Welcome to Contentment

Hey good folks and happy Wednesday! I hope you’re looking forward to a wonderful weekend. 

I’m out of office this week with the family, so I’m pulling back an issue from the other week that got a lot of responses––just in case you missed it!

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Perception is reality. It’s why word of mouth is so important. It’s why internal comms and promoting your work is so important. And it’s why visibility and impressions in SEO and AEO are so important. 

For most companies, organic search traffic is down year-over-year, even if impressions and placements have drastically improved. That’s because Google and LLMs have increasingly become zero-click platforms––in which people search and get answers within the platform.

That’s the new operating model. For many brands, paid search and direct traffic are going up year-over-year, which is indicative of SEO’s halo effect. If you are getting impressions and citations from organic, but not traffic––it doesn’t mean that traffic disappeared entirely. It means those people are finding new routes to your site after they fulfill their inquiries elsewhere. 

That means they are more likely to click on a paid ad to get to your site, or just go there directly. That’s a sign your program is working. 

But building executive understanding of how this shift in SEO (which, to me, includes AEO) is tough. Organic has risen to be one of the top traffic and conversion driving channels for many organizations. As in, the 1 of the top 2 channels.

Reduce traffic in that channel consistently, and red flags raise across the organization. 

But there are a few things to work on here:

Growing up in a growth org meant, for me, that impressions were vanity metrics, at best. Real performance was traffic and conversion. But today, impressions are more meaningful than ever, especially for SEO. 

As more and more buyers do their research on Google or LLMs, without ever coming to your website, it is critical that the information presented on those platforms match what your company wants to say. 

Showing up there, across queries and prompts, is critical. If you don’t show up, the user doesn’t know you exist. Impressions, citations, and even branded prompts are clear indications that your organic search program across branded and non-brand is working––esp. if those numbers are growing quickly YoY, QoQ, and MoM. 

Impressions matter for educating the buyer in their new journey, but eventually, they do have to come to your site. You’ll likely see less traffic from organic, and even a halo effect on other channels from impression increases in organic, but you need to keep a sharp eye on organic conversion on your website. 

That number shouldn’t be going down. In fact, with less traffic from the organic channel, what does come through should arguably be more educated on your brand and what you offer, and therefore warmer as a lead. You should be able to convert them at a higher rate than before zero-click SEO. 

If that isn’t happening, you need to work on your website, your demo videos, and CRO. If the organic traffic isn’t converting at a higher rate these days, something is off on the site, or in the way Google and LLMs are talking about you.

No writer or editor likes to hear it (it’s existential), but for performance content (i.e. content written for SEO and AEO), humans are not your primary audience. The bots are. Your performance content informs Google and the LLMs on how to think about you, on how to describe your offering, on how to compare you to others, and more. 

Your prospect will read what they find on those platforms. And those platforms will summarize from the performance content on your website, that of third-parties, and more and more, social platforms, too. 

It is your job to influence their opinion, to feed them the right, more accurate information, and to increase your impressions and citations of that information. But do not be fooled into thinking traffic is your goal on these pages. It is not. Influence and impressions are. So, build your page for the bots. 

Include markdown text and FAQs. Never forget alt text in images. Keep assets regularly updated with clear publish dates. Interlink like your life depends on it so the bots understand the contextual web of your site and the information you offer. 

And that’s it for me this week! 

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you! 

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all. 

Tracey

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