Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, a brain dump of thoughts about SEO in the age of ChatGPT. If you've been wondering whether you still need to pay attention to SEO and you want to hear my 📣 opinions, read on ...

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"Should we still be doing SEO?"

I was in a community call with a bunch of other comms-for-good professionals recently, and someone asked this question:

"Now that everyone's using ChatGPT for search, should we still be doing SEO on our websites?"

I gave my quick two cents on the call, but I want to unpack this question in more detail here.

First, let's review what the question-asker means by "doing SEO". I had a gut sense (and I followed up to confirm afterwards), and I was pretty close. When nonprofit comms professionals talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as something we "do" to our websites, I think we're talking about two main activities:

• Following technical SEO checklists, which recommend making sure pages and posts have good titles, descriptions, are the "right length", are available to be indexed by Google, have a good semantic structure (headings, images with alt tags, etc.)
• Publishing content to try to rank for specific keywords, which if done well involves some keyword research, reviewing competing content, writing a great piece of your own content, publishing it, and promoting it.

Broadly speaking, I'll refer to these two activities as "technical SEO" and "content marketing".

There's a wide range of good and bad advice out there about both of these, and there has been for years. Some of this advice has already been wrong and out of date for some time ... for example, Google straight-up ignores meta description and meta title tags now, and generally will create it's own title and description to include in search results. But many SEO checklists would have you working through your blog posts fine-tuning the titles in hope of increasing your ranking in the search results.

But I digress. Back to the question: In the age of ChatGPT, should we still be "doing SEO to our websites"?

My answer is yes, but not by following the outdated advice and playbooks I described briefly above.

People will always be searching. You will always want to show up.

Regardless of the tools, people will always be searching for information. They might be looking for information about a topic, or a way to take a particular action. Or they might be looking for information about your organization, specifically.

Whether those people are using a traditional search engine (like Google), or some other tool (like ChatGPT), you still want to show up in the results, however that search is conducted.

Searches haven't been limited to traditional search engines like Google and Bing for years. Think about all the other places people search for different types of information:

• YouTube, if you think the video format might be the best way to consume the information you're looking for
• TikTok, for experts talking directly to their audience
• Pinterest, to get visual inspiration
• Podcast directories
• Google Maps
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Forums
• the list
• goes
• on

I recommend stepping back from the details of SEO on your website, and trying to think about search optimization in a much broader way.

When people in your target audience search (for your brand, or for relevant topics), you want to show up.

Regardless of the platform.

Regardless of the format.

And if that's the objective, you have a new, larger question to answer: How can we optimize our organization's digital footprint for search?

This probably sounds like I'm saying you need to be on every platform. Of course, that's impossible for all but the biggest brands.

Instead, try following this advice:

1. Focus on growing your brand authority. Pursue any activity that is likely to increase brand mentions by people in your target audience or people they trust, in the context you want to be known for.
2. Keep on creating and publishing high quality, original content, on your website and on whichever channels your audience uses the most.
3. Engage in conversation and build real relationships with members of your target audience and the people they trust.

Focus your efforts on writing and speaking authentically, and developing your clear and distinctive points of view.

There have always been shortcuts and "tricks" people would use to game the system and try to get better Google search rankings. Sometimes they worked, in the short term, until Google released an update that targets those tricks, and then rankings and traffic would tank.

I'd argue the same is true for the shortcuts AI tools offer us with content creation and social engagement today.

Sure, you can use ChatGPT to churn out a blog post, or write your LinkedIn posts (or even your comments?!)

But when you do that, you're missing the opportunity to build and exercise your authentic, real communication muscles.

Writing isn't just a task you have to get done. Writing is thinking. It helps you develop your point of view. It shows your audience who you are.

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Back to the question: should we still be "doing SEO to our websites"?

In my opinion, optimizing your website (and your whole organization) for findability, for search, is critically important.

The rules and the playbooks are changing, and there's a sea of bad advice out there now, driven by the AI hype cycle we're in currently.

Don't be afraid to return to fundamental questions about your target audience, what they're looking for, and what channels they spend their time on/in. If you're tuned in, listening to your target audience, and showing up to talk with them, it's hard to go wrong.

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