The political resistance is real... seen all sorts of projects fail as reporting lines change and staffing budgets shift which doesn't suit stakeholders. Too many times what could have been an amazing collaboration stumbles and falls before it is given a chance.
I understand the skills-based anxiety as with so many employees overcapacity it's a fair question to ask where will they find the spare time to build sufficient skills to be successful.
SEO teams having oversight on AEO makes sense but there are increased costs in tooling and traditionally these budgets have been locked up in IT&D or Insights teams.
I hear discussions from disgruntled friends in the industry on the reorg fatigue that AI projects while still gaining traction are already being asked to revise their focus and do more faster.
The tracking metrics topics is a whole other world of pain and confusion for many folks trying to transparently tackle the topic.
Sadly, I’m hearing much the same thing. hearing it from practitioners, from senior leaders and seeing it in the teams’ inability to move forward in meaning ways.
The role of machine readable content, proper KPIs and how these new disciplines and tasks will be incorporated into an organization were the parts of the book I found most interesting. One thing that occurred to me was if you're a bigger agency already incorporating Semantic SEO ie: full schema, optimizing for entity extraction and embeddings, assigning intent to Keyword research etc. The big changes would be for content writers to change content so question/answers and topic are clear at the beginning of the post. To me hardest change will be proper KPIs because AFAIK there are no tools that provide grounding queries, share of conversation w/token source and quantity in one tool. IMO AI prompt tracking tools are overpriced, useless tools that have no REAL DATA from AI providers tracking visibility that isn't based on algorithms but rather probabilistic calculations or in the case of citations... often are hallucinations!
It is really a question of organization and budget. For many companies, SEO is still the POOR MAN of Marketing, Creative, Data Analytics, and IT. Everyone wants those organic clicks. It is on every CEO's road map but budget is no where to be found. Most of the problem stems from the fact that SEO is often reporting to IT or Data Analytics and some Marketing Manager who wouldn't know SEO-GEO from a can of refried beans. It's PPC, Email, Display, Text, and then SEO. Most of these companies are going to be left in the dust with the SEO with the knowledge needed, being allowed to charge enormous fees for consulting services while the office politics destroys any internal progress.
I understand and appreciate your perspectives. AI aptitude is a genuine issue.
An SEO professional might not truly understand AI and how it works. Likewise an AI professional might not truly understand how SEO works, especially if one’s understanding of SEO is clearly rooted in the “spammy” realm of SEO (i.e. gaming the system).
I see this with information architecture and SEO. Many information architects still poo-poo SEO and vice versa.
The political resistance is real... seen all sorts of projects fail as reporting lines change and staffing budgets shift which doesn't suit stakeholders. Too many times what could have been an amazing collaboration stumbles and falls before it is given a chance.
I understand the skills-based anxiety as with so many employees overcapacity it's a fair question to ask where will they find the spare time to build sufficient skills to be successful.
SEO teams having oversight on AEO makes sense but there are increased costs in tooling and traditionally these budgets have been locked up in IT&D or Insights teams.
I hear discussions from disgruntled friends in the industry on the reorg fatigue that AI projects while still gaining traction are already being asked to revise their focus and do more faster.
The tracking metrics topics is a whole other world of pain and confusion for many folks trying to transparently tackle the topic.
Sadly, I’m hearing much the same thing. hearing it from practitioners, from senior leaders and seeing it in the teams’ inability to move forward in meaning ways.
The role of machine readable content, proper KPIs and how these new disciplines and tasks will be incorporated into an organization were the parts of the book I found most interesting. One thing that occurred to me was if you're a bigger agency already incorporating Semantic SEO ie: full schema, optimizing for entity extraction and embeddings, assigning intent to Keyword research etc. The big changes would be for content writers to change content so question/answers and topic are clear at the beginning of the post. To me hardest change will be proper KPIs because AFAIK there are no tools that provide grounding queries, share of conversation w/token source and quantity in one tool. IMO AI prompt tracking tools are overpriced, useless tools that have no REAL DATA from AI providers tracking visibility that isn't based on algorithms but rather probabilistic calculations or in the case of citations... often are hallucinations!
It is really a question of organization and budget. For many companies, SEO is still the POOR MAN of Marketing, Creative, Data Analytics, and IT. Everyone wants those organic clicks. It is on every CEO's road map but budget is no where to be found. Most of the problem stems from the fact that SEO is often reporting to IT or Data Analytics and some Marketing Manager who wouldn't know SEO-GEO from a can of refried beans. It's PPC, Email, Display, Text, and then SEO. Most of these companies are going to be left in the dust with the SEO with the knowledge needed, being allowed to charge enormous fees for consulting services while the office politics destroys any internal progress.
A lot of truth in there, Geoffrey. So many times, the balance is off, way off!
I understand and appreciate your perspectives. AI aptitude is a genuine issue.
An SEO professional might not truly understand AI and how it works. Likewise an AI professional might not truly understand how SEO works, especially if one’s understanding of SEO is clearly rooted in the “spammy” realm of SEO (i.e. gaming the system).
I see this with information architecture and SEO. Many information architects still poo-poo SEO and vice versa.
Absolutely true. Sadly, humans do this too often, everywhere. but specifically to tech industry roles and overlap, it’s far, far too common.