; AI Overviews gives answers to a search query by summarizing data ingested and analyzed by Google’s LLM Gemini.
The specifics of both updates are interesting, but the general trends and implications are arguably more important for businesses to pay attention to and plan around. Both major Google search updates have either very directly or slightly less directly focused on the advancements and current notoriety of AI. Whether you consider AI the death knell for SEO, a bright shining light of opportunity, or something in between, AI has been a huge topic in the SEO world since the explosion of Chat-GPT. So how can businesses be thinking and planning strategically for organic traffic and their digital presence?
Recommendations for the New Organic Search Landscape
Quality, Brand, and Lower Funnel Focus
The first three recommendations to continue to have a successful organic presence and a powerful digital presence all relate to content on your website. Only one is a particularly new shift, while the other two are long-term tactics that are needed now more than ever.
The Quality of Your Content Matters
This has been one of the most important focuses for SEO over the last decade or more. It’s not new, but it’s critical. Some of the hardest hit websites from the March core update were sites with poor quality or regurgitated content. That’s because even though quality has mattered for years, putting out quick regurgitated content has still worked very well in many circumstances. Well… with generative-AI, we’re going to see more and more and more of this style of easy, surface-level content. This means more competition and diminishing returns.
Notice that we aren’t saying quantity doesn’t matter. Google still loves long content, and we don’t see that going away. But rich content—both long and short—with unique perspectives, in-depth information, and a truly expert approach will be good bets for well-ranked pages.
A Strong Brand Voice is Key
Again, not new… but the reasoning to pay deep attention to brand voice is a little different than before. We predict two types of digital searchers. The first are people that are trying to avoid AI and want to go straight to a website and hear directly from your brand. Having a strong, cohesive, consistent brand voice will help businesses form a closer connection with these users. The second digital searcher are those who tend towards AI chatbots/assistants, which means businesses have to work very hard to ensure their brand voice is strong enough to carry through to chatbots. That’s no small task.
Funnel Activity is Shifting
Chatbots and related AI-tools are taking a fairly significant share of high funnel, education-oriented search. This study analyzing ChatGPT vs Google discusses why that might be the case. We predict this means businesses will get significantly better results ongoing if they focus more on mid-funnel consideration and low-funnel content conversion content.
If your business does want to (or need to) focus on high funnel traffic, then consider focusing on question and answer or conversational oriented content. This plays into the style of chatbots, AI Overviews search feature, and related generative AI. We’re hesitant placing significant time and energy here because this is a short-term work around that probably won’t lead to sustained long-term success.
Technical and Process Considerations
Alongside our content recommendations, there are a few additional considerations that we recommend paying attention to in terms of process and infrastructure.
Privacy and Data Concerns Need More Attention
The AI tools that we’ve been discussing throughout this series rely on processing huge amounts of data to function. That means personal information, business information, and really anything and everything are likely to be fed into LLMs through web scraping, IoT devices, social media monitoring, and more. We know this is happening, but there is a startling lack of transparency in terms of the ingestion and use of data. That could put your business at risk.
Businesses need to focus on 1) tightening their own data privacy to protect their and their clients’ information and 2) ensuring really good and well adopted rules are in place at your organization when it comes to AI tools—generative AI tools in particular. Businesses run the risk of using copyrighted work or plagiarizing content. Not a good look for any organization. It’s a bit of a wild west in terms of legal ramifications, and a conservative approach is likely the safest. This article and report from Deloitte dives into legal implications of generative AI.
Be Smart About AI Tool Processes
We’ve left this for last, but it’s frequently one of the hottest topics in marketing. What AI tools should you use, how should you use them, and can they really make you more productive? You might have noticed from our last section that we don’t recommend a feet first, all-in approach to using AI tools for your business. That doesn’t mean don’t use—it just means be smart about how you use it.
We’ve long been huge fans of data mining and predictive modeling tools, and still firmly believe they’re underutilized within marketing. Consider what AI-oriented tools you can use to analyze your data and industry data to make smart campaign optimizations and more impactful strategy roadmaps.
Implement comprehensive human oversight into any generative AI practices. It might seem at odds with trying to speed up processes and working smarter, but we’re not at a stage where we can generative content of any type for businesses without a thorough human review. You need to ensure that all content is accurate, matches your brand voice and standards, does not use confidential, regulated, or proprietary information. AI tools can be an excellent research or first-step in your content process (whether text, images, music, videos), but over reliance is a huge risk.
Be Smart. Be Effective. Be Successful in 2024 and Beyond.
Technology changes and improvements hold the promise of more information, better uses of data, faster and clearer search, and more personalized experiences. By staying on top of current trends in the search landscape related to AI-tools, policies, and strategies, businesses can ensure they don’t run afoul of changes and make the most of the opportunities available for sustained success in a competitive digital landscape.
Cimarron Winter are experts in end-to-end organic search marketing—from strategy to content development, SEO, and analytics. If you need help with your organic search marketing, contact us for more information on how we can boost your online presence.