[00:00:00] Crystal: I'm really glad you explained that.

I know you have this quote that like the old inbound playbook is broken. So I feel like you really explained what you meant by that.

And I also questioned what was going on. How all of those silos were created? Within different corporations.

Cause it's okay we'll do this part of it and then we'll hand it off to you.

And then you do this part of it. And then eventually, somewhere down the line, there's actually gonna be a conversion in money exchanging hands.

So I get that and I appreciate the explanation. Because I really have struggled with that for a while.

Even my talk when we were competing for SEO week, that spot on the stage it was

[00:00:34] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah.

[00:00:35] Crystal: It was really just about like why is there so much of the, passing the buck? Passing the baton, even. And like shifting the responsibilities?

From the top down I can see the shared responsibility.

Now I feel like that's being exposed.

Could you explain the signals that tell you that the stakes have changed? And how you're dealing with it? In your daily practice? [00:01:00] Or current methodologies

[00:01:01] Aimee Jurenka: Right. That's a big question is what do we do now? And I kind of have that, oh, no moment.

Of like, okay, how are we gonna keep my, how am I gonna keep my job?

How am I gonna keep in this profession? What are we gonna do now?

Now that the traffic's gone? And I started like kind of being like, as a joke, being like, Hey, we just need to throw a funeral for all that inbound traffic we used to get.

Let's look at what actually converted, right? So let's look at that inbound traffic, what actually converted into sales. To lessen the blow.

Okay, so that was not actually converting. So now what are we gonna do? And death to inbound marketing is what I've been joking about as well.

You know, it's dying. We gotta throw a funeral. It's the death of inbound marketing. We're gonna have to change the way we write content.

We're gonna have to change the way what, what purpose it, it does. And our metrics. And the metrics is always a big thing. What are we going to track?

And especially with AI being so new, it's so hard to track right now. And so for me it's, it's figuring out how do we figure out what your visibility is and if your visibility's increasing. A few different ways. We now have the Bing AI report, right?

That has [00:02:00] grounding queries and your actual URLs that have been pinged. That's fantastic. So's some real data we can usually use. Of course, we know that's just a, a piece of it since there's just so many different LLMs and different, you know, ai surfaces. Google says they're incorporating it all in the Google Search Console, but we did find out that they a couple months ago that they're not using any of the grounding inquiries.

So none of that information, they're stripping that out. And so they're stripping out the actual grounding queries or the groups of grounding right now. So none of that information is in there for us to know what people are actually searching or to do our prompt research, right? Like we would do keyword research.

So that's a big bummer. And then, you know, AI tracking tools, they're working on it. You know, there's a lot of really great companies. People are doing really exciting things.

But there's just the idea of, well, you know, my position is there's no static serp. So how do we get a large enough data set to make it a, an actually valid statistical number that we can get directional data?

It's gonna be really tough. Because we were used to getting so much data and our clients used to getting so much data, and our bosses and C levels were used to getting so much data.[00:03:00] 

Of trying to wean them off the data. And I think I came up with it the other day, how I'm gonna try to start phrasing it. And it really kinda makes sense in my brain. Is, SEO right?

Traditional search is about traffic, right? Rankings and traffic.

Where AI search is gonna be about visibility. And that's how do we see how visible we are? How often are those bots coming, benchmarking, how they're coming.

If we have more. And then conversions. 'cause that's what we can actually track.

And make them two separate things in their brains.

[00:03:26] Crystal: I think that's a great point Like anytime we're talking about conversions, yes!

Let's let's hang out there. But even to go back to you know the very beginning when you're when you said Making the shift was now like finding out what is actually converting.

How do you go back in the data that you've collected previously to determine what was actually converting? So that you can double down on that?

[00:03:49] Aimee Jurenka: Oh, so Google Analytics, some people have internal CRMs, Shopify, some people do 'em through that. I'm a Google Analytics girly. You can go back and do your Google Analytics and look at it by URL [00:04:00] and channels. So you can go and filter it by organic search, right? And then go to landing page report and then pick your date and it'll tell you everything and you can see it all the way down to your key events.

So your Google Analytics does need to be set up. If you need any help with that, I suggest going to Dana DiTomaso or Brie Anderson's websites. They both are amazing at that and they have great tutorials. And they set it up and then you can actually see all that data.

The first thing I thought of being me, you know, with the whole idea of how are we gonna keep our jobs?

I live in a little bit of a panic state, as you can tell, was, what are they gonna say when you walk in and you go, oh, hey, well this is all changed. So what we've been doing, you know, we're now gonna go all the way over to this. They're gonna say, well, what was I paying you for for the last five years?

if none of this was converting, what was I paying you for? My first idea was, okay, well we can all get together and switch jobs. And then blame it on the other person. Right? So like, we could all get a support group, right? And hurry up and quick switch jobs. Be like, well, they were blah, blah, blah, blah because they were gone.

Right? And we could all, you know, throw each other under [00:05:00] the bus you know, as a unified sort of, you know, secret society. As fun as that would be. I know, right? As fun as that would be. Wish we could, right? I think what we're gonna have to do is go, well, our job used to get you this. Our job used to get you these sessions.

But that's no longer an opportunity, you know? So now we're gonna have to expand. And we're gonna have to work with the conversion rate optimization team, or become a conversion rate optimization team. That's how we're gonna be able to expand, you know, our role. That's how we're gonna be able to earn money.

That's how we're gonna be able to bridge that gap, you know? And same like with branding, we're probably gonna be getting into branding. Either we're gonna be working with that team and building the personas with our content team. Or we're gonna be, you know that person who does that now as an S-E-O-A-E-O-G-E-O search organic traffic, right?

Whatever we wanna call ourselves. I'm this week I'm calling myself an AI visibility strategist. Everything's in flux right now when it comes to it. But, yeah, I, I feel that's kind of how things are shifting and where I see opportunities for growth, not only like job security, but growth [00:06:00] in our industry.

[00:06:00] Crystal: It's so funny that you said that because I just changed my name to Visibility Strategist on LinkedIn this last weekend. So

[00:06:07] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah.

[00:06:07] Crystal: you said that, It's so crazy.

What you did there was very honest. And I thought, wow this is pretty cool. Because I bet there's a lot of people who are afraid to communicate that, the fact that oh we have been investing in this thing.

But now we've gotta completely switch because the way that search will be done going forward.

There's no like, ramp down period. It's not "happening."

It's happened. Like we're in the midst of the change 

now. that is just is such a hard conversation being had in so many boardrooms or zoom meetings across the country.

[00:06:40] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah. everybody's asking it, I'm asking myself. It's like, how are we gonna explain these things? How are we gonna do these things?

And I'm really good at identifying the problems in my world, but not always with the solutions.

That always takes longer, right? So my biggest challenge right now is trying to explain strategy and tactics when we don't have 10 years worth of proof. When [00:07:00] people are like, well that's not a verified by Google. Well, that's not blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's not this. There's been no testing on this.

Well, of course there's been no testing on this. It's a brand new tool that changes every two weeks.

It's trying to go from, sEO was this way. We had all these tests, we had all these case studies, right? We had all this documentation from Google. We had all these solid concrete things that we could use, right?

And point back to. And experts that were like, they, they're an expert in the field for the last 20 years and they've done this. And so that's why I believe them. And you should believe me. You know, when I say stuff by them.

That's not there. And so it's a a lot of like, well why? What can we do right now that we know that works?

Well, we don't have anything that we know that works 100% right? We do know you still need foundational SEO, so make sure you've got that tight. Everything else, we're gonna have to just, you know, you need somebody who's interested in being on the cutting edge. You need somebody who's interested in testing.

You need to be willing to test. And you need to be flexible. And agile.

It's funny 'cause you're like, what about the investment?

And the first thing I went was like, oh, trying to convince people to make investments in AI [00:08:00] search and AI visibility, when we don't know exactly concrete what's gonna work.

Has been, well that's my challenge this week.

We'll see what next week brings.

[00:08:07] Crystal: Yeah

[00:08:08] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah.

[00:08:09] Crystal: The fact that SEO as a practice like you said, was segmented. It had its little place.

But now discovery is happening AI answers, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok podcast communities recommendations Quora, Reddit. people are searching differently people are changing in how they discover brands And so that to me seems like it could be an opportunity of okay what has actually changed in like some of the industries that you've worked with? And like how people are discovering brands?

[00:08:40] Aimee Jurenka: TikTok has changed the entire world for e-commerce. Anybody in e-commerce knows that. Another Tin hat theory sort of idea.

If we have time for lots of speculation station.... I feel like TikTok Shop did such a good job that that's why they were trying to pretty much shut it down.

Is because it was confirmed with Amazon and they were like, oh no.

You know [00:09:00] 'cause TikTok shop took over the world. Especially during quarantine here in the us. Everybody knows that that's, that's like a, now a major seller. Where it used to be, right? It used to be with social, you make a piece of content for inbound marketing, right?

And then you would redistribute it everywhere. So then you would post it on social.

And you would talk about it on your Instagram, and you might make a video for YouTube with that one piece of content that you made, and you redistribute it that way. Where now it's you making it a post on TikTok, that's where you're making the content and you put your, your store link at the bottom and people buy directly there right then.

And so we're seeing a lot shorter sort of. You know, which is great for e-commerce, right? Like if you could get somebody to come directly off of a 30 second TikTok, that's gonna be a lot better than trying to spend $500 or two weeks writing a blog post.

And doing the research. And then trying to redistribute it, and all the time it takes. And the tools it takes to do those automatic posts, or what have you.

So I think when it comes like to the big change as far as it's gonna go for our search, like there's the search everywhere. People are calling that, you know, instead of SEO being search engine, optimiz, the search [00:10:00] everywhere, optimization is a way people can go. There's integration you can do with other teams.

I think too, to really keep in mind, like, I feel like this happened when we first got social media. And companies were like, oh, it's not the same anymore. People just aren't going online. They're actually going and they're getting information from social media. And that's when we saw influencer marketing come out, right?

We saw social media ads come out. And then people got into, oh, hey, I, I do, you know, YouTube, SEO and I do Reddit, SEO and different branches. So I feel like it's gonna just morph in sort of change and its own natural way, the way that did.

If anybody's a moldy, oldie like me, can remember the old days.

But we are gonna see some more of that direct lines opportunities open up for e-commerce, which is great for them.

[00:10:43] Crystal: how did that change at that time? It sounds like those platforms gave birth to a new form of SEO. Versus SEO encompassing all of it. I feel like GEO and AI search is [00:11:00] swallowing it in a way. Not just creating like another thing to pay for but just like eating it

[00:11:06] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah, I, I mean, I do, I kind of feel like it is more eating it. 'cause we're like, we're gonna be eating everything because it's, there's so much, so many levers and different things that you need to do in order to get into that AI answer. And it's just for visibility, right? It's just for that brand lift. A lot of times there are clicks outs, but nothing like, there was in organic search.

So, I mean, that's such a tough one. I mean, it is kind of eating it. I, I feel like though, inside our industry, you're gonna start finding specialists. I specialize in, Reddit for AI search, I specialize in citations. You know, so people that were like, I'm off page, backlink specialist in SEO. Or I do digital PR in in SEO.

Those were two different separate things in the SEO field that you could have. And I feel like we're gonna start seeing that. Like, oh, hi, I'm, I do citations only and I specialize in citations from Reddit. Now, that makes you very, very niche inside [00:12:00] of there. But I think that's what we're gonna start seeing is people coming up with different like niche avenues that they can go into and specialties that they can find.

As far as, getting a nine to five or offering a service for e-commerce like Shopify. Like you, hey, I'm a small business owner, right? I have an Etsy shop. And now there's 5 million more things that looks like I need to do. Or how's that gonna happen for me?

My number one suggestion would be like, look at the agentic SEO. Pay attention to what the agent SEO is and figure out how you can get your products into Google, Gemini and chat GPT where people can buy them directly.

If that means getting a Stripe account, start looking into seeing that. I know that's a big one. If that means figuring out how to do their product feed, you know, start doing that. Start working on those sort of things. 'cause I kind of feel when it comes to the small business owners that are doing the Etsy shops that are doing that, that's gonna be sort of the next avenue that they're gonna see.

It's gonna be worth their money and time. 'cause they're small business owners, they don't have a lot of time, they don't have a lot of money. They're not in a corporate, right? They're not doing enterprise size [00:13:00] anything. They're not getting paid by an agency. You know, they're not the agency. And so what can I do at home by myself in my half an hour after dinner?

Is, is where you kind of have that that sort of minute of like, this is gonna have the most payoff I feel in the future.

[00:13:14] Crystal: So if we can't get that particular click.

But somebody finds an answer to a question that they have, it references our website. How do we know that our marketing's even working? Is that something we should just stop doing?

[00:13:30] Aimee Jurenka: All the tough questions. You don't. So that's another thing is we're losing all of those metrics we used to get.

So it used to be, like I said, CRMs, we had Google Analytics, we had Google Search console, we had all these things where we could see the client journey. Cookies, right?

Followed 'em everywhere. And we could start seeing all these funnels and all these journeys. We're getting a lot less data. And so we're gonna have to just start doing the best with what we've got. And I, I honestly for right now, kind of believe we're gonna have to go back to the old [00:14:00] days before we had all that technology that followed the customer all over the internet.

'Cause there's privacy. People are taking out, you know, third parties. There's all sorts of stuff going on where we're gonna have to just be a lot more correlation. Which I know even I say it and I'm like. Because we hate that. Right? And you hated it. Is it gonna have to be like, Hey, we did this for a larger, for a larger company.

Hey, we did this piece of content, we know from our AI tracking right? Or grounded queries that we started to get, you know, more, more visibility on that topic. And we know from our Google search console and we know from the AI report that that URL started to get more pings, right? And started to get more traffic to 'em.

And from there we saw our branded searches go up this much. Because they left. And now they did a branded search after they left that, that, that sort of visit. Or they you know, we saw our sales go up on the product that, that that article was about. So it's gonna be a lot more correlation I think based in the future, which is horrible for us, who wanna [00:15:00] prove our work or wanna see what's working and not it's working right?

And we wanna get into the data 'cause the data's just not gonna be there as much. I know wa wa.