It’s the Marketing & Innovation Update for July.
Generative Search or AI Search is shifting the SEO game from getting from a list of results to a single answer to a question.
Steve Buors, CEO and co-founder of ReShift Media is here to answer franchisors’ questions like:
* Is your website traffic declining already due to AI?
* How strong is your brand’s authority?
* How will all of this change your content marketing strategy?
Listen now on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and more.
Thanks to Citrin Cooperman, Franzy, Hughes, and Thunderly ⚡
Transcript:
AI was not used in the creation of this podcast. This is the Social Geek Radio Network.
Hello Geeks and welcome to the Social Geek Podcast. I’m Jack Monson, your host and marketing co-host Celia. It’s the Marketing & Innovation Update for July with a focus on generative search.
Is AI killing your website’s performance? Steve Buors of ReShift Media is here to break it down. Today’s show is brought to you by Northeast Color, Hughes, Franzy and Thunderly.
It’s the Marketing & Innovation Update on Social Geek. Chatting now with my good friend, Steve Buors. He’s the CEO and co-founder of ReShift Media.
Steve, what’s going on?
Oh, not too much, Jack. Happy to be here, thanks for having me.
Thanks for joining me here in the middle of the summer in our Marketing & Innovation Update. I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic, and we talk a lot about AI on this podcast, but it feels like a lot of it is sort of the pedestrian stuff and the fun stuff and the artistic stuff. What I think we haven’t gotten into deep enough yet is the effect of AI on search.
So I really wanted to have a chat with you because I think you’re really out there on the cutting edge of where AI is with search, especially in the franchise space. So let’s dive into it. We’re really talking about, is it GEO, GSO, AI-generated search?
What do you like to call this topic?
Oh, I’ve just been using AI search at this point, but yeah, like Google’s got their SGE, their search generative experience. And of course people are using AI overviews, but you know, you got ChatGPT and you got, you know, Google with Gemini. But as a blanket topic, I just say AI and search, and people say, yeah, let’s talk about that.
Okay, good.
I love it. So let’s start here. Is the old type of search, SEO or Google search or whatever you want to call that, is that dead or is it just changing?
Well, I think a lot of the fundamentals are still there, but search as we know it is absolutely changing at the most fundamental levels. And it can’t be overstated just how much AI will shape how search changes over the next few months, few days, it’s changing so quickly. And I would say that we probably won’t even really recognize search within 12 to 18 months.
It’s going to be so different.
Wow. And really, this is because of consumer behavior, not just because of the technology, because I think we’re talking about a whole group of people out there who are not going to google.com like they did two years ago, they’re going to other places and they’re searching in a different way. Do I have that right?
Absolutely right. And I think the smart players, obviously Google being at the forefront of it, they’re bringing search to people, right? We’ve all seen what they’re doing with Gemini on your smartphone, where it’s not about, yeah, I go into Google and type into my search query anymore.
It’s a completely different experience, where it’s more about a conversation and exploration in a much more organic sense than it ever has been before.
How dangerous is it right now to have a website that was built in the old days, and by the old days, I mean, you know, two and a half years ago, that didn’t really take any of this into consideration. Are we going to just lose out on all of those people who aren’t searching only on Google right now?
Well, it’s an interesting question you asked there, Jack, because at the end of the day, search still works on the back of good content. So even with a mediocre website, from a technical perspective, if you have really good content, you still have a chance to rank. And I could be ranking in whatever you’re thinking about.
Google’s AI Overviews or GPT or wherever you’re thinking about for the future. But just as an AI search sort of thing. Because at the end of the day, if you’re an expert in the field that someone’s looking for information on, the search engine’s job, the whether AI or not, is to surface that content
So if you have good content, you’re already kind of in good shape in one regard. But if your website is holding you back, where it’s not presenting that content in a way that’s easily understandable, or where someone who has equivalent content that’s just as good as yours, but their website is better, they’re probably going to rank you. So it’s not that you’re dead in the water if your website’s perhaps low dated, but it’s certainly not helping you.
Let’s get it that way. Right. And here’s another question.
Will we get to the point where website visits or traffic to the website, maybe that doesn’t even matter anymore, because people are getting results on ChatGPT, and I use ChatGPT kind of generically, I just mean all of the services out there. They’re just getting their results there, and they’re never actually going to go to that franchise brand or other company’s website. Do you see that happening more?
That is absolutely happening, and I can tell you, I got some clients who are not very happy about that.
So, well, they’ve probably spent a lot of time and energy and resources on those websites over the past 25 years.
Well, you’re absolutely right, where if you’ve been investing in content marketing for years now and you’ve been creating great content, you know, strong articles and white papers and all the good stuff that you should have been doing for SEO up till now, you would have been getting great traffic. And that was your reward by creating great content, you’re getting surfaced in search results, people who click the hyperlink, they come to your website. And of course, the whole idea then is to cross sell them into your products and services.
But with AI-powered search, particularly, you know, on Big Daddy Google, where Google’s providing AI overviews, where it just answers the question, right? And if you’re using Gemini on your phone, it’s just giving you the audio response even. You’re not even looking at the screen.
Or if you’re using Google Home or, you know, an in-home speaker. So what’s happening now is you aren’t getting that click as a business. And we have seen our client’s traffic declining already.
Particularly, the ones that were great at content is actually, it’s funny how it’s almost counterintuitive where we have all this great content and people are interested in it, but my traffic’s going down. It’s not going down because the people aren’t interested. It’s going down because Google, in this case, is giving it to them in a way where they can easily consume it without having to click.
So as a consumer, it’s tremendous convenience. I don’t have to hunt and pack. In fact, the AI has gone and collated a bunch of information from different websites to give me the best possible answer.
It’s not even an answer from one website anymore. It’s an answer from a bunch of websites. And so now I get the best possible answer.
I could get without having to go through multiple websites and figure it out myself. But as the content creator, this is a big problem because now the person has gotten the answer without having to come to my website. So, yeah, it’s a big problem.
Yeah. But at least if you’ve got that good content, and this is the optimistic part of me talking, if you’ve been putting out good content for the past whatever time period, you’re still going to come up in the answers that people are looking for. They might not come to your website, but you’re still going to be top of mind, or at least somewhere toward the top if you have, and I don’t know, do we still call it authority when it comes to search via AI?
Do we call that authority?
It’s still authority, yeah.
Okay.
And I love how you’re thinking of it, Jack, because that is what it is now. So, so long search has been that very bottom of funnel experience where I search the thing, I see the hyperlink, I click it, I go to the website and I get the thing. We have to start thinking about search a little differently now where it’s actually starting to move up the funnel where it’s almost an awareness play, which is a funny thing to think of from a search perspective, but that’s what it is.”
I’ve had some of my clients say, oh my God, like we need to stop all these AI search engines from indexing our content and doing this AI overview type of experience. So how do we block them? I’m like, oh my God, don’t block them.
Right.
That’s the last thing you want to do, right?
Yeah, you’re gone. Don’t do that. But it does mean a shift in our expectations as to what search is going to do for us as a business.
Because at the end of the day, consumer needs are what’s going to drive the product, not business needs. Consumer needs are very much aligned with what AI search is. It’s a single answer to a question, and that might be from multiple sources.
You as a brand now need to start thinking about what your expectations are of search in a slightly different way, where to your point, Jack, it is more about awareness and getting my brand out there in a slightly different fashion. There are still obviously, if you’re looking at the screen as opposed to getting it from an audio prompt, there are still citations on there that you can click. So people are clicking those.
We are seeing behavior where people will still click those those source citations to get more information.
The real research guys out there, the real research nerds are going to click those citations, right? The average consumer may be not, but.
Well, you’re exactly right. If you really want to go deep on the topic, there you go. But at least you get your brand visibility there.
And in a lot of cases, the AI overview will mention a brand by name. If you’re really authoritative and someone’s looking for something and you provide that exact product or service, they will provide the name of the place where you can get that product or service. So yeah, it is a shift in thinking though, that’s for sure.
Yeah. And I love that it’s a shift in thinking. And now I’m thinking that you and Kirk Allen named your agency perfectly all of those years ago, that ReShift Media is really now another shift in how we’re looking at this.
Maybe you had some foresight into that.
Actually, it’s funny you say that. That’s exactly why we needed the company, what we did. So well done.
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How else are you guys shifting or adjusting for your franchise system clients right now?
Are you expanding on the content going into their website so it’s serving both people and bots? Are you creating more content? Are you changing the content on current sites?
Or what sort of the work that you’re involved in right now?
Well, it’s really quite interesting. I have to say, as someone who’s been in the industry for well over a decade, you know, luckily people can’t see my gray hair on your podcast here. This is probably the most interesting change in search since Google came out.
Google changed the game because they started using the backlink as a means of ascribing authority all those years ago. And since then, this is probably the most interesting and exciting time from a search perspective because everything is changing quite fundamentally again. And we’re kind of looking at it from two points of view.
So one is, yes, you do need to make sure that the AI can crawl, understand, index your content so you show up in all of those great AI-powered searches. So that means structuring your content in a slightly different way. That means thinking about who is and how to type of searches, any kind of question-based search and framing your content around that.
So that way, when someone conducts that search, there’s a very clear correlation between your content and their question, which coincidentally is perfect for a voice-powered search as well, because AI and voice search are kind of moving in tandem, I would say. They’re not exactly the same thing, but you’re certainly using AI for voice searches. So they are kind of intertwining.
And when people are asking questions using their voice, they tend to be pretty detailed. So structure your content in a question-based fashion, using plain language. So take out all those $100 terms that your marketers love to use.
Use plain language, because that’s how actual humans search.
Yeah, yeah.
And think about the long tail. And what’s fascinating when you think about that is you’re actually not building content for the AI per se. You’re building it for the human, because they’re the ones using the AI.
Yeah, but the good news is that’s what AI wants as well. So, I think, again, we might be a little overly optimistic here, but once again, good content should win out.
Absolutely agree. And then, the thing we’ve also talked to our clients about is you still need clicks to your website. You still want to drive conversion.
So, you start thinking about your website in a slightly different way, where your blog and your FAQ, if they’re structured in a conversational way and are structured in a more natural language sort of way, that now is built for the AI. But, there’s all kinds of great opportunities to still get clicks. And what we look at very hard is local searches.
So, franchise businesses are probably the best business model I can think of to dominate at a local search. So, local searches, you know, get pizza near me or get pizza in Springfield, all those sorts of things, where you don’t even necessarily need to say the name of the neighborhood or city, the search engine will infer it. And when someone’s looking for something from a local search perspective, they’re usually looking to buy it, right?
They’re past the stage where they’re thinking, do I need to buy this thing?
They have heavy intent.
Yeah. Exactly. Intention is high.
Search volume for local search is also very high. It’s one of the only categories of search that continues to grow at more than 100 percent a year. So if you now start to think about your franchise website as a local search machine, and you structure your local pages, and you incorporate structured data, and you think about your Google business profile and other listings as opportunities to index locally, what starts to emerge is a real tale of two cities with your website, where on one hand, my blog and my FAQ are built so I can index for the AI type of search, the amalgamated type search.
Meanwhile, my local content, my local pages, my structured data, and all of my listings are built to help me get traffic from a local search. So done properly, you actually can get the best of both worlds.
That’s awesome for local franchisees, local small business owners. Let’s talk a little bit about franchise development teams within a franchise system. How is this affecting that really more B2B search?
I’m thinking it might be a bit slower in evolving because those folks are still going to go to that website and do their research. Does that track with you?
Sure it does. So you’re right, there’s no local search capability there, but there’s certainly a branded search. And there’s the people who are doing the in-depth research in terms of, is this a brand I want to invest in?
But at that top of funnel again, when they’re looking for in general, is the pet services industry someplace I want to be, or whatever the food services industry, pick whatever one they’re talking about, or what’s the best pet services franchise? So those are all AI overview type of questions. As soon as I put the word what or where or how in there, I’m getting an AI powered search.
And so it’s still important as a franchise development professional to create and structure content in a way where you have a good chance of being that authoritative source of information as someone’s thinking about your industry, and then making sure that as they’re moving down that purchase funnel, that you’re interacting with them at multiple points along the funnel. So by the time they get a little further down and they start to say, what are the best brands to franchise with in this category, you got to make sure you’re ranking for that. So, branding is big, there’s still great content to produce around franchising, but yes, definitely the local piece doesn’t come into play.
Okay. So what’s next? What do you see happening over, and typically I would say the next couple of years, but oh my gosh, in this subject, a couple of years is like a lifetime, right?
What do you see happening maybe over the next year? Is there any other big corner that we’re about to turn when it comes to AI search, or are we just sort of growing at sort of the same rate that we’re growing at right now?
No, I think it’s only going to accelerate. And I think the toughest piece for any business people listening here is you can’t use yourself as your test case. You can’t say, this is how I use search.
So therefore that’s how everyone else does.
Right. Which they never should think that way anyway, when it comes to marketing, right? So maybe we’re finally pushing them into sort of a broader view of their targets.
I completely agree. I can’t say I’m not going to name names, but I get on the call with clients and they’re like, well, I don’t do it like that. I’m like, yeah, but you’re 55.
And I’m sorry.
Yeah, I don’t use TikTok. Well, guess what?
Exactly. So the people to look to are the younger generation, and they are overwhelmingly using voice. And that, in and of itself, combined with AI, completely changes how you even think about search from a consumer perspective.
And the fact that we’re going to be getting our answers in an audio fashion, well, we already are, but more and more. And it becomes a conversation. I think we’ve all seen the AI examples that, you know, where you’re literally conversing with the AI and you’re asking its opinion, basically, which is crazy, right?
Like, you’re asking, hey, what do you think about this? You know, help me prepare for this interview. Or, you know, how do I get the stain off my carpet?
That completely changes how search works at its most fundamental level and how brands need to think about how search drives their business. So yeah, this is the tip of the iceberg. We’ve barely seen any change yet.
We are going to see incredible change over the next 12 to 24 months.
Yeah, and just staying on the voice search for a minute, it’s also much more limited, right? Because when you’re getting a voice response from your search query, you’re really listening for that number one slot, you know? I don’t think you’re going to listen to 10 different, you know, things ranked number one through 10, where in, again, the old days of a couple of years ago, when we’d look at that Google search page, we might scroll down to number 10 or 12 or 14, but that’s not happening with audio responses.
Absolutely not. Well, we used to talk about, we need to be on page one, and it became, we need to be in the top five, then it became, we need to be in the top three, now you got to be in the top one, and the weird thing is, the top one isn’t even really just you. It’s actually a mashup of you and, you know, anyone else that the AI found to come up with the answer.
So you’re absolutely right, Jack, it’s one answer now, and that is a completely different way of thinking about search. Yeah.
Do you ever see a paid component falling into this? You know, a dozen years ago or more, we didn’t really think about the paid component of Facebook or before that, the paid component of Google. It was all of this organic stuff, and we were all just, you know, marketing and not spending a ton of money on ad spend until we had to, right?
Do you see that coming into some of these AI solutions as well, that there will be a differentiation between organic and paid at some point?
They’ll have to be, because all of the companies need to be able to monetize this clearly. Yeah. In the short term, for a voice search you do on your phone as an example, and you look at it and get the list still, obviously paid is still at the top of that list.
But from an audio perspective, absolutely, they’re going to have to, because they’re going to start missing out on impressions as well. I don’t know what exactly that will look like, or how exactly they intend to incorporate that, although radio style ads might suddenly be a thing again, you never know.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Well, you remember how Netflix came around and killed the TV advertising model, and now you got ads on your Netflix and your Amazon Prime as well? Like, it’s funny, like, my kids are seeing commercials on Amazon Prime, and they’re like, what are these things? I’m like, wow, kids, let me tell you back in the olden days, when I used to have to sift through these all the time.
Yeah. Everything old is new again. Well, Steve, I think there’s probably a lot of people who are nervous about the future and they don’t really know what to do next.
I’m sure every CEO out there has a dozen people telling them what they need to do when it comes to AI and now what they need to do when it comes to AI search. If some franchise brand really hasn’t moved forward with this stuff yet, what’s your best advice as far as how do you get started? Is it something that you need to outsource?”
Is it something that you need to maybe hire some talent? Is it something that you need to get your team up to speed on? What sort of your recommendation to, you know, sort of catapult forward?
Well, first of all, start now. Don’t wait. I want to end.
And the irony is because everything’s in such flux, this probably is a good time. If you haven’t really put the effort into SEO, this is probably the time to do it. And if you’re a new brand and you’re charting your content course right now, you’re actually probably pretty well positioned.
So it starts with content. Yes, you need a great website. And I touched on things like structured data and how your listings and how your content is structured.
Absolutely, those are important things. And you want to look at making sure you build just a killer infrastructure from a tech perspective. But you could build yourself a Maserati, and if you put bad gas in it, it’s still not going to run right.
Right.
Yeah.
Right. Contents to gas. And so start with great content.
If you have limited resources and you’re an expert in your field, which most companies are, or you get into your business because you’re great at it, talk about that and just create good, relevant content. If you can do that in-house and if you have the people in-house to do it, great. If you need to outsource it or if you need to bring in someone to help you edit and make sure that that content reads properly, do that.
But it all starts with content. So if you need someplace to start, start there. And once you feel that you’ve got your content feed under you, that’s when you start to take it to the next level saying, am I presenting my content to the search engine and to the AI in such a fashion where it can understand it to the degree I need it to.
And that’s when you start layering on website improvements and things like that.
Excellent. Steve, as someone would like to continue the conversation with you, maybe they’ve got some questions on some of the things we covered today. Where can they reach you and where do you like to connect with people?
Well, you can always reach me through our company website reshiftmedia.com. If you want to reach me directly, I do love talking to stuff. I can do it all day.
Email is good, steve@reshiftmedia.com, or just look me up on LinkedIn. Last name is spelled B-U-O-R-S. Look me up on LinkedIn. I’ll connect with you there, too.
All right. Very good. Steve, thanks for joining me today, and we will catch you at a franchise event in the very near future.
Thanks, Jack. Appreciate it.
Thanks again to today’s guest, Steve Buors of ReShift Media.
And thanks to our sponsors, Northeast Color, Hughes, Franzy and Thunderly.
And thanks to you for listening, telling a friend about us and staying connected on the Social Geek Radio Network.