If SEO is actually dying, what should marketers stop doing today?

SEO's declining effectiveness demands new customer acquisition strategies. Ruth Zive, Chief Marketing Officer at Voices, shares how voice-first technology is reshaping brand engagement for enterprise clients like Microsoft and BMW. She outlines tactical approaches for transitioning from search-dependent marketing to direct customer outreach and voice-powered brand experiences. The discussion covers practical frameworks for reducing AI-generated strategy bloat while accelerating go-to-market execution. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.

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  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Ruth Zive, the Chief Marketing Officer at Voices. Voices works with over 60,000 enterprise customers, including Microsoft, BMW and Shopify, to power their voice experiences across marketing, products and AI systems. And today Ruth is going to explain how you need to rethink brand building in a voice-first world. Let's move on to our next question. If SEO is dying, what should marketers stop doing today?

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  Stop, I'm going to try to frame the stop as a start. Stop investing all of your SEO budget in SEO.

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  And instead shift it to AI search and start to optimize for AI share of voice.

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  Okay, so stop investing in SEO because it's dying. Start investing in AEO because it's building. But a lot of the practices in SEO and AEO are pretty similar. So am I not doing keyword optimization? What's the actual difference in terms of implementation?

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  Well, I think the macro difference is that you're not trying to drive traffic anymore. It's just gonna stop happening. You know, the, I think the majority of answers served up inside of the LLMs don't even include links. I think I read this week that it was more than 80%. So we shouldn't expect nearly as much website traffic. And if that's the case, how are you writing content? How are you growing brand awareness? How are you driving discoverability inside of that LLM first experience? Which, by the way, will be mostly voice-led in the future. So there's, nobody's gonna go to a website. They're gonna be asking the LLM in their voice to find answers for them.

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  And you better show up inside of that experience. So we've got to like break this, you know, default sensibility around websites. I think it's going away.

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  Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that there'll still be a place for a website and people want to see visual experiences and it's, websites are going to be deprioritized. I don't know if I agree they're gonna go away. But I, the click is dying in some capacity, right? The, what you do in your marketing activity, driving someone to an experience where they then go to your website and you have trackable information. I do think marketers are gonna have to start taking a leap of faith and start thinking about brand activities. And because the, the click isn't necessarily the gold standard of what marketing was successful that got someone into a trackable, nurturable sequence.

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  Well, maybe, maybe that's a great way to put it. So the stop or the don't is, you know, stop prioritizing website traffic as your north star for SEO.

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  Yeah, scary. Stop counting clicks.

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  Right.

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  All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Ruth Zive, the CMO of Voices, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Ruth, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you could visit her company's website, which is voices.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. We'll be back every week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.