Aaron Shishilla (00:19)
Hello and welcome back to Marketing Alpha. Today we have a really solid podcast that I've actually been putting off for probably like a month, maybe like three weeks or so. And the reason being is because there's been a lot of research going on, a lot of changes going on, and I've been doing a lot of traveling lately. But regardless, today we're talking about what you as a small business owner can do in the world of SEO with all the changes coming to AI.

Now you might have heard a lot of the changes, especially people talking about, it's no longer SEO, it's called AIEO or AI Engine Optimization or just AEO. A lot of people are talking about that SEO is dead, which is constantly talked about every single month, it seems. But I wanted to open up with some data to talk about some of the changes that are going on presently in the realm of SEO, in the realm of

AI and just showing up naturally online. And then we'll get into the meat and topics of what you can do as a small business owner in order to optimize your business. So let's start with Google runs about 14 billion searches every day. And I know I've talked about chat GBT previously, especially on my social media, how it's gaining momentum. But chat GBT in comparison, just has 37 million searches every day.

So that's 14 billion to 37 million. That's a huge difference. So despite the AI hype, Google still is 373 times bigger. But here's the twist. When Google shows an AI overview, which is the AI responses or AI paragraph when you do a lot of times an informative search or you're searching for information, it shows that paragraph. And those actually don't result in clicks at all. So it is changing search quite a bit because

you're not getting any more clicks. And I've talked about statistics in terms of how much clicks are dropping off. I want to say when AI overviews are saying, like, I don't remember the exact, might have it later on in this podcast, but I want to say it's like a two thirds drop in the amount of clicks that you're getting. So something to be mindful about. But ultimately, what I'm going to talk about here is SEO isn't dead, but the rules have changed. Practices have kind of adjusted or changed.

Wolfpack has evolved our playbook as well when it comes to SEO and we've added some AEO guidelines or AI Engine Optimization Guidelines for our team that we're talking about this week. In fact, they've done a lot of research on their own, but there's some specific things that I want to talk about with them on things that I've done my own research on and we've learned about. So anyway, I'm going to be sharing basically Wolfpack's playbook here on how we're running our SEO efforts now that AI has changed quite a bit.

Anyway, let's get started with it.

All right, so the hype is that AI will kill Google and nobody's getting clicks to their website anymore. And while kind of it's true in some ways that people aren't getting clicks to their website anymore. The reality is Google's search volume still grew over 20 percent in twenty twenty four. So they still grew tremendously large in sixty five percent of searches, which this is the statistic I was going back earlier. Sixty five percent of their searches are not resulting in clicks anymore.

So search volume is definitely increasing 20 % in 2024 by that latest data. But a lot of the searches in fact are actually resulting in less clicks. So what does that mean? Well, it's ultimately because of the AI overview section, which is that small paragraph section that I talked about earlier. And it's showing up in about 20 % of queries right now on Google. And it's cutting the just the click through rates of people because now they can just see the answers that they need directly on Google rather than clicking into something.

So we've seen a significant drop in the amount of people clicking on Google search results because they could just get the answer right there. So what does that mean for your business? How is this changing? And we'll get into that. But the key takeaway here is search is still alive. It's still growing. But now our visibility and how we're showing up is changing as well as how your business gets ranked or shown in ARV.

Overviews is changing as well. So what's actually changing? Well now no longer are you just you know optimizing for Google search engine and showing up in ten queries now It's about like just visibility being found and being referenced in these AI overviews and Google AI overview or Google AI mode It's kind of like the same as if you were to think like chachip t or grok or Claude or any of these other AI chatbots So I want you to kind of think of it similarly the way that they've kind of

shown and query data is a little bit different too. So previously everything was like keyword based. So you would think like, hey, let's add this keyword a hundred times on this webpage in order to rank or let's like white out the text. So imagine the background color and just put a bunch of like key cities at the bottom of the page or in the footer or whatever it else. Well, now things are slightly different. I don't want to go into the technicals a little bit because I took a class on the technical changes.

But you can think of it as, hey, now they're actually taking instead of keyword matching and lexical models, they're doing semantic models or chunking. So we're taking the meaning of something and putting it on a vector or a graph and coupling everything together. And we're kind of chunking pieces in different ways. The reason why we're doing this or the reason why AI is doing this is it's a little bit more accurate. It's how humans read, actually. And when you think about a particular passage as well,

you can think of the passage or the essay in chunks. So we don't want to take keywords or the main keyword around something. We want to pull the chunk or specific relevance that we want out of that particular passage. So again, a little bit technical there, but it's kind of changing on how data is being pulled and queried into AI overviews and chatbots as well. Now, there's also some user behavior shift.

77 % of chatgbt users say they're treating it like a search engine now so they're no longer using like a traditional doc doc go or Google or Bing and 24 % of Americans 28 % of Gen Z go to chatgbt first so a lot of them are actually like a quarter of them quarter percent of them are going to chatgbt first over Google I'll say for myself there's sometimes queries that I go to directly to Google for sometimes I go to Google Gemini but I'm a

a big user and proponent of all the different systems to kind of test them out and see how ones are performing because they they excel in different areas. And what's another interesting statistic here is 30 % of Americans trust chat to be answers more than Google, surprisingly. But on the flip side of that 70 % of Americans trust Google more than chat to be if you were to think about it that way. So the bottom line, though, in how people or how things are actually changing is AI is changing how users consume answers.

They still come for the actual content and read the actual content, but it's just changing how they understand and perceive the answers. No longer do you have to scroll on a bunch of websites in order to find exactly what you need. That's just populating right there and referencing your content. So why does SEO still matter here? Well, the thing is that Google's AI overviews are still referencing websites. And actually, of the sites that are referenced within that, 50 % of them, roughly,

are in the top 10 results. So you still need to rank highly in order to be referenced and you still need to have really good content in order to be referenced in the AI overviews. The thing about like local SEO as well, like people looking for transactional stuff, that stuff is not based on the research. People are still going to Google for that. People are still going to like Google Maps and reviews and everything else. The AI overviews and chat bots, a lot of people are using it for a top of funnel search, meaning that they're

More like broad awareness stuff and they're kind of like querying about the general information before they're ready to actually make a purchase. Again, that's just what the statistics and metrics and information is and the data is telling us right now. So SEO still matters because for the bottom of the funnel or people that are ready to convert, you still have to rank highly. You still have to have good reviews. You still have to do all the local SEO stuff and rank for your particular cities. All that stuff still matters because

the user behavior and how people are using it. still going to like the Google Maps stuff. They're still going to Google. They're still clicking on the regular items. It's just how the information of the or the top of funnel items have changed. The other thing is like the technical stuff. All that stuff is the same. It's all prerequisites to how you optimize for AI chat bots. So AI chat bots, as I mentioned, a lot of people are going to those for the top of funnel or broad awareness stuff.

AI optimization isn't about changing everything that we had done. It's about kind of like changing to the user behavior. So ultimately, everything's still the same. You're still writing for humans. There's a couple of things that we are adjusting within our internal processes and our checklist to make sure we're hitting everything. But you're still optimizing for human behavior and human human readability. But I'll talk about how we're actually adapting here in the next section. So it's just about restructuring.

your SEO strategies to start actually feeding AI engines on top of what you've worked before. So here's how Wolfpack is adapting. Number one, first and foremost is we have a full article on just AEO or AI engine optimization and the best practices, guidelines and checklists around that. We now build blogs with what we call query fan outs. So it's kind of similar to what we did with SEO, but

It's essentially if we're covering a particular topic, within that topic, we have a bunch of different subheadings with a lot of other queries included. And I'll go into an example of that here in a second. So like if you are a roofing company, you might have a blog post about like the cost of roofs, all right? But then you might have a bunch of different query fan outs based on like related items. So roof replacement costs by material.

or affordable roof replacement near me, for example, you might have a section on that. You might have comparative sections. So you might have a section within that where it's comparing metal versus asphalt roofing costs. And you might be more personalized in a section as well. So roof replacement costs for a specific type of home in whatever city. So again, the blogs and how we're structuring them is ultimately the same. think now in terms of our strategy, we're being a lot more in

intentional about how we're layering the different packages or the passages within a blog post. We're being a lot more personalized and covering a much bigger base than we were before. The other thing too is with brand mentions and narrative control before when you wrote content on a blog, you were writing it for assuming they were going to read the blog post, which people should still be reading blog posts.

But within that, in order to gain the trust before, like in 2005, 2010, even 2015, when you wrote a blog post, you didn't want to really highlight your brand and sell your brand too much. The purpose was people reading the blog post and they didn't want to be sold to. Well, the thing is now, AI is reading it. And you kind of need to sell yourself to AI. So instead, we're adopting a strategy to where we're doing a lot more brand mentions within the article itself.

So instead of just holding out until the end and then, you know, having a call to action or just leaving it to the call to action button in the top right in the header navigation or whatever it is, we're including a lot more brand mentions within it. So that way AI reads the blog post and also understands, hey, we're a roofing company in Tampa. We can help roof replacement cost by material. We're affordable. Here's the cost for metal versus asphalt and the like

an estimated roof replacement cost for a 2,000 square foot home in Tampa as an example. So the strategy again before when you're thinking about top of funnel is like you didn't want to mention your brands. But now when you're being mentioned into AI, AI is reading it and it can mention it later within the blog post or within the chat. So if somebody is asking like, hey, what is the cost to replace roofs in Tampa near me? Okay, what are some roofers near me? Now AI knows like, hey, this was this blog post that was referenced in this particular roofing company in Tampa can actually

do that roof replacement. So that's another thing that we're adapting to is the query fan outs, but also the brand mentions. The next thing that we're optimizing for and changing within our strategy is original and hyper local research. So this was important before, but now it's becoming increasingly more important. And that's proprietary data. Proprietary data basically can be referenced a lot more in AI search results.

⁓ or in AI chatbots. It's very trustworthy and there's a lot of data out there that's just recycled. Nobody's pushing a lot of proprietary data anymore. So the fact that we are changing our blog post to include a lot more proprietary data, that can be then referenced within AI chatbots. So what I'm talking about here is like we might reach out to a client that says, hey, we need some hyper local insights about roofs in Tampa. Again, going back to that example of your roofing company based in Tampa.

So an example could be our records indicate that three tab shingle roofs last 12 to 15 years in Tampa Bay region due to humidity and storm exposure. Here's some data or insights and relevance to that. And the reason being, again, is we are offering proprietary data, its original content that talks about hyperlocal in Tampa Bay, what the actual results are from a professional roofing company. So if you were to relate this back to your company in whatever region, whatever city, if you're HVAC, if you're home inspector pest control, whatever else,

This hyperlocal original proprietary data content, everything is just a gold mine because now you're going to be a lot more trustworthy and it can reference that data when people are asking information on that. The last thing is technical accessibility. Again, it's all the same that we've done before, but we're just again honing in that it's still important. So schema markup is still important, logical site maps. If you're not familiar, I've mentioned it on my socials as well.

⁓ And done other podcasts and videos on it, but Yoast has a new site map just basically for AI chat bots that you can enable definitely recommend setting that up Answer first phrasing. So basically it's rain The question rather than doing a long spiel or sentence. It's just a super short sense that just answer first within it and Then we're optimizing for passages not just pages. So we're not putting pages with all these different keywords

We're really chunking everything into different passages. So that is kind of like the changes in everything that we're doing with our own content for AEO and adjusting our SEO strategy. Now here I want to wrap up with some things that you should do, things that you should check with your agency on if you're working with an agency and just how to relate this back to your business and then we'll do a wrap up. So number one is what you should do is create authoritative content with

query fan outs. When you're writing these blog posts, don't regurgitate information, make sure it's very authoritative and you're really querying out or fanning out the passage itself to cover a lot of different topics and make it super hyper local. That's very, very important. Highlight your own brand. Don't be afraid to do that. So number two, highlight your own brand throughout the article itself. Don't just do it once. Don't expect like, hey, somebody is going to read this and they'll see my call to action.

Now it's being referenced. The top of funnel content is being referenced in AI search engines. You got to tell AI search engines that, you can do this. OK, so highlight your own brand within it. Publish unique research or proprietary data your competitors don't have. So number three is just, again, going back to that original proprietary data that's very, very important. Publish hyper local content about what you're actively seeing within the field or within your company. And that can be used and trusted by AI search results as well.

Another thing that we really, like is when you're writing a particular blog post, we don't like to write just a bunch of words. We like to create a bunch of different graphics as well as different formatting that AIs can read. YouTube videos or videos in general, that's a gold mine. Table of contents, very important to include at the beginning of your blog posts, as well as tables. Tables are wonderful and also can be read by AI chatbots. So if you have a bunch of data,

You can put it in a table and format it in that way and publish that on your blog post. So think about the different visuals you can add besides just like a stock image. How can you add tables? How can you add a table of contents? How can you add videos as well to share or give another way to express the information rather than just long words? And then finally, it's just tracking. How do you track this? Well, there's a couple new KPIs you should look for.

So with some of our SEO tools that we're using, there's a bunch of different ones out there that you could check out. big fan of like SEMrush or like the big ones, Ahrefs. I don't know what kind of tools Ahrefs has lately, but you should be tracking new KPI such as your mentions on Google AI overviews as well as chat GPT and other AI models. That's important. And you should also check your technical readability. So

basically making sure all those technical things you should be doing for SEO that you are actually still doing and your website can be crawled by AI search engines. Sometimes there's these funky things with different data points on your website that can actually block certain AI chatbots and everything. So it's pretty rare, but just make sure you don't have that because sometimes you might have that enabled and you might not actually be able to be shown up on AI chatbots.

So that's what you can do. Now let's get into this last section, which is how agencies should be helping businesses such as yours. So number one is that we're talking about is educating and calming fears. A lot of people are concerned. So the big thing that your agency should be doing is education and talking about what's going on and sharing their latest information, how they're adjusting their strategy. So if they're not doing that, get with them, figure out what they're doing. They should be able to educate you.

and be keeping up with the information that's super, super important with any digital marketing agency because it changes so much. The next thing is strategic content creation. So making sure that within the content itself, please, please do not make it's really crappy content. I still still see content that is just regurgitated, not good, not original, not proprietary data, not good information, not hyper local. It's just generic. It's shared multiple times. I've seen stuff that it's like

the same blog post that's on 20 other clients of theirs. So please make sure that you're checking that as well and that it's good, good content that matters. I'd rather have, you know, one quality post a month than five to 20 short little articles that aren't going to do anything for you. Next is make sure they're shifting some of their analytics and reporting. So they're starting to talk about these things. A lot of the softwares are still trying to catch up. So keep that in mind.

Like even SEMrush, a lot of their stuff is in beta. They're charging extra for it. It's not completely accurate. It's not great. But they should be talking about it. And you should be able to be able to ask them questions about, you know, how am I ranking in these particular, you know, AI overviews at a minimum. And they should be able to talk about that. And then a multi-platform strategy, you know, beyond Google, should focusing again on ChatGBT, focusing again on like Grok or Claude and

all these other platforms as well, not just Google anymore. The final thing that you should just ask them about is consider like, short term, maybe you want to couple in some advertising. One little cool news thing that I wanted to share is actually chat.gbt posted a job posting for someone to develop ad campaigns or ad campaign management tools specifically. So think like Meta business suites or like a Google ad platform within chat.gbt.

So it's kind of interesting because they haven't talked about running ads within ChaiJBT itself yet. They haven't announced anything, but they posted a job listing of someone that they're looking to develop that particular tool within ChaiJBT. So that's something to be on the horizon or be on the lookout for. But again, going back to this, I would again go to your agency or marketing person or whoever and just like, hey, should we kind of look at a balanced approach here and not just focus on SEO?

There's a lot of small businesses out there that like just go all into SEO, which is fine. But I really like having a balanced approach. I don't like going all in with SEO because people could be disappointed after three or six months and not see the progress that they needed. So I always like to push into advertising to get some short term goals done and couple that with some SEO strategies as well. All right. So to kind of give you an overview of everything that we talked about.

Ultimately, again, I've regurgitated this so many times. SEO isn't dead. It's still the same. What's dead is the idea that ranking equals traffic, ultimately, and how people are interacting with the content. So think now, top of funnel, informative searches are all going to AI chatbots or Google AI overviews. It's lessening the amount of clicks that you're getting and the amount of traffic that you're getting. So expect less traffic. But we should now be tracking how many times were you mentioned in these because that's still important.

We should be adjusting our strategy when we're talking about our content or our pages and everything else. So that way it's optimized for AI. And if somebody asks AI, hey, who's the best roofer in Tampa, you get referenced. So follow all those rules that I talked about earlier when you're writing content or writing blogs. And ultimately, just make sure that you're working with any particular marketing person or agency or trusted agencies to stay on this forefront. Because the last thing that you want to do is you got just got caught up with all this SEO stuff. And now

The world's changing again and you have to flip your strategy again in five years because you're behind. So you should be jumping ahead and getting on board with some of these strategies and testing them out within your marketing budgets. Anyway, let me know if you have any questions on this. You can reply, send a message to this particular podcast. Give me a follow, give me a rating and let's link up on social. Until next time. See ya.