Transcription
SEO is about to change forever. And I know what you're thinking. Wait, hasn't it already been changing? And yes, but for small business owners and small agencies relying on organic traffic to getting leads or sales, we've entered a brand new era. And the good news is that there are smarter and faster ways to rank that didn't exist a couple of months ago. And I know this because I spend every single day on the AI search trenches, helping a community of over 500 small business and agency owners rank number one in the AI overviews. And we get to see what works and spot the patterns before it hits the mainstream media.
But there's a catch. The people who move early are the ones that the AI will learn from. And if you wait 6 months, it'll be your competitor getting cited, not you. So, in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the eight biggest shifts that we see in search and SEO. And I'm going to be telling you the exact strategies and tools that you need to be doing today to stay relevant, keep getting cited, and getting more organic leads and sales in this new era of AI search.
The first point is understanding that they're no longer search engines. They are answer engines, which we all know this and it's all well and good, but what does this actually mean? Well, GPT search, Google AR overviews, and Publexity will now give you the answer instead of the classic old blue link at the top. This means that there's a large paradigm shift that a lot of people haven't quite understood. You see, the old goal was being the destination, meaning that blue link that everybody wants. But the new goal is being the source, meaning you want to be cited by the AI. And this changes a lot of things like the data that we look at that is really important and even how we create our overall strategy.
When it comes to writing content, you need to write this content with the intent of being cited. Start with one or two sentence answers. Use bullet points, clear definitions, and kind of structure it like you would see it in the search engine results page. For example, here's what I recommend: do a search on GPT search perplexity or Google AI that your customers might do within your niche and have a look at how those answers are being structured. That structure is how you write your content from now on.
Number two, keywords are out and questions are in. Now, kind of don't get me wrong, keyword research is still quite useful every now and then. Don't chuck it out the window completely. But one of the most important things that we're seeing works all the time is question research. You want to understand and answer all the questions that your potential customers are asking about your niche. The idea is to turn you into the topical authority figure within the niche. And we do that by answering every question there is to know about your topic. Large language models care more about context, natural conversation instead of this classic keyword optimization. But finding all the frequently asked questions about your topic can be daunting and time consuming. There's a couple of ways that you can do this. You can go on sites like Reddit, go to the right subreddit and see what people are asking. Or you can use tools like answer Socrates. This tool is very easy to use. You put in the keyword, the location, hit search. It will give you hundreds and hundreds of questions about and loosely related about that topic. Your goal now and your homework is to grab one of these questions and answer it in detail in a blog post and repeat that for all of the questions that you found. And if there are 100 questions, yeah, that means writing 100 blog posts.
Number three is understanding the dual window opportunity. There are kind of two main ways that we can get our content used or cited by the AI and that's being part of its original training data set. And for most of us, that time has kind of passed for now. That would allow us to make sure the AI understands that when people mention marketing for example our name is mentioned everywhere or if you're a plumber in a certain location it's been trained with a data set that you are in fact a good plumber in that location but also there's the second way and that is the retrieval or the rag component retrieval augmented generation this is where the AI understands that it needs to do the search functionality for getting that relevant information that is where you need to optimize for that I'm going to tell you how do that in a second. But once we do that very really well, that new data set will be used for its training data set. So it creates this kind of positive feedback loop. But you need to put the effort in.
Now number four is understanding that you need to optimize for the AI, the AI autonomous agents, the reader, not just the algorithm. Large language models are now reading your website. So, you need to make it as easy as possible for that large language model to read what you have on your site. One of the best ways to do that, and we've found this and tested this, is by adding schema to your website. If you don't know what schema is, do a quick search. You'll know all about it. But you need to make sure that you have the correct and adequate schema that represents your on-site content on all of your important pages. Think your services or your product pages. You also need to make sure that your website is AI agent-friendly. For example, get an account with manis.im or genspark, even GPT operator, and ask that autonomous agent to do the task that you would want people to do on your website. For example, if you're a barber, get the AI agent to make an appointment under a certain name. If the agent can book the appointment, great, your website is AI agent-friendly. If it can't, then well, you got some fixing to do. And for final good measure, you also want to add an LLM text file to your website in the root directory. There's no actual proof at the moment that adding an LLM text file to your website will help you rank higher on the AI overviews, but it seems to be a growing trend. So, you want to make sure you do the due diligence and add that file anyway.
Number five, and one of the most important ones, is understanding that originality and depth trumps almost everything. You and I both know that AI tools can remix or regurgitate any type of content. But what it can't do is think of original thoughts and have that experience. At least not as of the time of this recording. Now, this isn't to say just be different and say the opposite to what everyone else is. If you are being different, provide a different angle that is helpful and most importantly backed by real data or experience. See, content that features new original ideas that are ideally backed by data is highly valued by large language models. And it tends to see significantly higher visibility on the AI overview. Sometimes from 30 to 40% more visible. So fantastic. How do we do that? Well, my personal strategy is that I keep a document with all the experiences, the wins from our community, and the things that I've learned throughout the years. You should do the same. Grab a Google doc, whatever you want, and every time something interesting that you think you want to add in this document, add it. The wins that you've added for your customers, the good experiences you've provided for them, something about the industry that you only know because of years of experience. Take some time away and put that document out there. What you want to do then is grab this document and place it into the AI model next time you are writing. Let's say I put it into GPT or Plexity. And when I'm writing the content, I want to instruct the model to say, "Hey, when we are writing this, think of the document that I've provided and insert my experiences or my knowledge wherever you think is appropriate to do." So, this will make your content so much better because it's something that the AI can't replicate your experience.
And number six is quoting one of the best to ever do it in marketing and SEO, Mr. Neil Patel and that is understanding that SEO is changing from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization. Meaning you need to be everywhere all at once. If you're relying on Google or one search engine to get all your traffic, you're leaving a lot of potential leads and money on the table. You need to increase that overall digital footprint by being on all the social media platforms. Think of your brand or even your personal brand as an entity; that entity needs to be on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and all the platforms that you think are relevant. That way, the AI can crawl all these all these different platforms and understand that you kind of being mentioned for the same things on all these platforms. It adds a lot of trust to your entity as well. Now, if you're a one-person team, this can get very overwhelming. How do you publish so much content for all the platforms? This is where we need to get smart, use AI and automations. We can use one single source of content, for example, the high-quality blog post that you can now write by integrating your experiences, the thing that we just spoke about, and we can run automations to grab that content when it's published, and repurpose it into a LinkedIn post, an Instagram post, or whatever other platform that you want to be in. Now, the key word here is repurpose, not copy and paste. You want to add the value that you had in the blog post to those posts in each one of the social media platforms appropriately. This is one of the strategies that we teach in our AI ranking community. If you're interested in this kind of thing, make sure you check us out. I'll leave a link below.
Number seven is understanding that new metrics matter. Your traffic, and I'm sure you've seen it across every industry, is decreasing. This isn't your fault. It's just the AI overviews because we're getting the answers that we want. But your conversions shouldn't decrease. You see, we're actually seeing this. We're actually seeing that the traffic that we do get from the AI overviews, whilst it's less, the intent is a lot greater. Meaning the conversion of that traffic is substantially higher. And it makes sense if you think about it. If I've gotten the answer from GPT search or perplexity, but I'm going to the source, I must really want what's on that website. So don't get all caught up about the decrease in traffic. The other KPIs or key performance index to look at are things like your search appearances and your brand mentions. These are really important metrics to look at now.
And number eight, the final one is do not ignore the fundamentals. You still need them to rank. What I mean here is that everybody's caught up by how do I do AI SEO or optimize for GEO? And that's all well and good, but without the fundamentals, you're not going to rank because you see all these AI search engines, they go shopping for their sources on the first page of the search engines. So, if you're on the second, third, or fourth page, you're not going to have any luck getting cited as a reference. So, you still need to do your fundamentals. You still need good on-site SEO. Your website needs to be loading quickly. You need to optimize for those questions or those keywords and a bunch of other things. Without those, you're not going to have any chances of ranking in the AI reviews, AI overviews. So, do the fundamentals. If you don't know how to do those fundamentals, well, you can check out our community where we teach you how to do that in a very easy to follow manner.
Now that you know the biggest shifts happening in SEO, you need to take action. One of the easiest ways you can take action today is by writing that high-valuable content with your experiences. Now, I've done a tutorial on how you can set up clawed projects into a perfect custom content copywriter that's going to write in your tone of voice, have your experience integrated into the content, understand your audience, and even do the correct backlinking to the appropriate sections of your website. You want to go watch that video and start writing high-valuable content that's going to bring you the right traffic.