SEO should focus on the mid-funnel if generative results are the top of the funnel

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study at the end of the newsletter.

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Historically organic search lived at the very beginning of a customer journey or marketing funnel. Sometimes, that entire journey is only 30 minutes, like in e-commerce, while in others it might be months-long like for a new SaaS tool.

With the launch of the generative experience, Google will now be taking the top of funnel for itself leaving SEO to the mid-funnel. To be fair, they aren’t really “taking” it, they are just answering what is essentially commoditized information.

To date, Google has only delved into short answers when it could rely on structured data that was more than likely to be accurate.

In this bucket would be topics such as population counts, sports scores, ticker symbols, heads of state, and all other kinds of results that we see today in knowledge graph answers.

Prior to the introduction of the knowledge graph, users would have had to go to a website to find out who won the prior night’s sports game, the name of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, or the height of the Burj Khalifa. The knowledge graph used datasets to extract that information and display it on the top of search results when a query matched the intent of that knowledge.

This isn’t to say that all sorts of other information wasn’t commoditized already but it wasn’t packaged in a nice clean dataset that Google could parse. The launch of OpenAi’s ChatGPT instantly changed the playing field for Google because suddenly 100% accuracy was no longer the ideal.

For proof of this point, just look at what happened at the launch of Bard when Google flubbed a basic fact. It was embarrassing and hurt the stock price, but it didn’t harm Google’s overall credibility as a reliable source of information.

The moving of the goalposts away from perfect accuracy provides the opening for Google Search Generative Experience to thrive in many other areas of commoditized search. There will be accuracy issues but with a disclaimer and a pass from the user base, so much more surface area of search results can be disrupted.

Without this pass, Google couldn’t give an opinion about a medical symptom or a recommendation about where to stay on a beach vacation. In my opinion, I think this is great for users because it means that users will get a much faster response to their queries. They will not need to read through long-form content to just find one nugget of information.

Impact on SEO

Obviously in this case, what is great for users might seem on the surface to be less ideal for those that earn their income from SEO. Most SEO efforts are measured by clicks and rankings, (I am a proponent of using revenue as a metric for SEO success as I wrote in Product-Led SEO) and it is very likely that those clicks will decline when users do not need to click on website results when their questions are answered on the search page.

However, I don’t think this is bad for SEO either; rather, generative results just move the user to a different place in the buyer’s journey or funnel. Without generative results, users would need to click a lot of different results in order to build a level of knowledge that delivers them into the consideration part of the funnel.

Instead with generative results, they will become more informed far quicker and by the time they click on web results, they will have a higher propensity to convert. Generative results will eliminate the tire kickers that are a part of every website’s total users.

Ultimately revenue will stay the same (or increase if you follow the tips below), but conversion rates will increase as a byproduct of lower total traffic.

Generative results in search mean that SEO moves from the top of the funnel to mid-funnel

Instead of targeting keywords with the most search volume to hopefully peel off the maximum amount of clicks, SEO efforts will need to be more deliberate to target the right users with the right keywords.

In an upcoming newsletter, I am going to do a deeper dive into how to target mid-funnel keywords, but I will close with these four tips:

1. Make sure your content aligns with an actual buyer persona. If you can’t picture how the content might help an actual buyer convert, don’t write it.

2. Use modifiers on those head keywords you used to target like “price”, “reviews” and “features”.

3. Write content that compares you to your competitors. Generative results can also do this, but it will not be satisfying for someone to make an actual buying decision.

4. Put every topic idea on your content roadmap into individual Google searches, and if you see an SGE box shows up that answers the question, consider removing this idea from your roadmap.

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