Name: The Search Forecast: Reshaping Your Strategy for AI in 2025 and Beyond
Uploaded: 2024-09-26T10:35:57.200Z
Duration: 20 min 4 s
Description: The Search Forecast: Reshaping Your Strategy for AI in 2025 and Beyond

Transcript for "The Search Forecast: Reshaping Your Strategy for AI in 2025 and Beyond": Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's session, the search forecast reshaping your strategy for AI in 2025 and beyond. By quick introduction, my name is Trent Ruffalo, and I work at Yext as a senior product marketing manager. I am super excited to present this session because literally so much has changed with search over the last year alone, and things continue to change with what seems like a new update on Google or Bing every other day. For marketers, these can not only be exciting times, but they can also create a feeling of uncertainty because it can be difficult to know how to navigate these changes and optimize for new search experiences. If you have any of those feelings or thoughts today, we've got you covered because in this session, I'm going to first give an overview of how search has evolved. Next, we'll introduce new generative search experiences and how those can impact search results. And lastly, we'll provide strategies that you can implement to optimize your brand for both local SEO and new AI led search experiences. So when we jump right in, it's important to take a step back where we can see how much search has changed and evolved over the years. In the early to mid 19 nineties, we saw the 1st big breakthrough with crawlers and search engines like Yahoo and Ashteeves making their debuts. These search engines were keyword based, meaning they would match users with web links that contained the same keywords that people use in their search. Then about 10 years later, Google pioneered the shift from keyword matching to being able to understand natural language and user intent. And this shift was huge and drastically changed how brands created and structured their data. Where creating a bunch of content that contained high target keywords was no longer good enough, brands also needed to structure their content and establish relationships between its data so that way Google could understand, for example, if you offer pizza at certain locations. In about 10 years ago, voice search came into the picture. This certainly impacted how brands market to consumers because how someone talks to Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant is different from how people search on Google, Bing, or Apple Maps directly. And now we're in a brand new phase of search known as generative search, which is led by AI. And that's right. A year and a half ago, ChatChiBT started out as a fun tool that you would all play around with. You would ask it to do do certain things, like write me a bedtime story, maybe about a a carrot and 3 little pigs. But now that same AI model, is now powering these new era of generative search. This new era of search be first became a reality on Bing when they introduced Copilot. This is an AI powered assistant that relies on ChatGbt to produce generative answers. And this completely changed the game because it allowed consumers to have a natural, more more conversational like experience as they search. Shortly thereafter, Google started using its AI model, Gemini, to enhance its search experience. Google introduced a search feature called AI Overviews that sometimes features generative summaries at the top of the search results page. The goal of AI Overviews is to help users find the most relevant information quickly to help improve search quality. And you can see the difference in the quality of the results here with AI overview featured in the right in the image on the right hand side. And the most recent shakeup to AI search is the introduction of SearchGPT, a cutting edge new search engine developed by OpenAI. This has the potential to generate a significant amount of adoption from consumers and could have a huge impact on how businesses think about their search strategy. At the moment, there are no ads on search gbt, which is currently in a prototype stage, and you can't buy your way to search results. This means you won't be able to rely on paid search, which then levels up the importance of your organic search strategy. Now over the last few decades, SEO was the name of the game for marketers. But now with the rise of AI powered search, there's a new concept of optimizing for generative experiences, also known as generative engine optimization. You might be asking, what is GEO? How is that different from SEO? Well, at the end of the day, the best quality content is still going to win in both cases. But there's a key difference that impacts how you should think about creating and optimizing your content. On the one hand, SEO optimizes content for traditional search engine formats, while on the other hand, GEO will craft content that can be easily parsed and utilized by AI, and this includes structuring data and formats that are friendly to natural language processing. So given this important difference, how do you develop a search strategy that optimizes for both? Right? Because although GEO is on the rise, SEO certainly isn't going anywhere. While step 1 is to prioritize and optimize web content strategy, This is likely table stakes, I imagine, something that everyone is already doing because it's such a critical critical piece to perform in search. But the rise of generative experiences has even heightened the importance of creating optimized first party content because of a feature like AI overviews. You can see here a generated answer is primarily sourced by a variety of first party content. So when thinking about how to create an optimized web content strategy, remember, SEO isn't going anywhere. So those traditional tactics of generating content around target keywords and ensuring technical capabilities are met are still important for appearing and ranking higher in search. But given the differences in how SEO varies from AI led experiences, now more than ever is a time to be incredibly data driven. And that's because the format of a blog or a product web page as well as the copy that you actually draft could have varying results. So don't be afraid to test out new things. For example, how to format a bolded, bolded list could have a better chance of showing up in AI instead of a straight long form copy. Step number 2 of creating an effective search strategy is incorporating a reputation management solution. Managing reviews can be very, very complex, also super time intensive, but the benefits of doing so could be enormous for your brand. That's because ratings and reviews have such a big impact on where and how your brand shows up in search results. When you, for example, search on Google for something like best pizza in Chicago, not only does Google automatically pre filter to only show restaurants that are 4 stars and above, but they also feature what are called review justifications. And these are those review snippets that contain the same keywords used in the search query. In this example, you can see it's best pizza. On top of that, businesses that publish first party reviews that are properly marked up with schema can further differentiate themselves in search results. Here, you can see on Google that is featuring the review count and the average rating directly in the search engine results page. And these are reviews that the insurance agent, in this example, solicited themself and published directly on their local web page. In a crowded and competitive search landscape, something like this can help your brand stand out in search and drive even more traffic to your website. Incorporating a reputation management strategy can seem daunting because you may not know where to begin or how to start prioritizing. But these are arguably the most impactful things that you can do especially from the get go. First, start responding to reviews. Businesses with higher average ratings are better positioned to succeed in search. And one of the things that you can do to increase your average rating is to respond to reviews. Our customers that respond to more reviews are rated more than half a star higher than those businesses that don't. Next, you should start to ask for customer reviews. That's because happy customers are more likely to leave you a review simply when you ask them to. And lastly, publish those positive reviews on your websites to help sites like Google index your content and further help you stand out in search. Now step number 3 to optimizing your brand for SEO and AI is a well managed listing strategy. In this new era of AI led search, having a well managed listing strategy can help your brand succeed and differentiate from your competition. But what does a well managed listing strategy actually look like? First and foremost, you'll wanna make sure you are managing listings on the big sites, so the Googles, the Facebooks, Bing, Apple Maps, and make sure you're filling out your data as much as possible. The more these search engines know about your brand, the better your chances are of showing up in search. Once your data is complete and actively being managed, you want to make sure you're frequently updating your listings. Consistent updates keeps your data fresh, but also sends, strong trust signals to sites like Google. And lastly, it's important to ensure consistency across your listings, not just on the big sites, but also the smaller ones that may not be generating as much direct direct traffic for your business. To highlight how important consistency is, Yext ran a study about 6 months ago to see if the data would support that more consistency across your listings actually translates to better performance in search. Specifically, this is what we looked at. We analyzed more than 600 1,000 business locations that were live on our listings product for at least a year. The reason why, the locations analyzed needed to be live for at least a year is because it takes time to see the SEO benefits. Then we measured how many clicks each location got on Google. To read this chart here on the right, each dot represents an individual business location. So the further to the right you go, the more sites that location was synced to. Then the further up you go, the better it performed on Google. And these were the results of that study. Should be pretty clear and obvious that all those best performing locations are over to the right, meaning they're synced to more sites and therefore have consistent listings in more places. Now I will acknowledge while there are some locations a 100% synchronized and still not performing the best comparatively, and that's because consistency is not the only factor that contributes to SEO. But at the same time, there are virtually no locations on the left minus a handful of outliers that are performing well, over there on that left hand side. And that's because the biggest takeaway from this chart, the locations that are only syncing to Google and a few others are the furthest to the left. But as you can see, just managing Google alone isn't enough to give you that best performance on Google. Remember, this analysis is only looking at website traffic generated on Google. This does not account for traffic from any other site. So if you had the choice to sync to be on the left versus the right, you know, which one would you choose? Based on the fact that this data supports that there's a strong correlation between the number of publishers synced and your performance on Google, I imagine most, if not all of you, would prefer to have your data synced in more places, including both those big and small publishers. Now you might be asking yourself, why does network synchronization actually correlate to better performance on Google? Well, when you have a low percentage of the network synchronized, your listings will have missing and inaccurate information and give off a poor less trustworthy signal to Google that looks like this. Whereas when you have a high percentage of the network synchronized, your listings will be consistent and accurate everywhere, giving off a signal that is much more trustworthy and improves your chances of showing up on Google. It's the same thing as asking 10 people for directions and getting the same answer 10 times. You're likely very confident that the answer you just received is correct. But when you get conflicting answers, just like what you saw on the previous slide, you're probably less confident and don't know which answer is correct. Sites like Google operate the exact same way and want to feel confident that the information they're delivering to consumers is the most accurate and up to date. So we know with statistical evidence that synchronizing your listings on both big and small sites correlates to better performance on Google. But what about AI led search? Well, you might think that Gemini, Google's AI model, only looks at data on Google or, you know, similarly Copilot, you know, would only source information from bink, but that's not the case at all. And when ChatGPT is prompted to to cite its sources in this case, after providing an answer about a local financial representative, it doesn't reference information from big publishers like Google, Facebook, Bing, or even Apple. Instead, it site source data from yp.comandlocalmin. You can see that right here on the on the slide. And this means if you are not actively managing your information broadly in consistency, AI led models like Gemini or ChatGPT, and soon to be others could present consumers with inaccurate information following a query or even worse, they may not surface your information at all. To show you another example of how impactful these smaller sites can be on AI, we actually went and asked a bunch of large language models where they get their local business information from. And some of the top sources that they featured in their answer included numerous online directories, social platforms, and online review sites. And you can see that they list off some of the specific publishers like Google, Yellow Pages, TripAdvisor, many others. But then we asked the large language model to be more specific about which directories it uses as a follow-up question. As you would expect, they listed off sites, you know, the big ones like Google, Bing, and Yelp, but they also specifically called out smaller, less prominent sites like Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, CitySearch, HotFrog, and Super Pages, and about 20 others that probably many of you have never ever heard of before. In fact, we ran this exercise across every major AI model and got the same results. We wrote a whole blog and provide a lot of screenshot, supporting evidence. So not to go into too much detail here, but definitely recommend checking out that resource for those who are interested. This is a blog that you can actually find on our website. It's called where do Google Gemini, Chat GPT, and other AI models get local business information from. And lastly, if you need more evidence to support that these smaller sites are crawled and sourced by AI and large language models, the CEO and founder of Locally provided a quote to confirm that ChatGPT is in fact scraping their site for information. So even if you're not getting a lot of traffic from these sites directly, they're still so, so, so important even if it's just for setting up your brand for success with AI alone. Given all the statistical evidence that supports synchronization across listings in as many places as possible correlates to better SEO, but it also best positions your brand for AI. Which option between the 2 here would you choose? I would also add, it does no harm to sync to more publishers. So as a marketer, why wouldn't you choose option 2 if there was a listing solution that provided an automated way to do this? Not only would it do no harm, the data supports that it could very well increase your SEO and help you perform better in AI led search. Now to recap everything that we just covered, how can we help set your brand's digital strategy up for success in the upcoming year? Great web content that is optimized for target keywords, ensuring technical requirements are met, while also testing out new formats to see which types perform better across different, across different search experiences. Next is to put in place some sort of reputation management strategy, primarily focusing on responding to reviews and generating feedback that you can publish on your first party websites. And lastly, like we just covered, make sure your listings are optimized, complete with profiles, making frequent updates, and ensuring network consistency and having that leveled out across the board. Whether you use these pillars as the foundation of your marketing strategy or you're able to pick up on a few things that you can take back to your team, hope you found the content in today's session to be helpful. And with that, thank you so much for joining today's session, and I hope you enjoy the rest of Yext Summit.