Posted on by Bob Ottaway

SALES LEADS STILL BEGIN WITH A WEBSITE

People love to speculate.  People love to predict change.  People love to predict we’re doomed.  Don’t believe a word of it.  Here’s why: 

  • BUSINESS WILL GO ON:  Regardless of how a website search is “returned,” that is, how the format looks, businesses will be listed, and users will get the results they are looking for.
  • WILL THE SEARCH RESULTS LOOK THE SAME?  There are many answers, and as Google’s John Mueller often answers, “It depends.”
    1. Some results will be written by the search engine itself to answer your search question based on websites and large language models like ChatGPT.
    2. Other results may look more like the “10 blue lines” of website results that you have been used to seeing for the last 20 years.
    3. Other results may provide a short answer and allow you to ask for a more in-depth answer.
    4. Other results may be multi-level, answering maybe all of your questions in one search result.</span
  • PAGE RANK WILL NOT BE AS IMPORTANT:  Researchers are trying to answer this question every day, especially about Google.  In fact, some believe that the new “AI Overviews” in the initial search return may feature websites that were never on Page One of a Google search return and aren’t today.
  • THE CONTENT OF YOUR WEBSITE WILL DETERMINE IF YOU ARE IN THE SEARCH ANSWER:  
    1. Maybe your site answered the searcher’s question head-on.
    2. Maybe your site had the information the searcher was looking for.
    3. Maybe your site is a brand, and the brand or its product was searched.

As you can see, the above outline is best guess and a conjecture.  That’s because where we are with AI and search results is in flux and changing daily.  All we can be sure of is that your website is the engine of your sales leads…now and tomorrow.  No website?  No visibility.

Onward and upward!