@tjrobertson52

SEO is not the right strategy for every business. So I wanna talk about how to know if SEO is right for you, and if not, what you should be doing instead. It's actually pretty simple.

Are people going to Google and searching for your product or service?

Yesterday someone dmed me on TikTok. They were looking for help with SEO and AI optimization, and they said they've had a really hard time getting any sales through SEO. They explain that they have this great product, and when people actually see it, they love it.

However, it's very unique. No one else offers this product, and no one knows that it exists until they see it. And this is a perfect example of a business that should not be investing in SEO.

There's no agreed upon name that you would go to Google and search for. It's a very novel product. Very few people have ever heard of it.

For a business like this, SEO and Google ads, for that matter, aren't gonna do you any good. No one's searching for your keywords. The only relevant terms that you might care to rank for would be something like ideas.

In this case, personalized gift ideas. However, terms like that are way too competitive. It's gonna be some big publisher that ranks the top of Google, and nowadays, people aren't even gonna go to that publisher's website.

It's just gonna get answered in some kind of AI response, and that's one hint as to what you should do instead of SEO. We'll get back to that in a second.

The point is, traditional inbound marketing almost never works for these kind of businesses. So what works instead? Well, outbound marketing works.

And mainly I'm referring to organic social media or social media advertising. If your ideal customer is not aware of your product or service, you need to inform them. As long as there is a target audience for your product or service, you can get in front of that audience on social media.

Typically this is going to mean creating a compelling video that shows off your product or service. I recommend creating at least a dozen such videos and posting them organically to all the social media platforms and seeing which one does best. Then make a 15 second version of the top performing video and put a strong call to action at the end.

Run that video as an advertisement on whichever platform your video is performed best on. That is right now by far the most effective strategy for advertising if you have a very clear target audience, but they're not yet familiar with your product or service.

However, I think that's probably gonna change in the next year or two. As AI models get smarter, more and more people are using them for these kind of recommendations. Let's take the personalized gift example again.

Every month, more people are turning to tools like ChatGPT to help them find the gift ideas. ChatGPT is then going to do a series of hyper specific searches across a traditional search engine, looking through hundreds of pages of content to find the perfect gift ideas for this particular user and their specific case.

But how do you make sure the AI finds and recommends your product? Well, first, you need to identify the pages that ChatGPT is referencing before it makes its recommendations. And then you just need to get your product or service listed on as many of those pages as possible, preferably in a way that's recommending you.

This is currently the primary strategy we're deploying for our clients.

And honestly, the payouts probably not gonna be as big as it would with social media videos, at least in the short term. But long term, I do think this is going to be the primary way that people get their recommendations. And right now, there's a huge opportunity to increase your visibility while the competition's low.