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The way we get information on the internet is poised to transform from a mostly search-based user experience to a conversational, or chatbot-based one, powered by engines like Google’s Bard and Microsoft Bing’s partnership with OpenAI.
Caught up in this dynamic are SEO agencies, who have carved out a niche helping brands get discovered in this current search paradigm.
In response, several SEO agencies are adapting their tactics to prepare for this new user experience, including conducting analyses on how to make it into a chatbot’s answers, retooling websites such that they will be maximally likely to be surfaced by chatbots, and experimenting with long-tail keywords.
“You can start to reverse engineer what sources they’re pulling from and what would make it likely to pull from a certain source in the future,” said David Shapiro, svp of earned media at NP Digital. “It’s like SEO back in the early 90s, even before Google, really trying to understand what’s powering these results.”
The shift in search is just one of many changes in the past few years to the performance marketer job. The discipline became in vogue in the past two decades for its focus on technical granularity and lower-funnel results, but now privacy concerns and artificial intelligence are preventing performance marketers from exerting as much control when crafting media plans.
Showing up in AI search and honing prompts
Most people are still searching on Google’s search engine. Only 14% of U.S. adults have tried ChatGPT, according to a May Pew Research Center survey.
As marketers wait for wider adoption, they’re analyzing when and how a brand gets cited by a chatbot, a service around 10% of NP Digital’s clients have asked for in the past few months, Shapiro said.
“We’re noticing that pages ranking number one in organic search results aren’t necessarily the top source in the same search engine’s chatbot results,” said Evan Finkelstein, senior manager of SEO and performance content at New York Life Insurance Company.
A key task of SEO agencies is finetuning content and metadata on websites so that search engines will pick them up. Now agencies are working to spruce up websites so that an AI chabot’s web crawler might be more likely to put the website’s content in a chatbot’s answer.
[SEO agencies] have been really bad at communicating the value they’re bringing.
Sam Tomlinson, EVP at agency Warschawski
Between 40% and 50% of clients of SEO marketing firm The Hoth have focused more on ensuring they comply with Google’s crawling requirements this year, said CMO Max Gomez Montejo.
“Clients are becoming more aware that they need to enhance their websites if they want their content to be prominently featured in search snippets or, looking ahead, for AI chatbot integration,” he said.
Right now, it will be hard to measure the fruits of this labor, as, currently, ChatGPT is mostly based on information from 2021 and older. But the idea is that eventually, ChatGPT will include more recent material, and at that point, brands should be prepared.
Gomez Montejo said The Hoth is also working with clients to hone their long-tail keyword strategy, which refers to more specific groupings of keywords that get fewer searches per month and are a significantly less popular investment than branded keywords. As searches become more conversational, focusing on these phrase-like groupings becomes more important, he said.
SEO agencies are also offering new services for the traditional search interface already being remade by generative AI. Both The Hoth and NP Digital are helping clients craft the best prompts to feed to a chatbot when making AI-generated content.
Moreover, because brands are able to generate more content with ChatGPT, advertisers are asking SEO agencies to create more blog posts on their behalf to compete. Gomez Montejo said that client demand for content has doubled in the past year.
An evolution, or the end of SEO?
Even without chatbots, SEO agencies have faced challenges in recent years. Google has made links less prominent in its interface, introducing text snippet answers to queries instead of purely funneling users to websites for information, Finkelstein said.
“The results partially remove the brand from the equation, decrease visibility and the likelihood someone will visit your site or engage with your brand,” Finkelstein said, noting the chatbot interface is likely to exacerbate this problem.
In addition, brands must attend to digital channels now more than ever. Younger audiences have a penchant for searching on TikTok and Instagram. That means less innovative SEO agencies are getting squeezed, said Sam Tomlinson, EVP at boutique agency Warschawski, who said that in the past 12 months, he’s seen fewer SEO-only RFPs from clients than in any preceding period he can remember.
“[SEO agencies] have been really bad at communicating the value they’re bringing,” Tomlinson said.
But successful SEO agencies have excelled at adaption. Tinuiti helps clients with how they show up on platforms like Google Maps, TikTok and Reddit, while adapting to changes to Google’s algorithm, said Kris Wong, senior director of SEO at the agency. She sees the shift to chat-driven search as another bump in the dynamic job of an SEO professional, rather than cataclysmic.
“Google is changing so frequently … so being adaptive is key,” Wong said. “It’s nothing new.”
