Slow down and keep your eyes on the end user

Vince says: “Things are changing so rapidly with AI, you should be leaning on what works for people and not the algorithms.”

Will doing what works for people naturally mean that you will be successful in catering towards the newer algorithms?

“That's the big question. In theory, Google’s algorithms and the tools that they have built want to provide answers for users. There are some tin-foil-hat theories that they are optimizing for ad dollars and publishers – and to an extent, they do want to keep people on the platform because it’s where they get paid.

However, at the end of the day, that type of mindset is going to be very limiting, and you end up forgetting about your customers.

The idea is, you want to think about your customer first and how they would want to interact with your page, your content, your site, and your brand. That will lead you to what will ultimately be best for your company.

If you’re building your content strategy, or your brand itself, on exploits and hacks, you're building a house of cards. As we've seen multiple times, Google will often pull the rug out from under you and easily knock that house down. Whereas the brands that are really crushing it are the ones that have built a brand.

It's easy to think that Google (and other algorithms) prefer the big brands, but really, those are also the ones that have built great brands and brand notoriety. That's why they're getting clicked on, not because they've exploited some hack or some tactic that they saw on LinkedIn that works for a week.

If you're doing things for customers, Google will naturally reward you. It might be in more of a macro sense, but ultimately that's what you should be striving for.”

Could a people-first approach potentially work just as effectively for ChatGPT?

“All these tools are trying to simulate the way that a user will want to think and talk. Otherwise, they're not going to last long. If you have a tool that doesn’t connect with the end users, it’s not going to last or be helpful.

I mention Google a lot because, although ChatGPT is used, Google still has the vast majority of the market share.

Also, when I talk about AI, you can roll AI overviews into that because people are still using Google in a big way. Google is kind of a catch-all term because they have been the market leader. I'm sure models like ChatGPT are starting to take some eyeballs away, but I think it's the same thing.

You need to be more aware of building your brand and doing it the right way for your customers, rather than trying to do something that you heard about on LinkedIn, where somebody got a couple more citations on ChatGPT because they did some funky little spammy thing.”

You advocate for SEOs to keep testing, so what should you be testing, and how do you go about doing it?

“The way that I approach this is, it is okay to be open to trying these things. You don't have to outright discount everything you see, but if you do decide to try something, it’s important to test to see if it works and what impact it has. That testing mindset, and dipping your toes in the waters, is going to help mitigate some of the risks of Google pulling the rug out from under your house of cards.

See if it works. See how much it's going to impact if you start scaling it. The funny thing about this AI era that we're in is that it's really easy to scale some of these things and put your foot on the gas, because AI has made it easier to do some of these tasks.

Let me give you a concrete example. One of the things that will help you get noticed in AI overviews and ChatGPT is getting your brand included in ‘Best X’ roundups: ‘Best Podcast Company’, ‘Best Digital PR Tools’, etc. You could easily spin out hundreds of thousands of emails to websites and ask them if they want to write a post or if they want to include you in a post that they already have.

The long-term goal is not to appear on every single website. It's more important to think about your end user. You want to be where it's most relevant. You want to be on a quality website where someone's going to see your name and think, ‘This site that I trust mentioned BuzzStream, so maybe I should trust BuzzStream.’

Just getting your brand mentioned on random low-quality sites might work for the algorithm now, but we are still a distance away from these LLMs and AI technologies discerning more of the authority piece.

Back when AI was first coming onto the scene, somebody posted on LinkedIn that they had figured out an AI hack, where they used it to basically replicate all the content that their competitors had. His traffic went up and up, and he was boasting about it. Within a week, Google caught on and tanked the site.

That goes to show that just because you see somebody doing it, that doesn’t mean you should be doing it yourself. Test it. Test a few of these pieces of content and see what impact that has. Is it having a negative impact? Are your customers talking about it? Are you finding customers from these pieces? That will help future-proof your strategies.”

How do you know what to test to begin with?

“It really depends on what we're talking about. Let’s stick with the example of showing up in ‘Best X’ roundup posts.

If I wanted to test that for BuzzStream, I would personally start with the higher-quality websites. Then, if I'm seeing things working from that, maybe I would work my way down to the medium-quality ones and see whether things start to drop off.

You need to look at a number of things. You want to see how that impacts your visibility in AI overviews, but you also want to make sure that's not impacting your overall rankings. You want to understand how it's impacting traffic to the site and, ultimately, conversions. Are you getting more conversions from it? You can get as scientific as you want with it, by setting up a control group and doing it that way.

Some of it comes down to scale. You're not going to get a super scientific result if you're only testing two or three pages. Some of it will need to be based on your gut as well.

When I say testing, I also mean just dipping your toes in the water and seeing how things work and how they impact your brand in various ways.”

Do you also try to divide the people that you're targeting into likely customers versus people that aren't?

“That's another great option. In the SEO world, there's always going to be that push and pull of, ‘Am I doing this for the algorithm, for rankings, and for exposure, or am I doing this for the end result, which is always going to be sales/money?’ It really depends on who you ask.

Realistically, if you're an agency and your KPI is traffic or citations, you can get all the citations and traffic and rankings in the world, but if they don't ultimately lead to dollars for your clients, they're not going to keep you around. They're paying you money so that they get more money. There always has to be an eye on the prize whenever you're thinking about this stuff.

The good agencies are the ones that push back on that kind of thing. Yes, your goal may be to bring in links or bring in leads, but if you're bringing in low-quality leads or links that don't ultimately help the bottom line, you're not going to last.

Even with AI and all of the algorithm changes – and people talking about their strategies and saying that they've figured out how to spam their way into citations and whatnot – if you're thinking about that bottom line and that customer, that's what's really going to help you in the long run.”

How do you keep on top of the latest trends to test?

“There are a couple of newsletters that I follow.

The thing I’m trying to do nowadays is not get too overwhelmed with it. You want to step back, see where things are going, and not feel too antsy. You don't want to just jump on the first thing you see. I like to take it all in like a sponge.

I really like the Core Updates newsletter from Mark Williams-Cook at Candour; they do a great job. Aleyda Solis has one called SEOFOMO. Stacked Marketer is one I have started looking at recently that does a great job at discussing marketing in general. I'm not a marketing generalist; I’m very much a content marketer who focuses on SEO and digital PR, but understanding what's going on in marketing in general is very helpful.

On LinkedIn, I have a few people that I try to keep in touch with because they're super smart and pretty much everything that they say aligns with the way the industry is moving. Mark Williams-Cook is one, and Lily Ray is another. It’s a case of picking the people who you find to say insightful things, and who aren’t too quick to jump on the latest fad.

You want to listen to people who will poke holes in some of the more clickbait-y posts that you see out there. The kind of thinkers that we need are people who are a little more wary of jumping on the latest trend.”

Vince, what was the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Go slow. Don't be afraid to take your time, and make sure that you're really thinking about the end user in all these strategies that you're implementing and seeing.

How is it going to impact your end user? How is it going to impact your customers, at the end of the day?”

Vince Nero is a Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream. Find out more over at BuzzStream.com.