ChatGPT and Organic Search – The Sky is NOT Falling
If you are a business that relies on local search results to drive traffic to your website, I’m sure you have heard the roar. “ChatGPT will decimate the SERPS”. “Zero search is getting wiped out”. “SEO is dead”. Alarmist and concerning for sure. But this is not a catastrophe. On the contrary, this is an opportunity!
The folks who do not embrace the winds of change and position themselves to thrive will perish.
Ai is here and has been here for years now. That genie is not going back in the bottle. So, love it or hate it, but it IS happening.
And make no mistake, this WILL change the landscape of SEO, but my opinion is that it will change for the better. Folks want fast answers to things and the Ai taking over the search results for informational key phrases that SEO would typically target, is good for searchers.
No one wants to read an article just to get an answer to a question like, “What is concrete chipping?”. An Ai answer (provided is it correct) that pops up with no need to click to a website is fast and efficient. Google is doing a service to make that faster. However, it does push out all the businesses that used to pop up because they had created content around a response to the query and optimized it to rank. So yeah, that sucks that old content will no longer rank.
this will force the creation of better content focused more around the transactional or research phase of a client journey. Businesses still need a way to pull clients into their funnel/website to get those leads.
I believe over the next several months or couple of years it’s going to be a lot of fat trimming in the SERPs and the days of bloated content just for the sake of ranking are coming to an end quickly. Again, for the searcher, this is a very good thing.
So why are we not worried at Local Juggernaut about this? Because we have always touted and provided deeply researched and very high-quality content for all stages of a client journey. But beyond that, at the end of the day we don’t think of ourselves as just an SEO company. We are acquisition partners to our clients. Meaning we are focused on what will get our clients more customers. And today we recommend Search Engine Marketing because that gets the best results.
But that may change.
If or when it does, our entire staff also has experience in PPC, Video marketing, Social Media Marketing and full sales funnels. We are Certified Google Ads Partners, and TRUST, Google is going to find a way to keep their ad system healthy through all this. So, if the time comes where Search Engine Marketing is no longer the best way for our clients to get more customers, we will be on the cutting edge, pioneering what does work and we will then recommend that. We are not married to SEO. We will adapt and change our marketing model as needed to work. Period.
At the end of the day, it is not the method that matters, it is the results.
So let the industry run around screaming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling”…. while they are busy chasing their tails and freaking out, we’ll be over here, heads down, grinding on getting our clients results!
