The Paradigm Shift in SEO: How Marketers Can Prepare

Welcome and Introductions

Carissa: Welcome everyone. I'll just let everyone roll in for just another minute and then we'll kick it off. Today, seeing people rolling in, topic struck a nerve. I think we're all kind of like, I'm, I'm personally really excited for all of the like Google updates, like the events and keynotes this year. I feel like I'm in the middle of some, you know, six season drama and I'm every, every chapter, every episode is. Got more of a cliffhanger for me. Yes, I'm seeing someone in the chat say this isn't the Sam Smith I was expecting. Oh, sorry. Not the best. You got the best Sam Smith today. Awesome. As people roll in, I would love to just introduce myself. I'm Carissa. I'm a customer marketing manager at Jasper. I'll kind of be kicking us off. This is the paradigm shift in SEO and how marketers can prepare.

And so as you can tell, we have a really fantastic duo. The even better Sam Smith today and then our very own Megan Keeney Anderson, the VP of Marketing at Jasper. They're both extremely passionate about AI and SEO and I have just heard incredible insights from them already. They have a ton of knowledge and experience to bring to the table today.

And then I can just assure you that there is going to be a really insightful and engaging session as we explore today's landscape and then what next steps everyone can take in this evolving landscape. And so I can see some people are already doing this inside of the chat, but I'd love for you guys to introduce yourselves. It is a private chat today, so you can say your name, where you're tuning in from, maybe your role, and what you hope to get out of the session today. You'll also notice my friend and Jasper expert Meredith will be inside of the chat today as well.

So we'll be monitoring all of your comments and then if you have specific questions today, we'll save some time at the very end for some questions. But I would love for you guys to use that Q and A feature inside of Zoom just so that we can really easily monitor those. And that Q and A will also be public, but seeing some people tune in from all over, that's awesome. Phoenix or Palm Springs, even some international folks as well joining us.

So that is just amazing to see. But with that being said, I would love to just kind of kick it off to Megan and we can dive into this discussion today.

The Paradigm Shift in SEO and AI

Meghan Keany Anderson: Fantastic. So we are going to have a lot of fun today. We're going to tackle some fears. We're going to keep it fairly casual. This is really a shared group of, you know, marketing and business leaders who are, you know, with open eyes, trying to understand what's changing about the marketing landscape around us and what do we need to kind of prepare for. You know, it's funny, this is probably even beyond SEO. I think some of the changes we're seeing in marketing right now are the biggest changes that any of us have really seen for large portions of our career. I think like other big shifts were frankly the move to digital and the Internet, the introduction of mobile and kind of what that opened up. This is right up there on that level.

And so it comes with a ton of opportunity. It also comes with some trepidation. Some things that have worked before aren't going to work moving forward.

And so we need to not fear that we need to fix it. Right. We need to go after that and, and, and understand it and get curious about it, which is why you're all here.

And it's also why I brought my friend Sam in who knows a thing or two or a thousand about SEO. Sam is from Demand. Well, I'll let you introduce yourself, Sam, tell him a little bit about your background.

Sam Smith: Sure. Everybody, I'm Sam. I am a career long builder of technology solutions for marketers. I love working in the martech space. I love working in startups specifically. Yeah, and like Megan said, this is just a wild time with the advent of generative AI and that becoming commoditized in solutions that we can integrate with from a product builder, it's, it's really exciting, allows us to see new opportunities to do things that we've never been able to do before or rethink existing workflows.

But yeah, it really gives us a chance to, to try and think about what, what disruptions might be coming and how can we get ready for those.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Awesome. So the way we're going to approach this everyone is we're going to have a bit of a discussion back and forth, talking through the observations that we've seen, the practical advice that we've seen work. And laying some of that out. I will bring up some summary slides as we get to different breaking points in the discussion and also I'll show you kind of inside Jasper about how we're bridging AI and search engine optimization to make better content.

So we'll be a little bit bouncing around, but that will keep it interesting.

Mythbusting: Google and AI Content

Meghan Keany Anderson: This first section I really wanted to talk about, you know, some of the, the, the basics when it comes to AI and SEO. I know that this is all kind of new and so some of you may be at various stages and learning about it. So I thought, Sam, that we could talk about, you know, some of the core aspects and beginning right up front with one of the big questions that I heard probably more last year than recently, but for the sake of asking it, will Google penalize AI content?

And so I hear this question a lot. I thought we could maybe, you know, once and for all be clear about kind of what the, the short and sweet answer is to that.

Sam Smith: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I'm on the receiving end of that question all the time too. We get it from customers, we get it from prospects. The where I go with that is straight to Google's mouth themselves. About this time last year, actually, I think it was maybe this week last year, Google put out updated guidance around their helpful content update.

And a lot of that really specific changes in that guidance, some of which were like things in language where they talking about. It used to be that they wanted you to produce content written by people for people. And that has since changed. They're talking about content created for people for just four people. Right. They've dropped the by people language.

So it, it kind of speaks to not just acceptance but, but also saying, hey, if you're using AI to produce this, that's totally fine. That being said, there are, there are still guidelines around what Google defines as valuable content and helpful content. And a lot of that comes down to how it, how the content you're publishing helps Google's users find the answers they're looking for. There are definitely ways that you can abuse the new AI capabilities to produce all kinds of content. That isn't going to help anybody.

But basically what Google is saying now is that if these tools are out there and you want to use them, it can help you be more effective and efficient. And simply by nature of having them as part of your toolkit is not going to pose a risk to organic search rankings.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, I think the line that I remember from one of Google's search experts was that they don't hate AI content. Obviously they're making major investments in AI. They hate bad content, they hate shallow content, they hate content that is designed to trick search engines and doesn't really serve the end reader or customer.

So use AI, but use it in combination with a editor, with a creator who has a point of view, who has done research, who has added substance to that. Use AI as an accelerant. Don't use AI to automate a bunch of content that you Publish without checking.

Sam Smith: Right.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Those seem pretty clear to follow. All right, so with that myth out of the way, let's dive into some of the non gimmicky, really productive ways that you've seen customers or that you yourself have used AI to help with search engine optimization. And I'll start with you and then I'll, I'll pull up a little bit about how we do it inside Jasper afterwards.

Productive Ways to Use AI in SEO

Sam Smith: Sure, sure, absolutely. Just, just to get it out there too. I didn't clarify earlier. I'm CTO of a company called Demand. Well, we are official technology partners with Jasper and we use generative AI technology from, from Jasper and combine it with SEO data to help our customers grow their organic search. The way that we've seen that kind of surface itself is all across the SEO spectrum. That can come in the form of helping formulate an SEO strategy. It can be in content execution. It can also be in some of the more on page technical parts of SEO as well.

So there's a lot of different applications for that. One of the most advantageous way we've seen, you know, Megan, you just talked about making sure that there's a human involved in the process, is through a managed service that we offer called Manage AI Content. What it really does is it allows our customers to take advantage of the speed and the efficiency gains of AI while still having a human subject matter expert involved.

And we think that is really important to the process to make sure that you are putting out the best content possible. But that's just one use case out of many. Right? There are tons of free and paid solutions for using AI tools to optimize title tags or meta description pages or meta descriptions about the pages that you are publishing. AI is also useful for helping formulate a strategy. Right? Doing keyword research, discovering new topics or clusters of search that you might want to go after.

So it's really widely applicable. And part of the fun part of my job is figuring out all the ways that we can work that into a platform that help people do that discovery, be smarter, be faster, and really do more with less, which I think is really important right now.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, what I'm kind of hearing you saying, Sam, is, and I'll bucket these a little bit. There's a scope of work around strategy and planning. So getting keyword lists, figuring out where the opportunities are, figuring out how to take a pillar piece of content and build a cluster of content around that.

So there's like a, like strategy way that AI can help. Then there's the actual content creation Getting those to market faster, structuring that well for search. And then there's the optimization side of, hey, maybe those things that you might have skipped over in the past because you were just too rushed, your really good meta descriptions or, you know, markup schema for snippets, things like that, that you either skipped because you ran out of time or maybe you don't have quite the SEO skill on your team to know how to do that. Well, those three areas I think are kind of where we see AI being a help for SEO.

Demo: Using AI Tools for SEO

Meghan Keany Anderson: And so I'll dive into our copilot for a moment so you can kind of see how we use it. And then after that I want to dive into, okay, so these are the ways that AI can help with SEO, but what are the ways that AI is sort of changing search engine result pages and that we need to get ready for? That's the paradigm shift we're talking about.

But for now, I'm going to hop into Jasper. So some of you are Jasper customers, so this might look familiar. Sam, I know this looks familiar to you, but let's say I want to write a blog post about changes AI is bringing. The worst part about demoing is having everybody watch how slowly you type. Okay, So I think what's, what's useful for us in this is we can kind of begin to, to build out our, our content in a very kind of intentional way. Right.

So main points. So let's say we want to talk about does Google penalize AI? We also want to talk about what is SGE or search generative experience in Google. We also want to talk about what should marketers do to prepare for coming changes to search. Right.

So I'm going to work with my copilot Jasper to start to build this out. It'll prompt me to bring in more substance. So do I have any case studies and AI? I do, but for now I'm going to skip that.

And then we're going to sort of generate that. Now while that is generating that, we, we don't want to just hit publish on, on that. There's still more work to do.

So what this does is it gets you faster to that first piece of content. Right. And what I then want to go do is go in and build that content out, add examples, add research, fact check everything.

But it does kind of get you faster to that nice clean outline of a first draft post. Then let's say, and for this I'm going to hop over to a different tab. You want to take that post and Optimize it. We have kind of a built in SEO tab here that we use that will say, hey, this is kind of where you're sitting right now in terms of search engine optimization. Let's look at some ways that we can change the headers, let's look at some topics or additional content that you can create around this and then let's find ways to further optimize this for those search engines to make sure they appear.

So those are kind of the ways that we, that we use AI inside Jasper to kind of help build out our content. And there's lots more to dive in there, but I wanted to give you sort of a sense of it.

Recap: AI and SEO Basics

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, so let's do a quick recap of this very first intro session of the ways that AI can help with SEO and that early myth bust around whether AI content automatically gets penalized. So I'm going to pull up a couple of the key points that we've made here. So, and I apologize, I'm working behind the scenes here. Thanks for your patience. All right, so myth busted. Google does not penalize AI, but there are ways you can use AI to help with SEO.

So some of the ones that Sam mentioned that I've mentioned is kind of building out that SEO content map. You know, the topics you want to rank for. How do you take a topic and produce, you know, a dozen different angles at approaching that topic? How do you then optimize your structure and your meta details? How do you build clusters around a content pillar so that you own not just keyword, but you start to own a whole topic?

And then using AI for kind of high volume objective content, like directories is a good example. By objective content I mean like these are the things where it's informational at its core. We had an example of a customer named Scott Matheson from Amplitude. I'll kind of pull up his case study here. He used AI and Jasper to. He knew he wanted to build this massive heavy lift directory of terms that were related to his business. So, you know, product analytics terms would live on the website. It would serve as a surface area to capture people. It was 20 individual term landing pages. Each of them contained about 600 to 800 words. It was over 15,000 words in total. Heavy lift, but like objective and straightforward and demonstrably provable content. Right. Directories like this are a great example of where to use AI versus something that might be more like thought leadership or require more research or more detail. You might want to go heavier on human content there.

And even with this directory, everything was AI assisted but human, edited and reviewed for accuracy to make sure that they were putting good content out and not, not, you know, stuff that was just designed to fill up space. So the nice thing is they were able to do this really quickly. And then that directory, pages from that directory started to hit page one in the search results within three weeks.

So quick project would have taken a very long time without AI. AI made it happen and got them that organic traffic earlier. All right, anything to add before we move on to the big changes to upcoming search engine results pages?

Sam Smith: Nothing.

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, perfect. Then let's dive into the stuff that scares us.

The Paradigm Shift: Google SGE and Search Changes

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, so one of the things that Google has unveiled in the last year is it's going to be making some changes to the way that it structures its search engine result page and it will be introducing AI generated answers right alongside the sort of organic blue links that it has always surfaced and alongside the search engine marketing ads that's always surfaced. This, any change to Google will get marketers attention, but this one was particularly startling. Sam, let me throw it to you. What is it about this change that you think has marketers attention?

Sam Smith: It's, I think it's the fear of the unknown for sure. And it's taken Google I think longer, which is maybe how they typically operate. Taking them longer to roll out a change than, than some people have hoped for.

And whether it's a good change or a bad change, you want it to happen right now so you can figure out what to go and do with it. I think the, it's really unknown about what the impacts are going to be. Will it be broad reaching, Will it affect certain types of searches? Will it affect certain industries? I think there's just a lot of unknown about how and when it's going to happen.

But we can start to see a little bit of some of the early implications of this. I found there's an article from site called Search Engine Land. If you're interested in SEO tips, go check it out. They have a study that says they basically looked at the presence of AI generated results on I think something like a billion different queries that have been generated and found that there are industries like healthcare or even e Commerce, Queries, B2B, Tech, Insurance and education, just a few industry specific types of searches where we can see that Google is sometimes half the time or more often showing AI generated results on, on queries related to those topics.

So that that can, it shows us where they're testing right now. Doesn't necessarily mean that's where the effects will take place permanently or, or, you know, it's maybe not a holistic set of where those will happen, but it is worth acknowledging, right, that there are specific industries where there could be an effect of that and that will probably change over time. And there is also probably some indications of the different types of queries that, that will have different results. Right. If, if it's an informational query, something where it is a little bit easier for a large language model to come up with its own information about a topic, that's probably something that's more likely to have, you know, an impact from AI search results. My guess, personally, as you go lower and lower in a, in a marketing funnel and you get to search queries that are a little more transactional, a lot more indicative of someone looking to make a purchase decision, for instance, that's probably not going to be the first place where, where there are search results impacted by that, just because that is a whole lot more specific to, to a vendor, to a transaction that's happening as opposed to just providing some general information about a given topic.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, so I'm going to pull on that thread a little bit because I think that's really important. I think people see this change and they get nervous because there will be all of these what people are calling zero click searches where you don't have to click through to a website, you can just get the answer right on the Google page. But it's not like it is happening in a monolith across all terms, all industries. And, and your point around. Yeah, certainly like more exploratory searches, like when the buyer think about the buyer journey, when they're not quite ready to purchase, when they're just kind of poking around, when they're kind of learning a little bit in that learning mode, AI as a conversationalist is great for that.

And so we're going to see those kinds of very early top of the funnel, like exploratory searches will likely see more AI influence in the search engine result pages. To your point, Sam, when people are closer to a purchase mode, that is probably when the traffic will be less affected and will come through to the site. And so, you know, we're going to see some fluctuations in organic traffic for sure. In fact, Gartner estimates that over the next, you know, by 2028, we'll see certain industries will see declines of like 50% in overall organic traffic.

Now that's daunting. But when you think about the traffic that is coming into your site, if it follows that model we've been talking about that is going to be much more high intent traffic. The conversion rate off that traffic might be stronger.

And so it's worth kind of breaking apart this thing, kind of understanding what's underneath the hood and sort of what actually will change beyond just the overarching number. The other thing that I think is really interesting and I'd love your thoughts on this Sam, is so if you think about the search engine result pages, it's actually looking like it is turning into kind of three vehicles. Three search vehicles. You'll have AI or S. It's called sge.

So Search Generative Experiences. I've had to look up what that stands for a bunch of times, but that's like the AI answers. Then you will still have it have smaller landscape but you will still have the blue links that we can optimize for that amplitude and other companies are optimizing for.

And then there'll be a new vehicle called Perspectives. Now who knows how long Google will. They're experimenting with Perspectives and who knows how long that will sort of be part of the equation.

But for right now, Perspectives is sort of this new search vehicle that is emerging. And what I think is really interesting about it is I think it's really like smart and or I guess thoughtful of Google to do it in that Perspectives is quite literally user generated, human generated content, forum listings, product reviews, you know, TikTok videos and Reddit posts around a given topic. And the balance of having those human responses alongside AI responses might serve to counter some of the like distrust or genuine like, you know, errors that could come up in AI responses.

Now from a marketer standpoint, Perspectives is really interesting to me because it is something that we can contribute to, right? You can invest in building your community, in getting people to post about your product and surfacing in that way as sort of a new search vehicle that we can explore and optimize around and generate business through. So I'm kind of bullish on it, but what are your thoughts on it?

And feel free to like tell me it's going to be here and gone in six months.

Sam Smith: I definitely don't think it's a fad. I think it's, I think it's a smart balancing decision from, from Google and, and they even made updates to kind of guidance around like how you can indicate the presence of those kind of human generated posts on your site to help them pick up on it better. But I think it's smart because it balances this equation of, you know, hey, if they're going to say, on one hand it's okay to use AI and use it more and we're not going to ding you, the other hand is, well, maybe let's, you know, give a little bit more weight in search results or some kind of the part of the search experience to stuff that we know is created by humans still.

So I think it helps calm some fears, I think it helps even things out. And, and what it reminds me of too is I've seen this a lot recently on, on Amazon product pages where you scroll down to the reviews, and right above that now is an AI generated review that is like an aggregate of everything else that people have said. So while it, while it does provide a way to highlight human generated content, I think it's kind of double dipping intelligently because it creates a known set of information that an AI itself could like summarize or provide in a better way.

So I think it kind of makes this flywheel effect that like we're just starting to get results that are generated by machines, but at the same time we're finding ways to make sure that it's based on, on things by humans and for humans.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah. So search is diversifying. It is going to go through a period of, of turbulence. Right.

And so you want to be prepared, if you're, for all my marketing leaders in the room, you want to be prepared to sort of educate your company on what's happening here and get them focused on what's the most important thing that we can do through SEO now. And then, what are some of the ways that we need to diversify our own marketing strategies to compensate for some of the changes that we've seen in SEO. Because at this point, and you know, I know Sam and I talked before, so I know you agree with me on this. There is no another sort of myth bust way. There is no current way to influence what the AI generated response is on a, on a serp.

So that box is closed right now. Maybe over time marketers will figure it out. We're savvy people, but it's tough. That is kind of a petri dish. There's no direct way to sort of influence that.

So that leaves how do we get really good at the organic links and how do we start to explore this perspectives bucket and community and human generated and word of mouth content as a more decisive part of our, of our marketing strategy?

Navigating the New Search Landscape

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, so I'm going to bring up the recap of what we just talked about so y' all can fit for Anyone who's dutiful and taking notes, you can use these as sort of shorthand. And I may have missed a couple of points in here, but you know, the recap of changes coming to search, we are going to start to see a lot more zero click searches. Many of you have already started to see it. Many of you may have already started to see declines in organic traffic as a result, but those won't hit evenly. They won't hit evenly by industry, they won't hit evenly by search query type.

And so figure out where are the spaces where SEO still is a driver and you still can rank in the first or second spot and go after those hard. There are going to be three search vehicles. We just talked about it, AI, organic links and perspectives.

And then a fourth if you consider search ads. And then yes, you know, Gartner is estimating, you know, traffic losses, organic traffic losses of about up to 50% over the next few years. It's hard to know exactly that is an estimate. There are lots of other estimates out there, but they're all fairly sizable.

So it is worth setting expectations internally and regrouping on what the strategy should be. As you see those, those shifts and then to Sam's point, different industries and search types will be affected differently on it. Okay, so we've properly freaked you all out.

Now I want to end on action. What is a marketer to sort of do about these changes? And you heard a little bit of a few ideas even in that last section.

But let me start with you Sam. Kind of in light of organic traffic potentially declining, how are you shifting your own strategy? How are you advising others to shift?

Sam Smith: Yeah, I think it comes down to some real simple basics, right, about how Google wants to make sure that their users can get information as fast and easily and efficiently as possible. Especially in, in the light of what you just mentioned about how there's not a known way to influence AI generated results that are showing up in search. What, what we have to do is really consider the basic of making sure that we're putting out helpful content that is can be expedited and leveraged power of AI, but still needs a human hand as part of it. For us, we believe there is a superpower not just with AI, but when you combine it with real world performance data and the personalized context of whatever your goals are, whatever it is you're trying to achieve. We absolutely advocate for the use of AI to help you go faster, achieve more, but we want to make sure that we're providing it with the Right inputs in the right context to point it in the right direction and really make sure that the outputs are valuable. That applies, I think, certainly for SEO. I think it applies generally too. I'm sure there's a lot of FOMO for people on the call right now about if I don't have AI in my workflow, should it be in there? How do I incorporate it? I, I truly do think that finding ways to work it into your processes, into your daily life is, is going to provide an advantage. And, and of course, Jasper is a real great way to do that in a lot of different use cases.

And then, you know, lastly, just for me personally, if you're trying to struggle, if you're struggling to figure out where I can work that in, one of the ways I like to turn to an AI tool is to help get past the starting friction of whatever it is that I'm working on. If I'm creating a knowledge base article or I'm writing an email or I'm making a board deck, a slide or something. A lot of times it's hard to just start from scratch.

And so I want to rely on a tool that can help help me give something to react to rather than starting from scratch. And that's just a way, it's a fun game of finding, you know, where in my job, in my daily life, can I find an excuse to go and do that to help me go faster and get me more into the mode of doing what I do best?

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, this is a time of change, but it's also one of just rampant experimentation and getting, getting in there and having, having a hypothesis around like, all right, I think these searches will still be something we can optimize around and building a plan against that. Building out, using AI to build out that full content map as you're talking about, I would, you know, this is not a time to abandon SEO. This is a time to actually uplevel your SEO skill.

So I think that's a great point. I think another point that I've loved is a friend and former colleague of mine, Kieran Flanagan. He's now CMO of Zapier. He has this really nice way of framing this around the marketing strategy as a whole is, is really kind of about to go through a shift. I'll kind of pull up his, his quote on this.

So over the last 15 years or so, in some ways we've been really lucky because everything's been really traceable. It's been very data driven. We can optimize the heck out of anything we put out there. There was a formula for how to capture interest on online, right?

And so the thrust of marketing for the last 10, 15 years has been about how do you capture existing demand? So go meet people when they're searching for a product, Go meet people when they're exploring a topic that you know something about. Capture that demand that is out there and ready to be met. What Kiran has said is, you know, what we're going to have to shift to over the next kind of decade or so and not fully, but like more so is in addition to capturing existing demand, we really have to start to focus on how to create new demand.

And the ways that you do that is kind of the inverse. It's by making people interested in something that they may not be searching for yet. So, you know, social media content, YouTube content, brand and like thought leadership I think is actually going to see a big resurgence in a time when you know how to content and SEO content is like tougher to rank for.

So there's two ways you can grow as a marketing org. You can capture existing demand or you can create new demand. And we need to do both all the time.

But potentially we're headed towards a time where that creation of new demand and that growing of your audience in more community based branded ways will start to take the lead as well. I also talked with someone at, at HubSpot whose entire job is about leading the strategy for non organic traffic to their blog. Right.

So HubSpot sort of saw the changes coming to search. They, you know, had Basha step into this role of. All right, we've got people who are focused on SEO. How can you focus on non SEO acquisition? How can you help us grow and monetize our community? How can we do that in a way that is predictable and measurable?

And so a lot of her work is focused on that. And one of the clearest lessons that she's come back with is repurposing existing content for other channels and using AI to do so is going to be impactful and it's probably something you're not doing enough of. We all kind of think like, oh, I wrote a blog post, yeah, I'll put it on social media.

But if you put a real strategy around. No, we had a webinar, we're going to take the transcript of that webinar, we're going to turn it into five blog posts, we're going to turn that into 15 social media posts and we're going to build an empire around this content so that we've got diversified sources of traffic coming into that. So I thought those were two really good points on that end. In a moment, we're going to kind of wrap for questions. I will bring up a recap slide of what we sort of covered here.

Recap: Changes Coming to Search

Meghan Keany Anderson: So how do you get focused? We know that organic is probably going to decline in some respects. We know that we need to change our marketing strategy over the coming years to compensate for that.

And so these are a few of the things that Sam and I just mentioned and certainly not exhaustive. But it's a starting place, right? It's a place to move you from fear to action around this.

So the first one here, as I've mentioned, Kiran's advice of demand creation versus demand capture, how do you, while we're figuring out SEO, how do we grow community and social and thought leadership and brand experiences and events and these other channels that have maybe taken a backseat to SEO in the past, how do we get those growing again and creating new demand for your company that is not search based? I think part of that is shifting from keywords to key people. Right. This is the perspectives argument of yes, you should go and you should optimize for that keyword.

But in addition, let's find the person who has leverage on that topic. Let's find the person who's got an existing audience around your subject matter. Maybe they're an expert, maybe they're a customer that had a really good experience. How do you identify the network that is going to spread your company when you can't rely as heavily on the algorithms to spread your company? Sam, I'll hand this one over to you as our, as our recap around getting hyper focused on where SEO and SEM kind of work.

Sam Smith: Yeah, yeah. I think it comes down to doing playing the game the way Google wants you to play it, right. If you're putting out content that is going to help people find the answers that they're looking for faster and better, that's going to be a winning strategy to make sure that you're, you're always playing the game right and you're always aligned with their goals. Where, where that works today too, from an SEO standpoint is, is really in the basics of being smart about keyword selection, making sure that you're putting out content that includes the right phrases that are targeting the right topics and clusters of search that you want to rank for in ways that kind of provide some relevancy and make sense topically.

And of course, that can all be done with AI Tools to help you do it faster. And then also, Megan, as you mentioned, optimize content over time to help you make. Make better what you've put out there, repurpose it, and leverage it on other channels, too.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah. And the one final point I'll note here, because I've talked a lot about how this is a resurgence of brand and thought leadership, but that second to last bullet there I want to take a moment on. We focus so much of our time, and I'm projecting a little bit of myself here on how do I get net new customers. I want fresh, new fallen snow. I want new logos. I want to bring new people in. I get really excited to be able to sort of generate leads or generate new transactions for the first time. Right.

So much of our marketing intention goes there. There is still a lot of value. There's a lot of demand expansion within your existing audience.

So I know we're all concerned about the top of the funnel having some turbulence in it. But, but think for a moment about how much of your existing customer base could you be deepening the engagement with? How many of them, if they got more value out of your product, would then be, you know, ready to upgrade or to, or to renew? How many of them would be invited to, excited to like, invite their colleagues and their friends into it? I think that, you know, if SEO is getting a little bit tougher, the things that will get easier and should get your focus are customer marketing, brand and thought leadership, community growth. These are sort of the, you know, the broader network. Like, these are some of the areas where we can increase investment to help us navigate this time while we're figuring out the new SEO.

So not a complete switch over. We need SEO. We need to rank on those, those engines.

But think about diversification is sort of the, the message of the day.

Action Steps for Marketers

Meghan Keany Anderson: All right, let me stop there. We have about five minutes left. I will stop sharing and then we can take a couple questions. I know there's a lot of them, so what we can promise you is we're going to follow up with a recording. I will probably take your questions and turn them into a blog post and just answer them and then repackage that blog post in a thousand different ways to eat our own medicine.

Recap: What's a Marketer to Do?

Meghan Keany Anderson: I'm kind of looking through the chat and I just wanted to touch on kind of ones that were a little bit repetitive. And so I see a couple questions about hallucinations. I know that this is a big one of like people wanting to create really factual content.

And so I mentioned a little bit in the chat about our Google search integration, but if you want to maybe expand a little bit more on that. Sam or Meghan. Sure, I'll start and then Sam, if you have thoughts, feel free to jump in.

So yeah, hallucinations are real in AI results and there's something to be watched out for. Over time, the number of hallucinations is sort of minimizing. However, this is why I say trust but verify in AI search results and then also in your own content. You never want to publish anything that you have not fact checked, that you have not edited, that you have not, you know, that you can't stand by confidently.

And so in, in Jasper we've reduced hallucinations by allowing you to sort of securely store more factual information about your company and your product right inside the copilot. So when Jasper is creating content, it's referring directly to that knowledge that you've taught it. So the chances of it, you know, creating something falls much, much, much smaller.

But regardless of how good the technology goes, there's a role for editors and for humans in making sure that the content is something that is true, substantive and something you can stand by. Any thoughts on that, Sam?

Sam Smith: Yeah, no, I would back that up 100%. We would never advocate for publishing something that you haven't at least fact checked and looked at yourself to make sure it lines up with your brand voice and the message you want to put out there. We have a feature in demand well that I call One click Content that will do keyword research and generate long form SEO content for you all in one click in a few minutes.

But that's just getting you close to the finish line. It shouldn't be taking you all the way over. So if you can take advantage of AI for speed and efficiency gains, but make sure that you're putting the human touch on it too.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Absolutely. I agree. Someone else was kind of asking something similar about how to kind of avoid spammy content.

And I think the same thing applies. Just making sure that the is always in there and that it's authentic to your brand. AI should not make us lazier as marketers. You know, it should make us better.

And so I absolutely believe strongly in having it be an assistant. Think about it as a calculator for a mathematician. You know, it's not going to do the work on its own to the, to the quality. It needs your strategy, it needs your oversight. This is a, this is an accelerant. Awesome. Looks like there's kind of a lot of technical questions in the chat as well, so that might be something to put in the blog post. I might not have time to get to all of these. If there's anyone that kind of stick out to you, Sam and Megan, if you, if you're looking through and yeah I'm scanning, I can kind of rapid fire answer a couple of these.

Sam Smith: Rich asked if SGE and Zero click Search are the same thing. Essentially yes. They're just different names for the same thing. Zero click Search is kind of a summary of what that means, which is no traffic back to your site.

But those are essentially the same.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Let's see. Some of these require more in depth answers. Should we block AI crawlers from crawling our content?

Sam Smith: That's, that will depend a lot on. I would need to know more about sort of your company or you know, if you're a news organization, if your content is proprietary, those sorts of things, you'd want to look into that. But there's also nothing to say that AI engines are crawling your content. It's not, it just doesn't operate like a search engine in that sense. They're trained off a collection of content from the Internet, but it's not sort of an always ongoing thing like Google.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Okay, well let's end on this one. An anonymous attendee asked what industry do you think will be affected the most or least do we think maybe even just broad strokes B2C or B2B will be more affected by these changes to search engine result pages?

Sam Smith: I think I'd have to go with B2C on the long term. B2B might be where that gets experimented with first in the short term.

Meghan Keany Anderson: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean think about the types of search, like what percentage of your searches are exploratory versus kind of purchase driven. And I feel like when you find that more of your traffic comes from those non branded terms, they come from the exploratory searches. You'll. You'll see that eaten away out of it.

Closing Thoughts and Final Words

Meghan Keany Anderson: Okay, we are two minutes over when we said we would wrap. So maybe I'll wrap us there. But as I said loads to discover here. We will take all these questions, we will turn them into follow up material and listen like my final word on this is and Sam, I'll invite you to make the same so you can start thinking is, you know this is a lot of change if you're feeling stressed about this. I get that I'm feeling a little stressed about this but marketers are really good at change. We flow where the market goes. Everything changed when the Internet came around, everything changed. With mobile, everything changed. With social, everything changed. Feels like every few years like something changes and we need to adapt our strategies and every single time we figure it out, we buckle down. We change too. This is going to be no different. It's certainly a bigger one, but we will get through it.

And especially in discourse and dialogue like this. Sam, any parting words?

Sam Smith: That's a hard act to follow, but I mean, success in marketing is always based on the ability to experiment, learn from it and improve and just do that cycle over and over again. The cool part about AI and the tools that are coming out now is that it's not just new experiments that we can go and run, but it changes the way that we can do those experiments themselves. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of possibilities, certainly a lot of unknowns that come with that, but I think we're in for a lot of really good surprises about how this is going to change our day to day.