By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

Once upon a time, SEO was just SEO. (Cue Mr. Incredible meme.) Whether you were a billion-dollar national brand or a teen with a Spice Girls Tumblr, you played the same game: Trying to get your page in those ten blue links.

Now, two marketers might not even be playing the SEO game on the same field, let alone with the same rules. So how do they hope to win?

If you’re in SEO, today’s master needs no introduction. If you’re not, all you need to know is that he’s done SEO for more big brands than you have fingers to count them.

Kevin Indig

Growth Advisor for Hims, Toast, Reddit, Dropbox & more

• Claim to fame: Doubling organic traffic at G2, growing Shopify’s traffic by over 75% in 12 months, or standing up Ramp’s organic traffic. Of course, for any of those accomplishments, Kevin acknowledges he can’t take credit alone but gives it to a whole team of talented people.
• Fun Fact: He used to be a club DJ in a former life and played gigs in front of thousands of people. He also competed in powerlifting and weightlifting competitions.

Lesson 1: Find your vertical-specific strategy.

These days, the type of search you perform can lead to a very different experience. A product search might bring you to Google Shopping, while an informational search brings up an AI Overview. That is, if you’re even searching on Google at all.

The result is that SEO can mean radically different things to otherwise similar marketers.

“Based on what vertical you play in, you might not work with the same tools,” Indig says. “You might not even optimize for the same platform.” And a vertical-specific strategy is the only way to stay ahead in the new search game.

He gives the example of a SaaS or B2B brand vying for real estate in Google’s AI Overviews.

“AI Overviews source a lot of citations from YouTube or LinkedIn,” he tells me. So a business that wants to show up in Google search results might… not focus on either their website or Google.

Meanwhile, marketing a B2C product “is much more about Google Merchant Center than Google Search Console. [It’s] a completely different playing field and [there’s] completely different ways to win.”

“The pattern here is fragmentation,” he says. “We cannot just talk about SEO. What form of SEO are we talking about?”

But no matter what vertical you find yourself in, “SEO should not just be on Google anymore.”

Lesson 2: Decide where you want to be.

Indig simply means that good SEO is bigger than just Google these days, but it raises the question about Google’s competitors. So I asked if marketers should even be focusing on Google in the first place?

In true SEO fashion, the answer is “it depends.” (It’s comforting to know some things …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron