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Diversifying Beyond Google- Brighton SEO October 24, Nathan Height
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- 2. We are enteringa transformative phase
- 5. Market share ofsearch engines https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ Google are not holding this fairly (And we can see some signs of decline)
- 6. Restricting Access tothe Search Market Google is (potentially) anti-competitive in the following ways Paying to be the default search engine on devices Favouring Its Own Products and Services Prioritising flights packs, shopping results & maps packs in SERPs
- 7. We’ve been herebefore
- 8. In 1998, the DOJcracks down on Microsoft and its monopoly on internet browsers
- 9. Outdated complacent browser Preventing alternative browsers entering the market Competitors (Mozilla, Safari andlater Chrome) waiting to pounce
- 10. Research from Datos& Sonata insights Alternative search engines threaten Google in the same way
- 11. AI search engine,Perplexity, has seen traffic growth of 5x over the past 12 months
- 12. And has Copilotgiven Bing a fighting chance? https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/
- 13. Competitors recognise appetiteto diversify
- 14. The likes ofSearchGPT will disrupt the search engine market “I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google.” “Do I think we can have a great business that pays for our compute needs without ads? …I think the answer is yes.”
- 15. Google have beentrying to respond
- 16. But they cannot implementlarge changes which disrupt revenue and shareholder value
- 17. AI search willchange user behaviour
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- 19. Long tail commercialkeyword - ad based model Long tail commercial keyword - subscription based model VS Google’s model will struggle to accommodate this
- 20. Social search isalso threatening the space
- 21. Research by Adobein 2024
- 22. TikTok’s algorithm is basedon user engagement, not brand authority Tryp.com rank in p.1 for “Holiday Packages in Spain”
- 24. “40% of youngpeople, when looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.” Google’s SVP of search, Prabhakar Raghavan
- 25. Google are nowresponding to this threat “A range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches”
- 26. How will theydo this? Google and Open AI are turning to Reddit
- 27. Google learned harshlessons leaning too heavily on Reddit for AIO
- 28. But forum contributionsare skyrocketing in organic Increases in Reddit organic traffic between July 23’ and July 24’ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1b3yrgc/reddit_traffic_growth_from_google_oc/ https://searchengineland.com/forums-google-adapt-444065 +253% Increases in Quora organic traffic between July 23’ and July 24’ +133%
- 29. Where do wego from here?
- 30. Scale content for conversationalqueries 1
- 31. “Running Shoes” Eligible brands "Lightweight waterprooftrail running shoes for men with wide feet for running on rocky terrain" Eligible brands There’s a lot of content out there for short tail queries
- 32. Efforts focussed on thebroader categories Category Guides Main Category Subcategory Subcategory Subcategory Category Guides Product Product Product Product Product Product Product Product
- 33. Category Guides Main Category Products with benefit ASubcategory Subcategory Subcategory Category Guides Product Product Product Product Product Product Product Product Needs of audience A and products Products for Audience D Desired Features C Product content for Audience C Product content for Audience D Efforts focused on specific product information
- 34. How can wecover every search permutation? "Lightweight waterproof trail running shoes for men with wide feet for running on rocky terrain" Eligible brands Your brand, here, Everytime you are eligible
- 35. FAQ rich info Product/Service information repository User reviews content Audience rich info Product richinfo SEO teams to build a deep understanding of products
- 36. Category Field SubField Data Entry General Information Product Name Bicycle Light Secondary Product Name Bike light Associated keywords Front bike light Road bike light Waterproof bike light USB bike light Purchase Information Price ££££ Offer period Order within January for 10% off Delivery timeline 2 weeks Returns Policy 30 days no fee Sustainability Practices Compostable mailing bags Desirable Features Portability Can be carried and clipped onto any other bikes Lightweight Weighs only 50g Battery life 15-20 hours Map and document everything
- 37. This will helpprovide the content to roll out at scale Product Information repository Product page content Article: Feature A for Audience Type A Article: Feature B for Audience Type B Content available to match user queries
- 38. Sales Team Brands whowithhold information will suffer Showing the price of our product puts people off… we want people to call us to find out this information
- 39. Keyword research willhelp us prioritise the content Traditional search engine keyword volumes (Google, Bing, Yahoo..) Newer forms of searching for information
- 40. Next Step Scale contentfor conversational queries 1 Structure content for LLMs 2
- 41. “PerplexityBot” “GoogleBot” Retrieval-Augmented Generator(RAG) models Relies more on newer data and has less advanced deep- learning capabilities compared to GPT models You.com “YouBot”
- 42. Familiar ranking factors arekey Content Crawlability Internal links to relevant content Schema Mark-Up Clear Introduction Use of H1’s & H2’s Highlight key information (bullet points or number lists)
- 43. Gemini ChatGPT 4o PerplexityCopilot Landing page Authorship Reviews on page Answer Format Forum data Schema Text only Text only Text only Text only Article Article Article Article Article Breadcrumb blogposting Breadcrumb Article Assess what content formats work for your niche
- 44. Gemini ChatGPT 4o PerplexityCopilot Landing page Authorship Reviews on page Answer Format Forum data cites Schema Text only Text only Text only Text only Article Article Article Article Article Breadcrumb blogposting Breadcrumb Article Results from LLMs fo queries searching for office space with rooftops 💡 We need a text-based article page featuring a dedicated author, with content updated weekly. The page should include headings for each key feature, bullet points highlighting products that offer these features, and links to the corresponding product pages for detailed information.
- 45. We’ve been testing…. Article:Offices with parking
- 46. Push content beyondyour website 3 Structure content for LLMs 2 Scale content for conversational queries 1
- 47. WebText2 Books1 & Books2 LLMs usecontent from trusted sites & user engagement signals
- 48. Content syndication tobroaden influence
- 49. And using itto be present in the community
- 50. Website Article: Feature A for AudienceB Editorial Syndicators Forum Content Social video content “Author discusses top 5 features for target audience”
- 51. Website Article: Feature A for AudienceB Editorial Syndicators Ranking factors for all platforms Forum Content Social video content “Author discusses top 5 features for target audience” Authorship Brand mentions Popularity Engagement
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- 53. Summarising Scale content for conversationalqueries 1 Document everything about your product and audience needs
- 54. Structuring content forLLMs 2 Optimal content format and technical SEO is key
- 55. Push content beyondyour website 3 Target all sources used to train the LLMs Adapt the content for use across all platforms to generate engagement
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Editor's Notes
- #3 Google are still in the midst of anti trust trials after lawsuits have been filed by the DOJ. There are multiple trials now running, but the first is concerned with Google’s dominance on the search engine market first DOJ antitrust trial against Google focuses on its dominance in the search engine market. The DOJ argues that Google has maintained an illegal monopoly by signing exclusive deals with companies like Apple, making Google the default search engine on various platforms. Google defends its practices as standard competition. The outcome of this trial could reshape how search engines operate, potentially ending these exclusive agreements and limiting Google's control over the search industry. The trial is ongoing and expected to have significant implications for Big Tech.
- #4 The EU’s Digital Markets Act has also been coming into effect. This is is also concerned with monopolistic gatekeeping actions. There are ongoing compliance checks that Google is under pressure to meet.
- #5 Ultimately Google are not holding their dominant share of the search market fairly. This is data from statista on desktop share of search
- #6 Google are paying Apple and Samsung billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on devices. This arguable decentivizes Apple and Samsung to push their own search engine functionality, and creates additional demands on the device user to use another provider. Google are also guilty of pushing their own SERP features above actual service providers, keeping users within their own ecosystem.
- #10 I’ve surfaced research from Datos and Sonata insights here who have measure the Monthly active search users (MAU) and how many searches each user completes.
- #11 Whats interesting here is some of the growth, particularly for AI search tool Perplexity. For thos ewho haven’t used it, it’s free to trial and amazing as a search engine
- #12 But also going back to our Statista data. Bing is seeing strong growth from 2022 onwards
- #13 We’ve got more entering the market as well. There’s an appetite and I think most understand the kind of backing and publicity Open AI have now
- #14 OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has spoken about not replicating Google, but offering a whole new experience for people searching for content online. This is hinting at the complacency point we mentioned earlier
- #16 But, as we are learning from documents in this anti-trust trial, Google are reliant on the ad based model they have, and when figures come short they push the ads space they sell more heavily and prioritise this.
- #17 We think within this lies another threat to Google search
- #18 I’ve got a comparison here of how we think search queries will evolve with AI search answers.
- #21 For a few years now we’ve been watching figures being released around not only Tiktok’s popularity, but its use as a search engine. And this isn’t going away. I’ve surfaced here Adobe’s 2024 research into how different generations use TikTok, and this generation will ultimately determine the next 5-10 years
- #22 This research also digs into why large portions of users prefer Tiktok. One huge reason is the fact that it ranks content that users have all positively reinforced through engagement signals
- #31 We’ve all spent a long time going after the head terms against all the biggest brands on Google and there’s a lot of competing content out there talking generically about “running shoes”. There’s less for the really individual needs consumers may have.
- #32 We’ve been completing top of funnel, top of site hierarchy optimisations, often with long form, extensive and broad category guides
- #33 We need to dig deeper into the specific features and benefits of our products colletively
- #34 How do we ensure we allow the LLM’s to connect the dots that our brand has the best answer
- #35 SEO teams need to build a deep understanding of the products or services. What differentiates us, what do existing customers like, what do people as of the products and do we do them, and what are the demands of the audience. We can use online reviews, chatbot content…..
- #41 Just like Googlebot, some of the LLM’s use bots. RAG based models scrape new content
- #42 This means
- #43 To do this we map out what content the LLMs surface. For our clients niche, office space, we don’t find that LLMs surface the product page where parking is listed as a feature, it seems to prefer editorial content.
- #47 For the GPT based LLM models they don’t rely as heavily on their own bots crawling sites and are trained on existing data sources specialise in data collection. Common Crawl dataset that regularly crawls and archives a vast portion of the web, commonly used to train language models WebText2 is a curated dataset from OpenAI that gathers web pages specifically linked from high-engagement Reddit posts.
- #48 This means tactics like content syndication to cover ground could increase chances of being featured
- #49 And as we said Webtext2 uses reddit, so if you can garner the most engagement on a specific area, you provide links that gain engagement. This will also increase chances of being featured