SEO Is Dead in 2024 and What to Do

what's going on guys it's Mike welcome uh to another edition of Uncle Mike tells you all about it I just made that up not sure that that's a thing I want to talk today about SEO and the fact that SEO is dead in 2024 and this is not an exaggeration I'm going to tell you why I think that's the case and I'm going to share with you what you can do about it especially if you're a business a service you've got a some type of income stream that relies on SEO content driving traffic to your

site and helping you make a living I'm going to tell you what you can do about this big changes are coming to search they're going to affect us all both as users and as business people that are trying to take advantage of of SEO uh but especially like I said if you're a business a service a product you know a brand then you're relying on traffic you're relying on getting found you've got to pay attention to this and I there are some people talking about but honestly not many people are talking about it the ones

that are I think are under they're underestimating the actual impact oh yeah yeah it's changing it's not going to be that bad so let's talk about what's going on here first let's take a look at how SEO has pretty much worked up until now now if you're my age you remember things like keywords back in the day when Google was kind of early days uh you may even remember something like Ulta Vista but Google would rely on keywords essentially if you were a pet shop you might write an article uh about goldfish because that's one

of the things you're selling and you would just stuff as many keywords as you could in that first paragraph and the idea behind that was then Google would search and it would say oh my gosh so you might write a piece that's like if you love goldfish then we have goldfish that are unique amongst the Goldfish uh world and and for goldfish lovers I mean it just would say goldfish like 30 times and the idea was that the algorithm would go here's a wonderful article about goldfish this keyword and so you go in there and

you somebody else goes in and types because they want to get a goldfish and lo and behold your your content would show up because keywords that's evolved I mean that's old school now it's about semantic search and essentially Google has tried to understand intent we speak in certain ways so I might type into Google I don't type by keyword anymore I might say what time is the Phillies game uh on television it's looking at that saying well I want to understand what Mike's intent is what is it he wants to really know it's not just

looking at the keywords it's looking at the semantic phrase and then it's trying to find content that it can give me that answers my question that meets my need that that that is aligned with the intent my search intent and that's where you get semantic search now there's lots of SEO gurus out there they're all teaching you know how to take advantage of keywords and semantic search and how to rank you may be paying people five grand 25 Grand a month to make sure that your site is optimized that they're creating content for you so

that you can get customers in very common thing to do lots of SEO kind of gurus experts businesses out there uh but one of note that I've been impressed with through the years and I'm not they're not an agency that you would hire but they were instructing teaching on SEO is income school and they had a really good key insight about Google and it wasn't that this was secret they they they weren't the only ones to discover this but what income School kind of latched on to what they what they realized was important and Google

had stated this themselves that Google wants to keep users on the serp the search engine result page the results when you type a search in the serp is what pops up all the results they wanted to keep the user on the serp as long as possible why is that I mean the the reason would be is because that's how Google makes money Google makes its money from advertising and the longer it can keep the user's eyeballs on its page the more it can sell advertising the more it can charge for it the more valuable that

becomes and so what Google was doing was trying to keep people on the Ser as long as possible you could see examples of this you might type in a question like what's the weather today and Google would answer it themselves they wouldn't send you somewhere they wouldn't send you to some The Weather Channel they'd answer it themselves maybe you're interested in booking a flight somewhere well they would give you flight info uh maybe you were trying to find certain kind of business near you where they give you business listings maybe you're trying to buy a

new monitor for your computer well they give you options to buy monitors with pricing and photographs almost like you're on uh Best Buy's website so Google was doing all these things to find ways to keep you on the site as long as possible now one of the things that they did that was the Holy Grail for SEO uh experts and businesses was the snippet the snippet is that chunk of text at the top often it's larger and it's answering a question you might ask how do I remove paint from my hardwood floors I'm making this

up off the top of my head I don't know if that's in the snippet but then Google would have a snippet what they would do is they would search the internet they'd find the best ranking article the article they thought was the most relevant and they would take a snippet from that article and they would publish it so it would be all nice and big it would be the answer that you're looking for and right underneath it would be the link to your website assuming that's your uh your website to your hardware store let's say

so so the snippet became the holy Gray and and folks like income school would teach how to optimize for that and if you're paying um an SEO firm or expert they're often trying to help you gain the snippet so when you because you become better than number one like when you've got the snippet you're at the very top of the pile and you get people to your site I have a personal example uh years ago I wanted to explore this a little bit did some research and I wrote an article based on how income School

taught to structure it to optimize for the snippet the article was called how how to escape wage slavery I wrote it H1 tags H2 tags well outlined etc etc and I was able to for a number of years capture the snippet if you if you Googled the the how do I escape wage slavery or some semantic phrase similar my My article would be surface first it would be the snippet it would be a 1 2 3 4 5 here's how you do it and by the way here's an article to learn more and I was

so smart I was just experimenting with this I then took that article and made a YouTube video structured the same way I kind of used the article as my script and what would happen is you would see both my article and then you would immediately see right underneath it a link to my site plus uh the Google video sorry the YouTube video and so this has been kind of the core up until now of how SEO has worked you're trying to provide useful content based on search intent Google ranks it offers it up everybody's happy

but now things have changed because you got to you got to recognize that AI has entered the game AI has entered the chat you got chat GPT bar Gemini co-pilot grock all these AI products from different companies but AI is in the mix now and the initial reaction especially amongst SEO gurus has been Euphoria and I and it's it's a huge mistake it's idiocy but it's been euphoria oh with AI I can I can create thousands of articles in seconds I can flood the internet with content I can use AI to generate content I can

use it as a research partner to do all the heavy lifting I don't have to do anything I can use it to come up with ideas I can use AI to write my subject lines and really catchy titles and all this kind of stuff so there's there's a whole kind of Market if you will out there now of gurus selling folks on how amazing AI is for beating the search game you see Ai and search it's a natural solution AI is a natural solution for search and this to me is a massive mistake it's a

massive mistake because what these people are doing is they're excited in the moment they're not looking forward as to where this is going and you can see where it's going because it's right in front of our face it's a big mistake to use AI for search ranking and if you're doing it if you or your marketing team or the internal discussion at your organization or just in your mind is how can I leverage AI for search results how can I use it to beat the game and beat my competitors you are you are making a

massive mistake you do not understand what is coming you will be left crying in your crying in your beer uh because things are changing fast so let's take a look at the current state of the Ser I'm going to start explaining why I think this is a huge mistake and essentially you want to see we go to a search engine you look at the top of the page where the serp is you can see the serp but what's happening now is that Google more and more is giving Gemini answers for the serp instead of taking

my content or your content and serving it up as number one Google is saying hey look uh Gemini's got the answer you want to know to make bake brownies I'm just making this up I don't know if that'll be a Gemini result uh here's the answer and you can see now there will be underneath it um some links to websites Etc that you can go check out on your own but essentially Google is saying we'll take the serp from here they're experimenting with it right now but this is where it's going now remember income school's

key Insight it is that Google wants to keep users on the serp as long as possible that's how they make their money that's how they make their money and see in the past Google needed us to make that money they needed you they needed your content because what they would say is like look we're not in the content creation business that's you we don't have anything to sell other than advertising so here's what we're going to do you create the content you populate your websites you let us search those things and catalog them and index

them and we'll give you tips on how to how to take advantage of the algorithm and and what'll happen is we'll get everybody to come to our website but we'll do it by offering your content it's a win-win we get them all to our website and then we can sell them advertising well we're not selling we're selling advertising to the advertisers we can use that audience to sell to our advertisers and in return for you helping us by providing all this great content thank you very much uh will give you exposure which means people will

go to your website they'll click through and go to you and then you can monetize them you can do whatever you want you're going to love all the traffic you're going to get in fact we'll give you a free tool called Google analytics that will let you see all that traffic and where it's coming from we're working together it's us we're a team me and you this is Google speaking of you and I now so that was kind of Google's agreement with us but the fact is now with AI things like Gemini which is Google's

uh version you got co-pilot you've got grock on X Twitter you got chat GPT Google doesn't need you anymore it doesn't need you anymore it's AI can answer all the questions if a user comes with a question its AI can answer now you can argue but Mike the AI answers aren't that great and they make all kinds of mistakes and it sucks and yet that's today you're living in Alpha world right now they haven't come out with beta yet really and so what's going on here is the die has been cast the decision has been

made Google is making its own content it doesn't need your content anymore and a lot of the Googs are saying don't worry it's not going to be that bad Google's not going to close you out uh people still want to deal with Brands they still want the legitimacy of real people on the other end yeah that's true however I don't think that that's a safeguard I think that Google is going to make its AI better and better to the point where people are just going to accept it for what it is and this is just

going to be the way that you get information it doesn't matter what people want Google's going to make you feel good as a user and if you feel good as a user you thought you wanted to go to Mike Gaston's website to learn about escaping wage slavery but that was yesterday don't really feel that way anymore because gosh Gemini does such a great job it actually gave me a it constructed a video and there's an audio lesson it can construct all the stuff on the fly if it wanted to I mean they're going to get

that sophisticated this is not like over yet and so what ends up happening even though a lot of folks are saying don't worry it's not that bad yeah there's gonna be a bit of a ding it's not that bad the fact is Google's AI has all the answers and and it's going to continue to have better answers and deliver them in more compelling way so that's number one Google really doesn't need you and I anymore another thing that's happening here is the way the users are behaving users are turning to AI more and more for

search people are using chat GPT as a search engine as a matter of fact open AI I the company that created Created chat GPT knows this for a fact and they're they're actually positioning themselves to be one of Google's I say one of to be Google's like first serious competition for search Chat GPT is positioning itself as a search engine and they don't have to sell us people are using chat GPT for search in more sophisticated ways than they could with Google search and so Google's got real competition maybe for the first time in decades

so that's the second thing people are using AI more and more for search and so what's going on here between those two Dynamics plus you know hav't help you if your messaging your product your content goes against the consensus because you're going to get suppressed on top of that that's kind of a third it may not apply to you but think of someone who is in the Firearms world they're not necessarily making guns or bullets but let's say they make holsters or they make hunting vests Etc the more and more that people become um uncomfortable

and feel unsafe around the concept of firearms uh the more that kind of content is just going to get suppressed maybe you're running a church maybe you got a youth group or a drug rehab program that's religious in nature you're going to see that that the consensus isn't going to be comfortable with you you're not going to fit because you're not secular and Google's going to suppress that so that's kind of a third outlier there but the long and short of it in all of this is that Google's phasing you out it doesn't need you

anymore the users aren't necessarily looking for your content and will not be in the future and Google can create its own content and that's just where things are so This spells the end for anyone that's relying on search it's over if you have been relying on Revenue coming from search business from SEO optimization Etc this is over now if you doubt me I will give you the canary in the coal mine just go to Reddit and go to the subreddit our SEO this is these are all SEO practitioners on a subreddit and read for yourself

what is happening to the SEO world based on Google AI and the algorithm changes and so on where is Google moving things what you will see is SEO expert Guru after SEO expert saying my business is getting decimated like I I I I'm losing customers and at this rate I'm going to have to close or I closed or I gave up I can't get the results I used to get I'm losing I'm losing I'm losing it's a sad State of Affairs now I understand this might be you know kind of an outlier group of 15-year-old

boys working from their you know bedroom on SEO but the fact of the matter is there's a big change now yeah some of the bigger groups they'll be fine and they'll figure out how to navigate but these businesses that relied solely on SEO to as a service are are I mean there's lots of them going out of business I mean a lot and now that's to me is the canary and the co mine you play that forward to how is SEO going to affect companies that rely on SEO for their traffic to their site well

that's another problem okay so uh let's talk a little bit about what you do because the fact of the matter is Google is becoming more closed the informal agreement where you offer content and they give you traffic and return that's done that's over with so what do you do what do you do and I hope you can see this I mean if you disagree leave a comment down below or if you've been seeing effects of this leave a comment down below I'd like to like to hear your thoughts are but let's talk about real quick

here as we wrap things up what can you do what can you do about this the job number one for every business every marketer every brand product Etc is you've got to take back control you have to take back control right now Google has control right now if you sell through Amazon Amazon has control you have to take back control you can't rely on this informal agreement anymore to provide you opportunities to create wealth to transact to monetize so there are four simple ways I'm not going to unpack them I'm not going to decompose or

deconstruct them but I'm give you four simple ways four simple things kind of high level that you need to be focus on and do so that you can take back control for your business and have a bright happy prosperous future ahead of you number one is you have to build audience you have to build your own audience you see this thing about well I've got audience it all comes through Google that's actually Google's audience people are going to Google that is Google's audience and Google is working very hard to increase the relationship between itself and

its audience to keep its audience on its website Google doesn't want to share its audience with you anymore like it used to and so you have to find ways to build audience your own audience that comes to you that's interested in what you have to say it's interested in your thinking it's interested in your Take On The World your Solutions your products your services and so on now there's a myriad of platforms there are all kinds of things like video creation and YouTube's great I know it's owned by alphabet same company as Google uh there

are other video platforms there are podcasts there are social media platforms there are all kinds of ways that you can be building your own audience so that's number one number two number two you have to get good with outbound marketing now some people are like Mike what's outbound marketing essentially SEO optimization is considered inbound marketing the same thing with um social media you put a bunch of clever quips out there and you hope that over time you attract people to you the same with SEO optimization we put great content on our website and we hope

via Google that we're able to attract people to us that's inbound marketing outbound marketing is things like uh paid you got a paid advertising campaign you're paying to push your message out there uh that could be digital advertising that could be traditional that could be television broadcast radio print uh another example of outbound would be direct marketing or you're sending a campaign out whether it's postcards digital campaign Etc but it's direct marketing but you got to start getting good with outbound marketing you cannot rely on the inbound traffic like you used to be able to

because chat GPT and Google and so on have stolen your content and now they know how to give their own answers and they're not interested in making sure that you get found number three number three number three you got to spread your bets you got all your eggs in one basket shame on you you there was a time back in the good old days of marketing where we talked about the marketing mix and that meant that you had a mix of platforms and and channels and so on uh and types of messaging and types of

campaigns that were out there so that you're touching the market in various ways and capturing business you got to spread your bets don't go all in on one third-party platform that's called digital sharecropping my friends don't be a digital sharecropper I'm not saying that you have to avoid Google there's still some money to be made with your content getting surfaced on Google uh however be looking at other opportunities so that you've got a nice mix that way you're not relying on any one thing to make sure that you make payroll keep the lights on so

that's number three and lastly and this is this is the secret sauce if you can crack this code and I can help you with this uh I can help you with all this is you got to own your relationships as I said before Google owns the relationship it's Their audience you've got to own your relationship so if you're building audience on various platforms whether it's YouTube social media you're running ad campaigns you're getting traffic to your site you've got all this audience that's coming and going you have got to find a way to own that

what I mean by that is specifically you need to convert them into your email database you have an email database right you've got a list that you Market to right right when you convert someone to an email list whether it's a newsletter uh uh you know you got some type of coupon Club whatever it is you now own them because you know who they are it may just be an email record but the the fact of the matter is you don't have to pay anybody you don't need permission you don't have to do inbound or

outbound marketing you can send an email directly to your customers and your prospects and say hello lovely customer I'd like to talk to you today I have an offer I have something I'd like to share did you ever consider this you can have a relationship they can email back once you've got their email record you know who they are and you can at will communicate unicate with them and when you can communicate with your customer you can build the relationship you can build brand equity and most importantly you can solve their problems serve them and

monetize you can create wealth for yourself and while you create value for them so that's the fourth and most important is you've got to own your own relationships if you don't have access to your customer directly then you're in big trouble speaking of email uh what a segue I have an email newsletter imagine that I'd love for you to sign up I'll put some information here on the screen long and short of it about once a week I post usually a little bit of infotainment maybe share a story from my expertise a little bit of

an Insight here or there if you're into things like strategy wealth creation you care about the culture a little bit I think you'd enjoy it if you like my content here on YouTube you're definitely going to love the email my goodness it'll transform your life or triple your money back uh it is a free newsletter as uh as I speak here so long and short of it do me a favor sign up for the email um love to have you on the list and that's that guys that's it I hope that this was interesting for

you I hope this was instructive I hope that you came away going okay I've got a better perspective I have a sense of what's going on and I have a sense of how I can navigate forward if you need help navigating forward get in touch it's easy to do I'm just Mike at mik gon.com or you can go to my website mik gon.com there's contact form there but more than anything else I want you to remember one thing and that is that Uncle Mike loves you I'm so grateful for you guys love each and every

one of you and I'll catch you all in the next video cheers [Music] [Music]