It's time to throw your website in the trash. At least that's what a lot of 'marketing gurus' have been saying recently. I’ve seen a few posts on how we’re moving to a ‘zero-click’ world. Social platforms don't want you to link out to your site (reducing your reach if you do). Video content on YouTube etc keeps users on the platform and search engines are serving AI answers rather than sending people to results. This is all true. However the conclusion has often been ‘forget about your website, it’s going to die’. This is BS. All of these platforms just give you MORE opportunities to drive brand awareness, trust, authority and likability. If your content is strong enough on these external platforms, and you give people a reason to visit your site coupled with a good CTA, you’ll drive quality traffic. Ok it might not be as much as it could have been if Google sent people to your site directly instead of stealing your content and training their AI on it….. But, you have to adapt. Not everything is going to result in an AI answer in the near term, so content still works. And all other activities should lead people to your site so you can build your owned audience. Just because Linkedin doesn’t really want you to share URLs to your content, doesn’t mean you should stop sharing useful advice and building awareness with your target audiences. The best way to maximize quality traffic to your site with these walled gardens is content extension. For example produce one big video content asset, break it down into short form versions, build an article version, share chunks as native posts on your personal / staff profiles. You’ll 10x your content production and reach across 10x the audience. This has the potential to drive a lot more value than the AI generated articles you might be annoyed Google is pulling AI answers from 🙂 #DigitalMarketing #ContentStrategy #BrandAwareness #SocialMediaMarketing #MarketingTips #SEO #AI
Perfectly put and I couldn't agree more. This is a time of adaption, not abandonment.
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1moAbsolutely, James. Your website is still your shop window, whatever industry you are in. Your content still needs to be consistent across all your channels and one does not have to replace the other. Websites are not dead, SEO is not dead. Interesting times ahead, though.