How not to get fired in the GEO era

I snark about seo/geo/aeo/etc as much as anyone. But not internally. Especially not to the senior leadership team.

I made the “it’s just seo” mistake one time and not again.

A few thoughts how marketers/seos should approach this… Take it as a given that everyone in senior leadership has read some “seo is dead” take.

Assume that for many of them their personal habits have changed and they now use ai tools in many cases where they once used google.

Assume they think ai is often better.

There’s six ways to get more organic traffic:

- more demand
- more serp real estate
- more keywords
- more intent types
- more topics
- more languages

Here are some simple ways to think about each of these. More demand

Every keyword is a market. They expand. They contract.

A nice way to plan is to look not just at keyword volume, but the CAGR of keyword volume.

Prioritize building content on growing topics.

Over the last 9 months we’ve deleted close to 80% of the marketing footprint off ibm.com.

Tens of thousands of pages.

The result is that traffic, conversion and all our experience and NPS metrics are up.

It was a gross project but I’ll tell you about it. First, why do this project at all?

Simple answer.

The site was impossible to manage for our teams and way too hard to understand and use for our customers.

We were paying for complexity.

I see lots of SEOs freaking out because the AI is coming for your clicks.

I understand the anxiety when your livelihood is the channel.

But it’s the wrong response. Blaming Google is the wrong response. Blaming AI is the wrong response.

Here’s the convo I had with my team.. First of all, Google is the broker of a two-sided marketplace of users and publishers (a subset of which are advertisers).

It has to keep the equation together. And the introduction of ChatGPT, which obviously outperformed G on certain queries, forced their hand.