Everybody.
Hope everybody had a good lunch.
Was that not a good lunch or a what?
Um, once again, I'd like to thankour sponsors that are listed.
Um, up next we have Alex Nunn withSearch and Marketing for WordPress
in the age of ai, a digital marketingveteran and co-founder of Smart Sites.
Alex will update your.
Of SEO for the modern world inhis talk search marketing for
WordPress in the age of ai.
In a world where AI is changing the wayspeople find information and discover
content, traditional SEO is of the enough.
Alex's session will show you howto adapt your strategies to thrive
in an AI driven landscape withoutfeeling overwhelmed by the jargon.
Alex.
Great.
Thank you for the introduction.
That actually sounded really good.
Did I write that?
Yeah,
you did.
Who wrote that?
I, I wrote that.
That's I, that sounded great.
Um, thank you everyone for attending.
Uh, so today we're gonnabe talking about, uh, SEO.
We're gonna be doing actually a littlebit of GO, which is the new SEO, and we're
gonna be talking about AI paid a stuff.
Um.
Seems like there's alot of familiar faces.
How many of you guys wereat my workshop yesterday?
Quick show of hands, just okay.
So not, not everyone, so we'llstill, unfortunately, for those
who raised their hands, we're gonnacover some of the same content again.
But, um, for those that were hereyesterday, I think, uh, this will give
you an opportunity to ask some questionsbecause you've now digested this and
you're seeing it for a second time.
So, um, this, this deck compared toyesterday is a lot more condensed.
So there's a lot more opportunitiesfor questions and to have discussion.
So please feel free to stopme as I go through this.
For those that were not here yesterday.
Uh, yesterday was alittle bit more in depth.
SEO workshop here.
This will be a little bit, uh,condensed, but we're covering some
of the same topics, so similarlyfor you guys, feel free to.
Stop me ask questions.
I would love for this to beas interactive as possible.
Um, was there an agenda slide?
Agenda slide disappeared.
Uh, this is our agenda for today.
I'm gonna give the same personalstory of myself as I did yesterday.
Uh, we're gonna talk aboutrise of generative ai that's
also similar to yesterday.
Then we're gonna talk about rankingon ai, search paid ads and AI results.
That's completely new.
And, uh, I definitely want to have a,a more interactive q and a yesterday,
even though we had more time.
We got, we got a little bitlimited by time, uh, just because,
uh, the workshop was so long.
So definitely stop me during the sessionand if you have any questions for after.
Uh, we'll have time for that as well.
Um, a little bit about myself.
That's me over there on the top left.
Um, so my, my family immigratedto, uh, to the u to the us,
uh, from the USSR in 1991.
So that's very, very early me.
Um.
I've been fortunate enough to haveexposure to a computer and to the
internet since the beginning of computersand intern, oh, not computers, but
since the beginning of the internet.
Uh, so I've been involved in the, in thedigital space for a very, very long time.
I started my first, uh,company T 35 hosting in 1997.
So that was, uh, for those thathave been around, uh, since then,
that was the time of GeoCitiesHyper Mart, uh, tripod, angel Fire.
I don't know if any, any of thosenames, uh, ring a bell to you guys.
Uh, predates the startingof Google by a couple years.
Um, more recently, I co-foundedSmart Sites with my younger brother.
That's a company we run now.
Um, smart sites, you could, you guyscould fact check me and look it up.
We're, uh, one of the fastest growing,top rated digital marketing agencies.
Um.
We, uh, we have over 400 employeesand we do SEO, paid search and
digital for thousands of clients.
So that's my background, uh, whereI'm coming from, uh, to today.
I want to share a lot of the SEO stuffthat we're doing on, on our end with you
guys to give you guys inspiration andideas and best practices of what we're
doing both for ourselves, for our, our owncompany, and for thousands of our clients.
Um, same, same slide you someof you guys saw yesterday.
I, I also have a bestselling book out.
This is automotive theme.
So I personally, well take a step back.
So, smart sites were industry agnostic.
We're literally in every single industry.
There's no industry that's morethan five or 10% of what we do.
I personally do a lot in theautomotive space, like car dealership,
uh, automotive advertising.
So when I decided to write my first book,that was the no-brainer choice for me.
I was gonna do a bunch ofthese books for every industry.
But, um, later, if after a session, ifanyone wants to chat about the challenges
of book publishing, I'm more than happy.
Uh, more than happy to discuss that.
I, I wrote this back in the day, pre-chat,GPT, so I rode every word myself.
There was no ai.
Uh.
Yeah.
Cheating going on in, in here.
But yeah.
Uh, the, the reason I bring this upis, uh, I cover a lot of the stuff.
I'm gonna be covering my sessiontoday in the book, so if you guys
want more detail, um, I also not,I am not here to sell the book.
Um, I will, I can't physically givethem away because it's very hard for me
to get them to the speeches I attend.
But I'll send you guys a copy.
So.
At the end, um, I have my emailaddress, so please reach out.
I'll send you the slides.
I'll send you a copy of the book.
Those that asked yesterday, Ialready sent everyone a copy.
So, uh, if you want a more indepth, uh, analysis of some of the
SEO stuff we're gonna be talkingabout today, it'll be in there.
Just keeping in mind that I wrote thisalmost three years ago, so it won't
have the geo or some of the newerstuff, but like the SEO methodology.
It'll, it'll have a lot of good stuff.
Um, smart sites we kind ofcovered already, but this is us.
We have a team of over 400 employees,um, offices all over the world.
Um, we do tons and tons ofthis SEO paid search stuff.
And, uh, it gives us the ability toreally experiment with a lot of things and
really see what's working and what's not.
And that's, that's, that's, uh, whatI hope to dis distill for you guys
here in the next, uh, 35, 40 minutes.
All right, so we're gonna take itfrom the top rise of generative ai.
Um, I like starting off very generalat the top to kind of crave context.
Um, and again, some of this slideswill be familiar for those that
were at the workshop yesterday.
Uh, but it's still good to go through.
Um, this is the macro viewworld that we live in today.
This is the percent of searchthat happens on AI chat.
So this is the chat, GPT perplexity, um,all, all the, all the AI search engines.
Um, this is where we are today.
We are at, uh, we're at, uh, 7.6%,uh, of all searches happening on ai.
Right?
Um, I mentioned thisyesterday, but for, for me.
In my world, living a lot onLinkedIn and seeing what people
post on LinkedIn, I could swearthat it's like a hundred percent.
Like all the stuff I see islike AI searches everything and
no one's using Google anymore.
Does anyone still useGoogle question mark?
Uh, so just to put incontext, this is where we are.
What's, uh, what's more interestingis this, is, this shows the AI
search, uh, volume, which is thewhite pieces of the bar chart
compared to Google search volume.
So a couple things here.
Obviously Google search, andthis is just Google search.
If you add in Bing and all the othersearch engines, there'll be that the.
Aqua colored stack will be even taller.
Uh, what's interesting is yes, AIsearch is going up right there.
It's percent of sharesforecasted to go up.
But what's interesting is overallGoogle search is also going up.
It's not that Google search is downlike, like I would believe reading all
the posts on LinkedIn, uh, the amountof search happening on traditional
search engines actually going up.
Um, for sure.
Uh, the way people search is changing.
Um, more and more people areusing multiple ways to search.
So they will do an informationalsearch with ai, then they'll go back
to Google and do a Google search tofind actual, the business to go to.
So all of this is rapidlychanging and evolving.
But just from the top level, this iswhere we are, and this is where we're
forecasted to be the next couple years.
So again, uh, a lot of people maylead you to believe that the world
will completely change next year.
They're gonna wake up January 1st, andno one's gonna be using Google anymore.
Um, the actual data doesnot support that yet.
Obviously it could, itcould always happen.
Things could always change, but thisis pretty much where we're expected
to be over the next couple years.
All right, ranking on AI search.
So we're gonna talk aboutranking on AI search.
So this is the, the new word here.
I have a slide for it.
The new word for it is geo.
That's the one that's, uh,become the most popular.
I think it's still debatable what,uh, the, the acronym's gonna be.
Uh, geo is winning for now.
Uh, and I, from, from personalexperience, um, I've been.
For a very long time, I've beeninvited to speak at conferences
about SEO, so I always get invites.
You wanna come talk aboutSEO, talk about SEO.
No one wants me to talk about SEO.
Now everyone wants me to talk about geo.
So just, just based on the requestto talk about geo, I think that's
gonna be the winning acronym.
Uh, but, uh, we're, we'regonna dive into a little bit to
generative engine optimization.
Obviously that's geogenerative engine optimization.
Uh, the other one that's, uh, vyingfor uh, prominence is a EO answers.
Engine optimization, uh, which peopleclaim is a little bit different
than GEO, but I think overallit's gonna be rolled into GEO.
Um, cool.
Uh, this is at work camp lastmonth, so for those that I was not
there, I was at another conference.
Uh, but this, this, uh,this is Danny Sullivan.
For those that don't know him, he's,he was a Google search liaison,
so he was a Google employee whosejob was to communicate Google's
policies to the SEO community.
He literally, and I've been sayingby the way, go and SEO is the same
thing for, for, i, I don't wanna sayyears because this is also moving so
quickly, but at least 12 to 18 months.
And, uh, people always fight me about it.
So it's very, I I put theslide in for that reason.
So there's.
Someone else out there saying it.
So he was literally a Word camp, uh,last month, and he, he had a slide
that said, good SEO is good geo.
So, uh, what he means by that isthat doing correct SEO and the best
practices of SEO is also important forGEO generative engine optimization.
So another way I put thatis, um, the strategies.
The good strategies, not like the blackcat stuff or the spammy stuff, but
the strategies of correct SEO whereyou're focusing on creating unique
content, uh, that's informationalfor people to read is as important to
generative engines as they are to Google.
Another way to look at this is, thisis how generative engines work, right?
This is how they get data.
So what's interesting is atthe bottom of the pyramid, you
see the SEO content, right?
So.
The language models, even thoughthey actually have reasoning, they
don't have, they're not able togenerate their own information, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like something, like a math equationthey could do, but something specifical
specific technical informations orquestions, it gets that information from
the greater web, which is SEO content.
So literally the content you'dbe creating for SEO is what's
gonna be picked up in, uh, GEO ingenerative engines in Chad, GPT.
What's interesting is, uh, even thoughthat content gets picked up, you,
there's certain things you could bedoing to get picked up more often.
Uh, for example, uh, if you want to bethinking about how generative engine,
uh, prompts are made, so as opposedto Google where someone I don't know
could go and type, uh, I don't know.
Honda car dealership near me, uh, Chad.
GPT queries are much moreinformational question based.
So if you want more, more of yourcontent to be coming up in Chad, GPT
and, uh, general the engines, youwant to focus on answering questions.
So you want your contentto be like a question.
And then like answers to that question,that's what gets picked up the most.
It's still SEO content, it's still thesame PR best practices, uh, but that's
what's, uh, what's being pulled into, uh,chat, GPT and other generative engines.
Any, we'll take a quick pause.
Any questions with this so far?
I know I go super quick.
Yes.
Is it,
is it able to rank the qualityof the answer in any way?
So, the a the, uh, the question is, um.
Is it able to rank thequality of the answer?
So the, the algorithm for the generativeengine stuff is, um, even harder to
deduce than for search and Google.
So for search and Google, I'llwalk the next couple slides.
I'll walk you through how we deducethe ranking signals for search, uh, for
generous stuff, it's, it's still a biggermystery than the Google stuff that a lot
more people have kind of figured out.
Um, that being said, there'sdefinitely, uh, parts of the
algorithm that determine that.
And it's definitely a work in progress.
I don't think I have the slides in thispresentation, but yesterday I showed a
couple where it gave you the wrong answer.
Um, that has now been fixed.
There was a couple, there was acouple ones of how do you make
your, uh, how do you make your, uh,uh, cheese better in your pizza?
And it's a TA glue to it.
Um, it said, how manyrocks should you eat a day?
It said, two to three rocks,but you should, you should not
eat more than three rocks a day.
And then it recommended smoking two tothree cigarettes a day while pregnant.
That was also a recommendation,which is now doesn't, but
screenshots I use are from last year.
It fixed those things.
So certainly it knows the quality becauseit's fixed those things, but how it
determines that it's a little trickier.
All right, so I'm gonna gothrough the SEO ranking signals.
Uh, the reason we go through this is as,as, uh, as we just, um, discussed with
that question, uh, there's, it's muchharder to determine the actual algorithm
for chat GPT and generative engines, butthere's a lot of people that for a long
time have really focused on figuringout the algorithm for Google, right?
And if the.
If the things that you do for Googleare also good for chat, GPT and
generative ai, this is a good startingpoint of things to concentrate on.
Um, so how do you know what, uh, rankingsignals are important for Google?
So there's a couple ways.
We'll take it from the top, top left.
I'll spin it all the way around.
Uh, number one, uh, Yandex, uh, hadtheir entire search algorithm leaked.
You guys could go online,you could look it up.
There's a lot of websitesthat summarize it really well.
Um, literally rankings,weighting of the rankings.
Um, there's a lot of interesting ones.
There was one on capitalizations.
If you capitalize the titles of yourpages, like older words, it's bad.
You get deducted.
So there's a lot of interesting stuff,but obviously Google's naix, uh, Google's
always been a couple years, three tofour years ahead of the index with all
the war and everything else going on.
Now they're probablyeven more ahead, right?
So that's not something I wouldpersonally use, but it's public.
You guys could go look it up.
Lots of great information.
Uh, and the leak was,this is all fairly recent.
Uh, the index leak, I, I wanna say was twoand a half years ago, something like that.
Um, next one year and a half ago,Google had their algorithm leaked.
Every, every, everything's leaking.
Um, so the Google algorithmleak was all over the news.
So, so all over, at least, at leastin my, in the world I live in, it felt
like it was all over, all over the news.
I don't know if it was actually on yourlocal, on your local news at 10:00 PM
uh, but it was all over the news of.
Uh, a very, a lot of prominentpublications featured
it made into a big deal.
Um, so the Google leak, what happened isthrough API, someone was able to get all
the variables that Google uses for organicranking, which sounds like it's huge news.
We've cracked Google now, and alot of publications used a lot of
that clickbait wording, uh, to geta lot of traffic on their articles.
Uh, at the end of the day, whathappened was, even though the,
they leaked every single variable.
We don't know the weighing of thevariables, how important they are.
We don't know which ones are active, soit was 2,600 variables that were leaked.
The SEO community tried tofigure out the active ones.
They actually were able to figureout that around 600 are active.
Uh, and there's, again, lotsof great public information.
You could go look it up.
There's places that let you searchthe variables that describe each one.
Um, the, the problem I have with allof this is that no one has been able
to figure out the weighing of thevariables, how important each one is.
Uh, so the analogy I like to use is it'slike having a very complex soup recipe.
So you have a, uh, soup recipe with2,600 ingredients, and now you know the
ingredients, but you don't know how manyof each you need or the order put them in.
So it doesn't really help you much.
It's interesting to look through, butI would not use it as a ranking signal.
So what I do use as a ranking signalis, uh, therein Shaw maintains a
local search, ranking factor study.
So it's, uh, it changes every year,but it's a group of SEO professionals
that report to themselves.
What's important and what they're seeing,uh, as a ranking signal on Google.
So it's, it's not really meantto be a public facing, uh, study.
It's more of an internal one, butit's really, really good info.
And starting, they do itevery couple years, so.
It's not that I have an old one.
I think this is just the most recent one.
Um, starting at, uh, end of 2023,which is the last time they, they
did it, it was actually open-ended.
So old SEO professionals, literallyin a open-ended fashion, recorded
each category of what's importantto them, uh, the way that looks.
And for those that have their camerasout, this is a good slide for those that
don't, you could take your cameras out.
Um, the way it looks when you summarizeeverything is this is probably the
best interpretation you're gonnahave of Google ranking signals.
I think eventually we're gonnahave SEO professionals and GEO
professionals put something like thistogether for, uh, generative engines.
I think we're a little bita early in the process.
B, it's too fast moving, um,and it's super fast moving.
So for those that have been involvedin the geo space, getting your content
to rank on, uh, uh, Chad GPT and such,um, the last six months, Reddit, uh,
Reddit content was very, very prominent.
Reddit was the number one sided sourceon Chad GPT and all other AI engines.
Um, and two weeks ago theycompletely took it out.
Um, and if you look it up,Reddit stock fell 17% within 10
minutes of that becoming public.
Um, so I, I think we will have stufflike this for the geo world soon,
uh, but it's also moving so quicklythat I think it'll be, it'll be
very hard to have this kind of data.
So for now, I think this is our best.
Our best interpretation, uh, of what'simportant to Google, and I think in
effect, what's important to, to ai.
I'll walk you throughall the ranking signals.
Again, this is specifically forGoogle, but I think a lot of this will
translate to geo, and I think if you'reworking on this, uh, I think that's
your best path to be, S-E-O-N-G-O-C.
Uh, um.
Uh, optimized because as we look,the search still traditional
search, the old school search isstill the biggest chunk, right?
It's, I think it's gonna be awhile till, uh, generative ai
overtakes traditional search.
So, um, I think this is for,for those focusing on S-E-O-G-O,
I think this is where we go.
I'm gonna take it from the top.
I, I talk quick, but ple I'm gonna tryto, I'm gonna do a pause in between
the two sections for, for questions.
But please, as I go, feel freeto stop me as well for questions.
Just raise your handand, and, and I'll stop.
Taking it from the left.
So local Pac is the SEO word word.
In the, in the for,for the general public.
It's Google Maps.
So for, um.
Um, there's a big distinctionbetween ranking and Google Maps
and older organic results below it.
The ranking signals, as you couldsee, are completely different.
Um, local map, uh, local pack orGoogle Maps would be important.
If you have a physical location,so you have a physical location,
you want to focus on both of these.
If you don't have a physical locationand that physical location absolutely
does not make sense to you, you'd wantto focus more on the local organic.
We'll start with a yes question.
Um, just for like the on page signalsthat you're saying, like are you
talking about just the text or thingslike schema data for example, or?
Yes, yes.
Good question.
Hold, hold, hold thatthought for 30 seconds.
So we'll take it from the left.
So the first one for, forthe maps is GBP signals.
So that's literally makes sense tobe, to be rank well on Google Maps.
You need to have a Googlebusiness profile, right?
Sounds like it makes sense, butit's, uh, you'd be surprised
how many businesses have a.
Poorly set up one, you don'thave all the categories set up.
You don't have your local location set up.
Uh, there's a lot ofindustry wide best practices.
So for example, in automotive, you mightwant to have a separate one for, uh, your
service business separate from sales, andyou have it nested within the sales one.
So there's a lot of optimizations,best practices there.
So OnPage is interesting.
I I, I like combiningOnPage into a single.
Uh, signal.
But OnPage is the most, uh, um, complexout of all these ranking signals.
So OnPage, I would say is technical.
SEO.
So that's a schema.
That's to make sure that your websiteis optimized, the best possible
for Google to find your informationin the easiest way possible.
Um, and then on pages is also thequantity and quality of your content.
Uh, what's interesting is it's avery high ranking signal for maps.
So a lot of people don't realize it.
Some there we have a lot.
We have some local businesses that, thatjust, the website's not important to them.
They do maybe social or whatever itis, uh, but the, the, your website
affects your Google Maps, uh, rankings.
Um, that answer your question, I'll,I'll, I'll do it again on the right side.
If you have any followup, we'll do there Yes.
Question.
When we talk about speed.
Oh yeah.
So, uh, good question.
Very similar to this question.
So, on page I would put technicalSEO into a technical SEO.
The best way for me to describe it ina non-technical way is you wanna make
your website as discoverable by Googleas easily discoverable as possible.
And you want to make sure your importantcontent is prioritized to Google.
And that becomes importantin, in, in a couple ways.
First, yes, you wanna have a websitethat's fast, that people have a good
user experience that goes on theirbehavioral signals, so that that in
itself will affect your rankings.
If your website's very slow or haslots of popups, you'll rank worse
because of behavioral signals,which is a little further down.
Um, the other part of it is Google onlyhas a specific amount of crawl budget.
And it's usually on a domain basis.
So if your website's not easily crawlfirst all, they'll crawl less of it.
Number two, um, they'll,they'll prioritize the content
based on how they discover it.
And even if they crawl your entirewebsite, they'll probably not list all
the content of your entire website.
In search.
You kind of have to help Google understandwhich content you want to come up.
So that's my non-technical way to describetechnical SEO, uh, for those that.
Are more in, do this ona more in depth basis.
Um, there's literally technicalSEO people that charge a thousand
dollars an hour that go in and dovery specific technical SEO to fix.
It's usually like a fixing thing, andwe have someone like that on our staff.
Uh, technical.
SEO people usually get called in when,uh, big websites, enterprise clients start
dropping organic traffic by like 50%.
That's, they're, they're, they'relike, they get called in, like,
they're, like the firefighters liketo run in, to put out the fire.
Uh, but technical SEOs, it'sold own field for most SMBs.
It's literally making sure yourwebsite is, uh, as easily discoverable
as possible and that you, uh, makesure that you're showing Google the
exact pages that are most important.
Yes.
Sorry.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry to stay on thekind of technical side.
Yes.
I missed your thoughts on importanceof like, I know you said the chat
sheet or the chat search is a minor partthere, but you know, Google having its own
and in Gemini, and I think that's gonnajust increasingly become integrated more
of their, their their native surgery too.
Like, I'm wondering how importantthings like the Lmm, LLM.
TXD files or other indicators?
Yes, that's all, that's thosekind of things In terms of helping
contextualize, I, I think we'regonna lose 99% of the No, it's good.
I, I'll do it.
I'll, I think we're gonnalose 99% of the audience here.
Um, so in the SEO world, uh, overthe last 15 plus years, uh, the
community started standardizing firston a site map, although it's not.
The way search engines work anymore,we could probably lose the site maps.
It'd still be okay, but what a sitemap does is tell the search engines,
it's not meant to be consumer facing.
It's literally for the search engines.
Uh, all your pages and youcould even set how often they
get index and things like that.
Uh, the other component thatthe SEAL community has developed
has been robots at TXT.
So it's a file you put in the root domainthat tells, uh, Google and other search
engines what to index and not index.
Um, in the generative AI world,uh, we're now in the process of
developing something similar.
Um.
LLMs txt has been proposed.
Uh, there's a very wide SEO communitythat's pushing cats txt as the l
If you google lo blank faces, butif you look it up, uh, at, uh.
I promise I'm not making it up.
Uh, I don't know of any generativeengine that uses them and there's
been a lot of recent studies that,um, I've even participated in that
shows they don't like doing AB tests.
So I think there will besomething, but it is not yet.
Um, there's not yet.
Cool.
Um, on page, so we touch on page,I'll come back to on page one.
We're doing the other side.
Uh, review signals isa very interesting one.
Uh, obviously mostimportant for the maps part.
Uh, so review signals are your Google, myBusiness reviews, Google Business Profile.
Now, for me, it's, I hate when theychange, when they change acronyms on me.
It's not even new acronyms.
They go and change acronyms.
G. So GMB, Google My Businessbecame GBP, Google Business Profile.
Uh, reviews on there.
Uh, so it's interesting, one that wetouched upon yesterday a little bit.
So there's three things thatare important for reviews.
Number one, the, uh,quantity of your reviews.
You want a lot of reviews.
The star ratings of your reviews.
You want oh five star reviews.
So you want a lot of reviews.
They're oh five star.
That one makes sense.
That one usually everyone'son board with me for.
The third one is actuallythe content of your reviews.
So Google uses the content ofreviews as a ranking signal.
Uh, so the example I, I alwayslike to use is if you're a coffee
shop and your name is literallycoffee shop, nothing in your name.
That helps Google determine whatkind of coffee you make in any way.
Um, and you want to beknown for Brazilian coffee.
If a lot of your reviews mentionBrazilian coffee and someone goes.
On Google maps and types, or even justGoogle and types, uh, Brazilian coffee
shops or coffee shops with Braziliancoffee, you'll more likely come up
based on the content of your reviews.
So that's one that a lot of peopledon't really, uh, don't usually
realize, and that's super powerful.
If you are a local business with aphysical location that wants to be
known for something specific and to comeup for it, obviously harder control.
They can't really hold your customersat gunpoint and just tell 'em, like
to keyword stuff, their reviews.
Uh, yes question.
Um,
hi.
I'm a service based business.
Yes.
I
leverage Google reviews formy clients to drop reviews.
What you've said will not also applyfor service based business because
you said it's great for fiscal
stores.
Yes.
Uh, any, any business that has aGoogle Business profile, it, it would
be important for a hundred percent.
A hundred percent.
Uh, even as a agency.
If we have a lot of reviews thatsay they do amazing SEO and someone
searches, uh, uh, agencies that do,SEO will come up for a hundred percent.
And the there's no, uh,this came up yesterday too.
There's no maximum lengthof review where it gets bad.
Like the more, the better,the more content, the better.
Obviously hard to control.
Um.
And another question, I'm gonnapreempt this question right away.
Question that comes up,uh, responding to reviews.
Yes.
Super, super important.
But that doesn't help as a ranking signal.
You can't keyword stuff.
Your responses that, that always getsasked, and I see businesses do it also.
That does not help yourranking in any way.
Yes.
Um,
cloud Flare has a setting.
Yes.
They can discourage, uh, AIbots from scraping your website.
Yes.
Do you recommend came out recently?
Yeah.
Do you active by thefold for new accounts?
Very scary.
Sorry.
And you're, and I am taking from this,that, that you, that they, people should
not be turning that on or like, you know,I have a client who is, uh, you know,
has a certain subject matter expert.
Yes.
But she, you know, doesn't want AIgiving answers that she should be giving.
Very, very good question.
I've been asked this a lot, andthis is also gets a very into
technical, like when I do much moretechnical conferences, it comes up.
But a very, very good question.
So the question was, um, CloudFlarerecently, it was all over the news.
It was huge news.
Uh, the, the headlines of course forthe clickbait was CloudFlare Blocks
Chat, GPT, that was the headline.
Uh, so CloudFlare for new accounts.
By default, I don't know ifthey've reverted this policy by
default started blocking, uh, uh,AI bots from crawling your site.
For those that already haveCloudFlare, it would, it's a option
you have to dig through to find.
So it wasn't as, it wasn't like CloudFlareblocks Chad GPT as the headline said.
Um, I would say for most businesses,99%, I would not block it.
I think the value of beingindexed by AI outweighs the risk.
Uh, there's a couple specific caseswhere that might be otherwise.
Um, for example, there's a coupleof book publishers that I had this
discussion with that, um, that wouldnot want that, but, uh, interestingly,
that group of book publishers wound up,uh, suing perplexity for doing that.
Mm-hmm.
And they wound up winningperplexity, paid them, I forget, a
hundred million, something crazy.
Um, I think for 99% of thebusinesses I would not discourage.
Uh, for now until we seeotherwise, because I think the
negative outweighs the pie.
I think you're, you'rebetter off having it indexed.
And I think both ai, both GoogleOverviews and Chad GPT and Perplexity
and everyone else is gonna increasecitations, meaning, and we keep, we've
been seeing this all year, meaning thatinstead of just giving a response, gives a
response and gives a link to the website.
I don't know if I have it inslides, but we get like a lot.
Yeah, I do.
It's coming.
You're gonna have to.
You have to hold, hold, hold thatthought for a couple minutes.
Uh, by having our website crawl, we areactually getting like a thousand visitors
a month from Chad gt not even measuringAI overviews and everything else.
By having it not crawl, do you lose that?
But if you're like a, I don't know.
I'm thinking particularly book
authors.
Book authors is tricky.
There's, you have to, I, I, Iwould follow the litigation stuff.
It seems like, uh, perplexityis licensing it now.
And I think others will follow.
So I, I think for those, it would notbe, I think book book publishers in
general, I, it's almost like a unionkind of, they, they have the collective
bargaining power that I think it'll belicensed if you're like, I don't know.
Uh, try and become a nuclearphysicist and publishing
personal articles on that matter.
Uh, maybe you wouldn't want it, butI think for book book publishers, I
would, I would, that would be like aconsult, the publishing company, or if
you are the publishing company, then,um, those are people that consult me.
But, but I think they will, Ithink it'll be a licensing deal.
Thank you.
I think that that'll be, uh,very, very soon, very soon.
Um, where we leave offreviews, uh, link signal.
So link signals is backlink.
Backlinking backlink building was,was always a thing for a while, right?
Uh, as many years asI've heard SEO is dead.
I hear link building is dead.
I it is not, I don't have theslide here 'cause it's a condensed
presentation, but if you want theslides from yesterday for those that.
Didn't attend.
I have historical ranking signalsfor the last 10 years, so it's
becoming a little bit lessimportant, but still very important.
Uh, behavioral signals arehow people use your website.
Citations are the Yelpsof the world, right?
They become less and less important,but they're still up there.
Personalization is is the smallest one.
That's if, uh, if someone's, uh, Spanishspeaking and they have a Spanish,
uh, computer and their website's inSpanish, you're more likely to come up.
Um.
I'm gonna speed up so we cover everything,uh, the right side, same ranking signal,
so I won't spend as much time on it,but, uh, I'll go through it really quick.
So, on page again is your con, yourtechnical SEO, and then the quantity
and quality of your content content's.
What gives you the opportunityto come up and search results?
Uh, so if you are, I always use cardealership examples, but, uh, if you're
a car dealership, uh, if you made apage on your website comparing the
Honda Accord to Toyota Camry, someonesearches Honda Accord versus Toyota
Camry, that page has an opportunityto come up in search results.
If you did not create thatpage, nothing will ever rank.
Your homepage.
Won't rank for that.
honda.com won't rank for that.
Each page gives you an opportunityto come up in search results, uh, the
technical SEO and the link buildingis what helps you come up higher.
That's as, as simple as I can explain it.
Both of those things you wantto keep doing on an ongoing
basis for both SEO and GU.
Um.
What's my pacing?
I hear, I hear a plot over there.
I still have time.
They, they just ended early.
Um, the other signals we, we wentthrough, uh, these are a couple extra
things that you wanna do for GEOthat's a little bit different from
SEO, but again, super, super similar.
Uh, you want to write withprompt probability in mind.
So what does that mean?
A lot of people searchin informational style.
They search questions.
So you want to create almostFAQ schema as a thing.
You could create schema on your page.
That's literally FAQ based.
You're heading will have literally thequestion someone's asking under it.
You're gonna have a couple bulletpoints answering the question.
They'll bit further go into more detail.
Alright?
You write it in a way that increases thechances of generative AI picking it up.
You want to prioritize entity clarity.
AI is very big on, uh.
Authenticity.
Um, it, it's very clear on who'sproviding this content because
it doesn't want bias content.
So for, for us as a SEO agency,if I made a blog post that.
We're the number one SEOagency and everyone else sucks.
AI is not gonna pick that upbecause it bias information.
So AI is very big into prioritizingclarity and who wrote this content
and why it's authoritative.
And you wanna build topicalauthority that's very big for ai.
AI likes to quote things thatare topical authority sources.
Uh, for a while Reddit wasit for everything, right?
Uh, but now I think more so goingforward, it's gonna, it's gonna focus on
actual topical, topical authority pages.
This is how it works as a result.
This is, we do SEO for our own brand.
This is for smart sites.
Uh, this has studies, you couldget the link in the bottom from two
months ago from search engine land.
Um, they did a study of 8,000 citationsto determine what helps you rank.
So the SEO we've been doing forourselves helped us rank here ahead of
tons of other Fortune 500 companies.
Very hard to see on the slide.
We're, we're ahead of Four SeasonsSubaru and a lot of household names
in terms of how often AI sites us.
And it's all from the SEOstuff that we just looked at.
This is how the results look.
This is straight from GA four,so we're actually getting over a
thousand visitors a month right nowfrom Chad, GPT and perplexity, right?
We're getting a ton more from AIoverviews, which is not trackable
yet, which Google promises will betrackable, uh, early next year, uh,
which is I'm sure a ton more, but it'sactual visitors and not only visitors.
We had this question yesterday.
We get conversions.
So key events here actually form submits.
So we're getting leads from ChadGPT, recommending our business.
Any questions after this?
We're gonna talk about paid ads reallyquick, and then we're gonna do some q
and a and hopefully still be on time.
Questions?
Yes.
Question in back
it says
I would.
So I don't, like in general, I don'tlike blogs as a way to organize content.
Blogs is like very old school,like, uh, like you don't, you don't
go to like your dentist's websiteand check as his blog anymore.
That's kind of like, that was thething, but you guys laugh, but I'm sure
15 years ago, as soon as you heard,your dentist has a, has a website.
You went on his blog and saw whatroot canals he was blogging about.
Um, I don't like blogs toorganize content, so I would.
I, I, I think it should be categorypages, and I should, I think that
the informational one should be FAQschema, and I think they should be
categorized by what they're answering.
Like you shouldn't just have one pagethat has a thousand of them, especially.
And please don't have AI write 10,000pages and stick it on one page.
Uh, we're gonna talk about paid adsreally quick, and then we'll have
a couple minutes for questions.
So, paid ads.
This moves so quickly that, uh, I probablyshouldn't even be making slides anymore.
Um, this is, so yesterday for thosethat were here yesterday, yesterday,
since it was not recorded by theconference, I was saying a lot of things.
That's probably gonnaget me in trouble here.
I'm trying to do a little less.
Uh, this slide is still, I think, uh.
As it says at the top, proprietary andconfidential, um, ads in ai, results
are coming, not, no, this shouldnot be news to anyone in this room.
Um, Google and all of thesecompanies are not gonna be able
to do this for free forever.
Um, so we're already piloting, Ithink this says Q4, but we've been
piloting it for a couple months,uh, ads and AI overviews, which is
a little creepy because you ask, uh.
You ask Google for whatis the best mattress?
And Google says, these are the bestmattresses and one of those ads are paid.
And right now they're testinga lot of different ways to
indicate or not indicate that.
Um, so without getting myself intofurther trouble, there's some ads
you might be seeing from AI overviewsthat are paid placements that you
probably don't know r uh, but thisis coming, this is gonna be huge.
Um, chat, GPT just recentlyintegrated with, uh, Etsy and.
Shopify.
Yeah, it was Etsy and Shopify.
They're on final negotiationsof integrating with Walmart,
which means two things.
Number one, Chad GPT will beable to make purchases for you
from the integrated stores.
Uh, number two, those integrated storeswill pay to help placements of the
chat GPT and pay to have Chad, GPT.
Purchase from them.
Very, a lot to digest there.
But this is all that's coming and this isgonna, this is not gonna be big this year.
I think it's gonna be big next year.
There's a lot of testing that'shappening now with the Q4 season coming.
Q4 is the e-commerce.
Crazy shopping, right?
We have Black Friday, cyber Mondayfor, I don't know if those are big
in Canada, but big, big, uh, shoppingholidays coming in the us So there's
a lot of testing that's happening.
I, I think a lot of this stuff'sbeing pushed off a little bit.
Public releases.
Like this says Q4, but I don't thinkit's gonna be a public release in Q4.
But a lot of this, um, a lot of this iscoming and you want to be cognizant of it.
Separate from SEO.
Uh, for those that do paid advertising,I think this is gonna be a huge deal.
Um, and there's already ways to haveyour ads if you're doing shopping.
There's already ad ways to have yourads and Google ads appear in AI results.
Um, there's, it, it's a littletricky to do it now, and
it's, uh, in, and it gets, um.
Uh, that was a five minutewarning in the back, but I'm good.
I'm good.
I have a, I good at, good at pacing.
Um, there's ways to do it.
So if you are doing Google Ads andwanna learn about it, shoot me an email.
I could send you the, the deck thatI hopefully doesn't say proprietary
and confidential like this one does.
Uh, but there's ways youcould be doing it already.
It's not, it's the all experimental, butthis is coming, this is gonna be huge.
I think the next step in advertisingis gonna be, uh, advertising and ai.
Closing thoughts.
Same as yesterday.
I had AI write this for me'cause it was an AI presentation.
Why not put the deck into ai?
Had it give me a summary.
I actually didn't even read this yet,so We'll, as I read it, as I read it,
we'll see, we'll see if it messed up.
Uh, and you, you could always tellit's AI puts the, did the icons for me.
I didn't even imagine.
Like I would have to pick out my ownicons, like an I icon of like a rocket.
Uh, number one, be prepared forthe rise of LLMs while still
focusing on traditional search.
Focus on the important, uh, Google AIranking signals that we covered before.
Uh, again, I have it in my bookfor those that didn't get it yet.
My next slide will have my emailaddress, so you could email me.
I'll send you the slides.
I'll send you the book.
Um, like yesterday, I feel likeevery time I say that, I feel like
I'm like OOOO, Oprah, uh, Oprah'sshow that, uh, I forget her show.
But when she gets stuff out, likeyou get a book, you get a book,
you guys don't have it underyour seats, but I will, I will.
Uh, please email me.
I'll, I'll send you the book.
Uh, this is my only sales pitchpartner with agencies to understand ai.
I think I told.
I told Chad GPT to put in a sales pitch.
Uh, build your brand, brand for successwith SCO and AI results and early movers
and tech and tactics always win big.
So you always wanna be on thecutting edge with this stuff.
Um, like any new platform forthose that did any advertising on
Snapchat or TikTok when he came out?
Uh, huge ROIs in the beginning.
People, the first movers always,always, uh, do very, very well.
Uh, that's all I have for you guys.
I think I have like threeminutes for q and a.
Uh, you could connect slash followme on LinkedIn, my email address
on the left side, and I'll openit for three minutes of questions.
I just have a quick one.
You're mentioning the relationship.
Google business profile.
Yes.
What is that relationship?
What would be the differences?
Yeah.
So good, good question.
If you have a Google business profilewithout a website, you are less likely
to come up in, uh, in, uh, in rankings.
So the, it's not a huge ranking signal,but having the website gives Google
another data point of your authority soit knows you're more authoritative in
the space and it knows the content ofyour website to match it up to queries.
So it gives Google another datapoint of the relevancy of your
business to a search query.
Good question though.
Yes.
Any of the, uh, current SEO tools thatyou'd recommended you could handle on ai?
Uh, they're all very quickly moving.
Um, they're all adding AI capabilitiesat extremely expensive costs.
I think, um, I think this year, maybeslightly starting last year was the year.
All the SEO tools, the SaaS tool, likeSaaS, like, uh, software as a service.
The platforms you pay monthly for feeswent up like 10 x and I think they know
for AI tools, they could even charge more.
But yeah, nothing I could recommend offthe bat because it's so quickly moving
that by the time you get home after thisconference already be something else.
Uh, AFS have been doinga good job with it.
SCM Rush have been doinga good job with it.
Uh, but it's all very, very expensive.
Uh, it's all very quickly moving.
Um, I think there's gonna be anopportunity for a lot of new tools
because I think for a while it'sbeen, if you go back 15 years, there's
like a million different platformsand tools and kind of consolidated.
The last, uh, five to10 years been the same.
I think now is an opportunityfor people to develop new tools.
Good question though.
Yes.
And the
podcast, digital accessibility meettranscripts, use something like
script to do the transcript andthen throw it up on the website.
Good help.
Mark help?
Good question.
No, uh, transcript.
I would do transcripts, I'll tell you.
So anytime, anytime I do a podcast.
Um, they posted.
I don't, like, I go on others.
I don't, I I don't, I can't do my own.
Uh, it is very easy.
I get invited to a lot.
Same as speaking.
I get invite a lot, so I, I couldjust choose which ones I wanna do and
I wanna do, and, and then I do them.
So they posted themselveson YouTube, whatever.
I have my own site, alex mellon.com,that once in, I try to keep up to date.
So I post literally a link to the video,to a YouTube video and I asked them
for a transcripts and I posted with it.
And those pages have actuallyranked because of those transcripts.
So it's a lot of content, like it'sabove probably what best practices, but
it's, I don't think it would hurt you.
Yeah.
Yes.
Uh, is the block cluster, uh, contentstructure is important for geo, like,
structure is a lot more importantfor geo than a co Correct.
Uh, Google has found ways to indexeverything regardless of your structure.
Uh, the structure just helps.
A little bit to prioritize the crawlbudget on the SEO side for geo.
It's super, super important.
Yes.
Perfect.
Big hand for Alex.
Perfect.
Thank you guys.
Thank you.