“For that to show up when you search for Nike is a big change,” said Jim Yu, CEO and cofounder of BrightEdge. “It pulls a lot more of [brands’] resellers right to the top of the AI experience.”
Managing brand searches from an organic perspective, which was once straightforward, now requires brands to carefully consider their appearance in both branded and non-branded searches.
“Most marketers have taken this for granted for a long time,” Yu added.
Impacting site traffic
As brands await wide adoption, about 75% of Brainlabs’ clients have asked about SGE in the past six months. The agency conducted tests on SGE across verticals, including B2B and ecommerce clients, last December.
In one case, for a B2B SaaS (software as a service) brand with a market capitalization exceeding $10 billion, Brainlabs exposed 70% of the brand’s keywords with “informational” user intent to SGE.
“We expect the site will lose 20% to 36% of its traffic from the rollout of SGE,” said Tallent.
Tallent noticed that in most cases, websites not within the top 10 search results get pulled into SGE.
“It seems like SGE is not stitched up to all of its SEO algorithms that it’s been using for years,” he said.
Impactful content and diversifying search spend
At Brainlabs, brands are building subject matter expertise on websites while increasing their multimedia content with premium videos and images.
“SGE pulls the most impactful content from the site and combines it with other sources it thinks is going to be most impactful,” said Tallent.
Simultaneously, brands are diversifying their media spend beyond Google Search, across TikTok, YouTube and Reddit.
“Google paid search spending has grown every year at Brainlabs, including over the past year, while other media channels are growing faster with double-digit growth,” he said. “This aligns with overall industry trends—Google ad revenue is increasing, while its overall share of ad revenue against other platforms is declining.” Tallent wouldn’t share Brainlabs specifics.
The agency’s SEO team now works closer with the agency’s influencer team to understand TikTok search trends and ultimately reach a wider audience.
“Channels used to be separated and teams didn’t even communicate,” said Tallent. “Now we’re all getting on one call to make broader marketing business decisions to reach the audience, no matter what platform they’re on.”
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