Why Your SEO Budget Is Bleeding You Dry (Build for Audiences, Not for Clicks)

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Speaker B: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Pipedream. In today's episode, we're trying something a bit different today. I wanted to share with you some thoughts on an article I've been reading. Um, I've been trying to catch up a little bit on my B2B marketing updates and I came across an article that was published by a, uh, couple of weeks ago which was talking about the impact that AI is having on search. And it really struck me because you know what it was basically saying, as I'm sure we will notice, is that AI overviews are appearing in more and more of the search queries that we are putting into Google. And in fact the number that Ahrefs, uh, put on it was 58% growth in the last year. So essentially for every 100 clicks that a top ranking search page used to earn on Google, Google is now keeping 58 of those clicks directly on its platform. And that's what Ahrefs is calling out. And it's not like it's just the top ranking result, the kind of click through rate impact is running all the way down the results page. So position two is 50%, 0.8%. Position three it's 46.4%. And essentially what this all means is that content marketing in B2B was built on this assumption and that if you create good content that ranks well, you get traffic on your website which then builds trust and allows you to generate pipeline through demo requests, contact forms filled out, you know, whatever. Um, and so the chain basically entirely depends on Google sending people to your website. And what this study seems to suggest is that Google is increasingly choosing not to do so. We speak to B2B marketing teams all the time. And this is our, uh, insight as well, I guess this is our observation as well, is that, you know, B2B marketing teams aren't really catching up to what all of this means yet. And the kind of traffic decline that a lot of B2B orgs are seeing is gradual enough that they can kind of justify and explain it away month by month. But ultimately, you know, this study from Ahrefs is making the direction of travel undeniable. If you don't do something about this, then you will be left with your hat in your hands, uh, in 6, 12, 18 months. You know, pick a timeline. So what's the impact? You know, if your content that you are creating for your website exists to rank and ranking no longer reliably delivers traffic, then the entire program that you have been running for 10 years is built on a foundation that essentially is being removed. You know, SEO content written for an algorithm that no longer sends traffic is, is just stranded infrastructure, I guess. More fundamentally though, you know, SEO has never, ever been an audience strategy. It's always been a traffic strategy. And B2B marketers have been treating them as the same thing. Now the gap between those two things is starting to become pretty impossible to ignore. So what's the answer? Owned Media is how we see it in building out a podcast, a newsletter, developing your own community, you know, formats where you control the distribution and where you own the relationship with your customer and with your audience directly, not because it's fashionable. You know, I know it's become almost as cliche to say, hey, we should launch a podcast as it is for a, uh, new marketing lead to go in and say, hey, let's redo the website. But the thing about Own media and thought leadership and building the platforms to showcase your point of view and your people is that they are structurally different from renting attention from a platform that can change the terms of its engagement with you whenever it wants. An audience that you've built does not reset when Google updates its algorithm. The podcast subscriber, the newsletter subscriber, uh, the people that you have in your community, your own community, you know, these are the relationships that are going to persist regardless of what happens to search or a, uh, LinkedIn algorithm update. You know, somebody finds you for Google from Google, you know, they're looking for an answer. But someone who subscribes to your podcast is looking for a perspective, and that's a fundamentally different relationship. And it's much closer to the trust that's required to influence a B2B buyer's decision. It also, of course, enables you to be engaged with and in the mind of your buyers that are out of market. There was a study that came out from LinkedIn B2B Institute a couple of years ago that, you know, I'm sure we will seen, which showed that 95% of all of your target customers are out of market at any given time. And that's not to say that they aren't, you know, a potential customer.

Speaker A: They are.

Speaker B: They're just not looking for the solution that you sell today, but they could be looking for it tomorrow. Yet all of the marketing and sales dollars are going not just from you, but from your competitors as well, to the 5% of customers that are considered to be in market. So owned media is a strategy that compounds, it gives you insulation from algorithm updates or changes to platforms where you aren't able to control, uh, the direction of travel. And it accumulates over time. Right when you're building an audience, you are building an asset. You're not renting a channel. And right now, according to this study from ahrefs, at least the cost of renting a channel just went up by 58%. So, look, you don't need to abandon your SEO strategy tomorrow, but you do have to ask yourself an honest question. If Google did disappear tomorrow, or if they did make a major change to their algorithm, would you still have an audience? And if the answer is no, that's something that we'd love to talk to you about. So that's it for this episode of today's pipe dream. If you want us to be doing more of these reaction takes to industry news or updates and how they are affecting what B2B marketing is and should look like for modern day B2B businesses, uh, let us know. We'll also drop the link to the Ares article, uh, in the show notes of this episode. We'll see you tomorrow.