SGE's Impact on SEO
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study linked at the end of the newsletter.
Are you interested in taking a cohort-based course for product managers to learn about SEO that I am building with Kevin Indig? Please share your insights in this survey to help inform what we should teach and join our waitlist.
For those who have been subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you already know that I believe that Google’s SGE will be the most impactful event for SEO in many years, and it will launch.
Google’s SGE isn’t just a feature; it is a fundamental remake of search results that will inevitably have ripple effects throughout the entire search world. The beta of SGE has been live since the end of May, and throughout the last six months of its existence, Google has collected data points from billions of searches. (There are 8+ billion searches conducted per day in regular Google. Even with a tiny set of beta users, that is still a lot of data that Google has collected.)
What is available today is a result of all those data points and will likely closely resemble what ends up going live to all logged-out users when Google finally launches this to the whole world.
Launch sequence
From a launch standpoint, Google typically opens up a small test cohort of a percentage of their logged-out, not beta opted-in users, and then they expand the test cohort as the results come in. Assuming the tests are successful according to the tested metrics, it would go live to the whole of Google’s user base. The success metrics might not have to be that users like it because it’s possible that users will not like it, but they will still launch it out of necessity.
The big question for anyone interested in this project is when this will finally go live.
Initially, SGE was probably going to launch in the summer or, at the latest, by the end of Q3, but then Google ran into some issues around monetization. Google moved the launch date to later in the quarter, but they missed that, too.
Given that it’s now December, a period where Google typically doesn’t make significant changes in the interest of not rocking the end-of-year revenue boat and hoping to avoid recalling vacationing employees, I am confident that it will not launch before January.
IF, and it’s a big if Google is ready on the monetization side, the earliest SGE will launch the first week of 2024. If I had to guess, they would probably do a test around mid-month and not launch at the beginning of the year. Either way, OpenAI is not making it any easier for Google, and every month that they delay the launch is more time for Google to lose market share.
My conviction on how impactful this will be has only grown, and here are some examples of its impact.
Reviews/Affiliate
Here’s an example of a typical query for someone looking for a product review. The current results are media sites that monetize their content with affiliate links. The SGE response makes it unnecessary to even scroll to the regular results, and the natural next step in this buyer’s journey is likely to go directly to an e-commerce site to buy.
Google monetizes this query by bringing users directly to the same sites affiliates would have done. This sort of experience will be devastating to many content sites that were built around affiliate products.
Medical Informational
On many health queries, the same handful of sites write essentially the same content. Their content is medically approved and written by humans, but it is not unique. Some monetize with advertising, while others are lead-gen landing pages for medical institutions.
SGE will disrupt this entire model and make clicking any of the sites in the search results unnecessary. There will likely be additional follow-up searches, but the query set and funnel will be forever changed in the medical space.
How-to content
Most how-to content today is too complex for a featured snippet, so its traffic is secure even if a site’s content shows up in a featured snippet. Not so with SGE, as the results will include videos and more detailed how-to’s, as these examples show.
Helpful content algorithm update
In addition to the impending launch of SGE, Google has also been updating its algorithm with Helpful Content Updates. See below from Google’s guides on this update:
I have met with a handful of companies that have seen a negative impact from this update, and I believe that websites impacted by the helpful content update are at risk of feeling an even bigger hit from SGE. If their content is already not helpful, it will be even less helpful when Google can easily replace them as the content publisher.
If you have seen a decline from the Helpful Content Update, consider this your warning that you need a new strategy.
The idea of publishing content just because it might rank on Google and get traffic is dead, and now more than ever, every site needs a strategy about how and why they are adding value.
Affiliate and informational sites can add value, but it can’t just be because they aggregate content. Aggregating and summarizing are things that Google can easily do in their own generative AI. This is even more critical if a site uses generative AI to create content. Why should anyone come to your site to read generative AI content when they can generate it themselves?
Now is the time to come up with a way of adding this value back to the world, and for many sites, it will require an entirely new strategy. Check out past newsletters on how you can do that, or respond if I can help!
[Sponsored]
This client has been our Digital PR client for over two years now, and they are exploding on Google.
With every new Google update, their website went from strength to strength.
We are now outranking IKEA, Argos, Wayfair, and all the big ones, for their main money keyword.
This is how we earned over 542 PR links (not just placements) for them in just a few months, from reputable news websites:
✅ DATA-DRIVEN DIGITAL PR:
▫ We collected data from government websites and official sources
▫ We’ve analysed the data and tried to find interesting stories that we thought journalists would find useful and newsworthy
▫ We pitched the stories to tens of thousands of journalists … Read More
