4 BS Quick-Takes on LinkedIn this Month

The past month or so, BS-posting has reached a peak.

And, there are many more items I feel inappropriate discussing as it will target some people.

In this version of the Marketing Shots I am bluntly pushing back on bad takes, BS posts or opinions, and offering my version of a reality-busting truth-bomb.

➤ What you will read:

🗝 The Death of SEO or Google

🗝 GEO / LLMO and Other Acronym Optimizations

🗝 Outreach is Spam

🗝 AI Will Take Your Job

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The Death of SEO or Google

Have you heard about data manipulation?

Data does not lie, but humans manipulating data do!

There are many BS posts going around, and you should be able to recognize bad takes like this.

The loss of Google traffic to ChatGPT, or steep decline since then...

🔎 Look closer, the Graph shows a 99% dominance of Google dropping to 97%.

2% points is not a tragic loss.

When someone presents data, always check their data and when their graph begins and where it stops. This is a simple trick of zooming into a 10% scale instead of showing the complete graph. Cherry-picking stats to make a point.

The reality is ... Google has dropped under it's 90%+ benchmark domination over the past decade or so (data from StatCounter), and many searches take place outside traditional search engines.

But, let's see the total size.

Google still dominates with up to x373 more traffic than ChatGPT and a growth in 20% in searches, and more profitability than last year (data from SparkToro, NYT).

GEO / LLMO and Other Acronym Optimizations

Simply put ...

Anyone selling GEO / LLMO optimizations is probably selling you a dream that you cannot afford.

LLMs are mostly black boxes, and even their creators don't fully understand how they work.

Partially, they can be temporarily manipulated.

But, the BEST way to optimize for large language models or AIs (generalizing) is to have a big established brand, show up on top articles on Google & Bing, and more or less that's it.

Aiming to be the top result in a future technology controlling search is crazy!

The below is data from TOP PERFORMERS and MARKET LEADERS.

• Right now, in the best case AI sends ~2-5% of traffic to sites.
• And, sends a bit better quality of up to 5-6% of qualified leads.

If you are not a market leader, you should not expect these numbers.

And, if AIs take 25%+ of the traffic, that's in the future.

Are you willing to spend 90% of your budget for 5% of the traffic?

Most businesses need sales in the short term, not ROI in 5 years from now.

My point?

If you don't have a 100k SEO budget, do not bother with optimizing for LLMs. If you have <10k budget for SEO, focus on Google's 95% dominance.

Outreach is Spam

AI supports spam outreach.

If you really want leads for your business, automating can help, but avoid:

• Spray and pray approaches
• Fully automating outreach with AI
• AI comments under posts

The ones who will win outreach is the least spammy and really personalized tactics.

If you don't have time to send 1000 emails and fully automate it, spend 15 minutes per day for 3 personalized manual emails/messages.

It will work wonders for your sales efforts!

AI Will Take Your Job

No, AI will not replace you.

AI will replace menial, low-quality tasks. If you were doing menial, low-quality, repetitive, easy-to-automate tasks, it MIGHT replace you.

Klarna works back into re-hiring employees they fired last year to fully automate.

Service quality dropped...

AI can be a productivity tool, but requires oversight.

My take on AI

Have you noticed that people who are not experts in a specialty think AI is doing a GREAT job, but experts feel it's lacking?

• A CEO asking deep research for a marketing plan is excited they can fire their CMO.
• A marketer writing code is excited he won't be needed developers.
• A developer creating articles for their website is elated because they couldn't write with a gun on their heads.

On the other hand:

• A marketer asking AI for a marketing plan feels the plan is generic.
• A developer writing code with AI has to fix the bugs and connect the dots

AI is a tool, and an experienced hand can take their job to the next level, but would have difficulty recognizing mediocre or bad work in other domains.

AIs are very convincing that they are doing a great job...

...but, are they?

Upskilling

Experts will not need juniors to do more and better work.

Our problem is an entry-barrier of inexperienced people in the market.

Soon, you will need more seniors, but you will not be training juniors to become seniors that can quadrable their productivity with AI.