Transcription
All right, so Google just launched AI mode, and it is absolutely going to affect your SEO if you're trying to get more traffic, leads, and customers from Google, uh, organically, specifically. So, let's dive right into it.
So, first of all, it's very simple. Google—this is they've been talking about this for a long time. It's been in the, uh, in beta, and they've been experimenting with it. Um, but now it's actually here. Okay? And so I predicted a while ago that this would be what search would eventually just become in Google. And honestly, like the old days are over. Okay, this is what we're going to see going forward.
And this, if you've been in SEO for a while, you probably experienced this in the local pack where the local pack used to have more than just three businesses showing, right? It used to be five, six; there were a lot showing. Then Google chopped it and only shows three now. Um, this is the same exact thing, right? They're doing the same thing here where it used to be, here's 10 blue links, here's 10 websites or pages that you can go and visit. Well, they're chopping that as well. So, you can see they're only showing three citations, three websites here. Now, they are prioritized pretty well, but the thing is, you know, they are also providing a lot of information here that may solve the, uh, the query for the particular searcher, right? So the risk here is that you could create content, and people just literally don't click on it and don't go to your website at all. Right? Because like these websites here, they're all listicical. So they're all talking about these specific products. So I want to show you what could happen. Even if you're here, you still may not get traffic. Okay?
Because what happens now is I search best running shoes. All right? I'm going to scroll down, and what I can do is I can actually search again. Okay? So I'm going to ask another question. So in this case, I just asked for a review. Okay, so a review of one of the ones that are in here. Okay, and you can see it gives me a review and then another, you know, three citations here. But I'm going to go even deeper. Let's go, let's add another query here. Best place to buy them. Okay, so now I'm finding out exactly where I can go and actually just buy these shoes. Once again, I don't have to click over here. Okay. So, you can just keep going and going on this till eventually you get to what you want, and more than likely you're going to end up at the actual business, and you're going to be purchasing directly through the business. You're not going to be going through some listical to eventually get to the business.
So the thing is, like if there's anything that's really dead, like, and I, you know, there's always a possibility that there's some outliers, and you know, it could still be done, but I'm telling you, if you're just going to go and create like an informational website, uh, that just creates content on your website in general, you're really going to struggle. Like I just don't see how it's possible that you're going to see growth going forward because the only entities that are going to benefit in this environment are actual businesses. You know, there's a time and place for mediabased websites, but the thing is Google is highly moving towards like a very closed system where they want to be the top of the funnel, possibly even the middle of the funnel, right? And of course, there's all kinds of other issues with this, like if people stop creating content, Google doesn't have anything to work with. But, you know, that I don't think they really care about that.
So, the point is is the goal, I believe, of Google, what they're trying to do is they're trying to keep searchers completely isolated in their platform. They don't even want searchers going to websites, right? They just want to solve your problems right here. I think the thing that will be helpful to kind of envision about what this is really go like what's really going on here: Google used to be a search engine. Okay, that's what it used to be. It used to somewhat treat publishers fairly, and they there was a relationship there. There is no relationship anymore. They don't want a relationship. So don't even hope that that's going to happen because what Google is doing here is they are now just basically a closed system like Chat GPT or DeepSeek or Grock, you name it. They are just they have basically just decided we're just going to be a glorified large language model like our competitors, and that's it, right? That's what they've decided to do. Um, and they have incredible amounts of data. They have incredible resources to be able to do this, and they probably will do a very good job as a large language model, but there's a lot of casualties that are going to come from this. Many, many casualties. Um, and I'm just saying, you know, if you're running an SEO agency, this is going to be extremely hard going forward to try to explain to your clients why they're not getting traffic anymore from Google. Okay? So, you have to start adapting and start changing what you do. I'll explain what you can do, but for now, let's just keep kind of keep digging this.
Uh, a local example here. I did furnace repair St. Louis. You can see most of these are pulled directly from the local pack basically. So, you know, local businesses I don't think will be affected very much by this. But if you're a, uh, a media publisher like HomeGuide, for example, that is creating listical content, you will suffer. You will suffer because the user is just not going to click through. Why would they? They've got all the stuff they need right here; they can immediately go, if I'm in St. Louis, I see all the, uh, all the businesses that offer furnace repair, I'm just going to go start doing my investigation there, and then I can follow up once again with another question. Who's the number one option? Boom. They tell me who it is. I go, I convert. Okay? I don't need to go to some listicle to go any further. Once again, closed system. Think of Google now as like Facebook who's trying to keep you on Facebook. That's what Google's gone full on on this. They're all in. Okay? So they don't want you to leave. That's their goal. They want to keep you trapped in the Google ecosystem. Okay.
Uh, and then another one here, St. Louis SEO consultant. This one's kind of fascinating because in the traditional, um, I have a, you know, a dedicated EMD here that ranks, but in the, uh, AI mode that website doesn't actually pop up. It only got SEO is the only one that pops up. And that's once again a listical. Here we are again. You know, does someone need to click through on my result? No. Right? They can just see right here. And funny enough, click on this. It is going to go to my local, uh, my Google business profile. Okay, my Google business profile right here. Boom. They could, you know, you know, convert right through this. Google is just become an answer engine. Okay, they are not trying to send traffic anymore. So, we have to be very, very deliberate about what we're going to do going forward. Um, and if you're just if your business is relying on pure organic traffic through Google directly to your website, you are playing a dangerous game. I'm just telling you that much. I've been doing SEO full-time since 2013. Full-time. I've gone through every single cycle. I've gone through every single algorithmic change. I've been through it all. I'm telling you. Um, and nothing is more devastating than what's going on right here for your traffic. Okay? Nothing.
So, the thing is we have to change what we actually care about as far as our KPIs. And you'll see tons of people talking about, oh, zero-click searches and all this stuff. Okay, that to me is irrelevant. All right. What we need to care more about is what are the things that businesses care about? So, if you're a business trying to grow your own business, you're trying to get more traffic, leads, and customers, or you're an agency trying to do it for a business, it all comes back to one core principle. Okay, what are we trying to do? Like at the end of the day, what are we trying to do with with digital marketing in general? Well, we're trying to get more customers and more revenue. Does it matter where it comes from? The truth is no. Okay, so I want to show you a couple examples of this. So, I talked about this actually, uh, 3 weeks ago at SEO spring training, and you know, some people got to see this, but I'll just show you an example like this is what I'm talking about here, which is this is the reality of Google and it's going to get worse with the AI mode. Okay, so all this stuff is now going to be embedded into, uh, into the AI mo AI mode, and Google has been completely transparent about this change. You can see it here. They've been making these changes year after year, slowly pushing websites out of the search search results, right? It just keeps happening over and over. And notice that like websites don't don't show up here really anymore. Okay? Like we have we have YouTube, we have Reddit, we have all these other platform AI overview, then we're going to have the AI mode. So like I said, closed system. All right? So, and the idea is we need to stop focusing on just our website. We need to think about first of all owning as much real estate on Google as possible. So that's it's not a bad idea because Google has still it's the dominant search player at this point. Will that change? We'll find out. But what I want to show you is this. This is what we should be thinking about. We should be thinking about don't just think about, okay, we're going to do an SEO campaign, and I'm going to rank my website. Okay, don't think like that anymore. Just think about, okay, I have a topic. I have a thing that, uh, I know if people are interested in this, they're very likely to buy my stuff. Okay, so an example here, uh, how to start an SEO business. Okay, this is a concept. This is a topic. Okay, I'm thinking about it as a topic. I'm not thinking about it as, oh, I'm going to go and rank on Google. So, I I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about, wait a second, this is a topic, and I know if I if I show up for this topic across multiple platforms, then I'm going to be able to drive sales specifically for my book or for my training program. Okay? So, what I'm thinking more about is how do I dominate this topic? So, think about topic domination. Don't think about ranking in Google. Okay? Now, ranking in Google is one piece of that. It's one part of the equation. But as you can see here, you know, we have an ad, we have our ranking in Google, we have Amazon, we have YouTube, we have LinkedIn, we actually show up in Google with the LinkedIn, and then we've got three YouTube videos. Okay, I can show you many examples of this this kind of SER domination in Google, but specifically, you want to rank everywhere. You want to be you want to build true topic authority and not in the context of just your website. You want to do it literally everywhere that you possibly can. Okay? Okay, so I just want to emphasize that this is how you survive. Okay, stop thinking about just doing SEO. Start thinking about how do we how do we generate customers, uh, through digital marketing? How do we be omnipresent around this topic? How do we get people to understand that we are the authority on starting an SEO business? How do I get people to understand that we are the authority on the best CMS for SEO? Right? Insert whatever you want. Like that should be your focus. Don't just think about we're going to publish a blog post every week about this. That's not the right idea. Okay? So, I want to show you like that's just one little small example. I'm sorry to rant on you about this, but it's just it's it's so silly at this point that we if you're just going to focus on your website, you you will not survive. I'm just telling you now, okay? And looking at this, this is kind of like the reality of what's going on. Don't don't look at this as scary. Look at this as opportunity. All of these platforms. We need to be thinking about how do we get visible on all these platforms if possible, right? And this is just scratching the surface. There's all kinds of other things, okay? But thinking about that, how do we build this omnipresent attack to build support around the core thing that we're selling?
Okay, so I'll give you some really quick example. This you I've on my channel many times I talked about the five stages of customer awareness. You can see this is the way you should do it. Focus on the bottom of the funnel and then slowly transition up. But I would be very very careful because this problem aware and unaware phase these like top-of-the-funnel stuff this is stuff that is just going to get buried in Google. Like you you're not going to get any traffic to this content in Google specifically. Now if you talk about these topics on other platforms there's a possibility you could build some real brand equity. You can build some, uh, brand awareness which then could drive branded searches back to Google. Okay. So that is a possibility. It could drive branded searches inside of Chat GPT and the other large language models. Okay, so Google now at this point, I used to call it a traditional search engine. It is not a traditional search engine anymore. In fact, I don't think traditional search engines are even a thing anymore. I just think everything is going to become a large language model. Like they're all large language models now at this point. So everything is just a Chat GPT. Okay, so they're all competing for the same thing now at this point. So essentially most of our work should be thinking about how do we get visible in AI search. Okay. And that's most of my content going forward. It's going to be highly focused, just so you're aware, on real digital marketing to get customers. The thing that we really care about, it's yes, a little bit of Google, but also AI search, also social media, also email. There's so many things that we can do to get customers. So, even if you're an agency, don't just sell SEO. That's a big mistake. I'm going to start talking about how to actually package this here very soon, but think more like an investor. Okay? If you're an investor, uh, sorry, an investment, uh, investment company, um, what they do or an investment firm, they don't sell like we're just going to buy you S&P 500. That's not what they sell. What they sell you is an investment strategy. Okay? They sell you an investment strategy, and you pay them. They execute that strategy. And the idea is you get a return that's better than the S&P 500. Okay? That's the idea. So, think about your agency that way too. Don't just sell services one off or a service here, a service there. Think about what's a strategy that we can sell to a particular ideal client profile or vertical, um, that is going to help them get more leads and get more customers, get the get the KPI that they care about. Okay? And then actually measure that KPI. And of course, you're going to execute on that strategy. You're creating the strategy, you're selling the strategy, and then you're executing on strategy. I think that's going forward going to be the best strategy. You know, no pun intended here, but that is going to be the best strategy going forward.
All right. So, going back to this, um, couple key things here. So, what I'm going to show you is just some general concepts I think will be very helpful for you going forward. Okay. So, let's just jump into these real quickly. So, first things first, uh, let's actually go, we're going to go back here. Okay. Okay, so number one, uh, don't try to scale your content. All right, so the what's funny is this has become like a really interesting situation where there's so much capability from the AI to do things very fast, uh, very automated and at scale. Okay, but to go going forward, like that's not the content that's going to win. Like if you're going to say, I'm just going to do, uh, you know, automate a bunch of SEO content on my website. I'm not going to touch it. Um, well, you're just wasting your time because that stuff's not even going to rank. And number two, uh, Google's gonna suppress it anyway with what it's doing. So, it's just not there's no point of doing it. The only way you're going to stand out is to think about how do I create stuff that's different and better than what's already out there. Okay? So, you can't do that by thinking about scale. You have to think about quality over quantity. I know it's like a broken record hearing that all the time, but it nothing has changed as far as the principles. The principles stay the same. Quality over quantity is what wins long term. The reason why I have a picture of Heath Ledger here from the, you know, from the Dark Knight, is because Christopher Nolan, the director, he, if you look at his, uh, his movies, he's he's put out a movie basically every two to three years. So, he's a perfect definition of quality over quantity. And look at the results that he's gotten from that. Okay, you see he's created some of the most memorable movies of all time. I really love his movies, so maybe I'm super biased, but the point is quality over quantity. Okay, it does work, but the problem is it's really hard, and people don't want to do it because it requires you to do something that no one else has done. And if you think about the large language models, they do not create anything unique. All they do is steal what already exists and regurgitate it back to you. It is all from existing training data. They do not invent anything. They do not create anything. They do not experience anything. So the advantage that you have is on that front. Which brings me to the next point. Don't publish just to publish. Don't say, uh, to your team, okay guys, we're going to publish, you know, three pieces of SEO content every week. Okay? Well, why would you do that? Because you don't even know if that's going to work. So, you'd be much better thinking about what can we create that's going to help us either a get more customers, b get us leads, uh, c maybe get us some marketing qualified leads via email, uh, help us get more shares on social media, or help us get more backlinks to our website and content. So, there has to be some sort of core objective as to why you're doing it. And if you can't really figure out what it's going to be, if it's like we're doing this to create brand awareness or you know organic traffic, like yeah, that might work, um, possibly, but you need to really tie a really key KPI to it because otherwise you're just going to be wasting your time. So don't just publish to publish. Publish with an objective in mind, okay? That's really what matters. And there is no advantage to just publishing all the time. There really isn't. Like even you'll even notice some people that are like diehard like quantity-based publishers, notice how much they've dialed it down. There's a reason for that because it doesn't work as well anymore. Okay?
Uh, and then most importantly, don't create generic informational content. I think I've kind of nailed this quite a bit, but like you are wasting your time. And the reason is for this. Can AI generate this exact thing in 10 seconds? So at this point, we can create copy in 10 seconds. We can create literally landing pages in 10 seconds at this point. We can create images in 10 seconds. We can create videos in 10 seconds. The anything that can be created basically at this point can be created by AI. Okay. But once again, this is the question you should be asking when you're creating your content. So you pick a topic and you run it through this filter and say, can AI generate this exact thing in 10 seconds? And if the answer is yes, don't do it. What it means is if the answer is yes, think about a way that you can attack that topic, that idea in a way that no one else could do, right? And there's many ways to do that. I won't get into it here, but just pulling from like using your experience is one way. Okay? Uh, doing things that no one else is willing to do is another way. All right? And like I said here, do what do what AI can't. Okay? And that's like these two simple principles. This will make your content better. I guarantee that if you just think about these two things before you approach any content, can AI generate this exact thing in 10 seconds and do what AI can't. Okay, those two things, you're immediately going to do better because you're going to think more about more deliberately about what you're doing with your content. Your content needs a purpose. Now, it needs to not be just a little, you know, point a checkpoint that you have every week. It needs to be something that has you're doing it for clear impact in the business and things that have big impact. Uh, not, you know, I like to think of it as like throwing a pebble into the ocean or dropping a nuke into the ocean. What's going to have a bigger impact? Right? So, a lot of people just throw pebbles into the ocean with their content. Little tiny pebbles, and it does absolutely nothing, and they just keep wasting their time. And the thing is with the content they're creating, they're doing it because it's easy, right? Oh, well, this is easy, so we'll just keep doing this over and over, hoping that, you know, it fixes resolves itself and things get better. But it won't. It won't get better. Uh, what happens, and I've witnessed this so many times in my own experience, I've been doing this now for over a decade. Any time that I invest a significant amount of time, effort, or money into a piece of content, it always, always, always, always outperforms a whole basket of just average content. Every time I I without fail it always works. Same thing with products. If I spend like last time I, uh, upgraded the SEO expert certification inside SEO Academy, I spent a year and a half rebuilding the whole thing. I've gone through five versions of that training. Okay. Every time that I'm doing it, I think it's absolutely the worst experience of my life going through that to redo the whole thing. It is so difficult. It's so hard. Um, but by the end of it, I realize that that difficult work is what produces a great outcome. And the thing is, you have to think about what are the people who you're competing against. What are they not willing to do? And that really can help you stand out from just a sea of people who just want to click a button and have everything do it for them. Um, and not have to think, right? If all your ideas come from AI, you are not creating anything new. It's just a fact. You are not creating anything new because you're just pulling from what already exists. So, be very careful.
Uh, and more importantly, stop thinking about SEO. Okay? I I'm really you're going to notice my content. I'm just going to be straight up with you. It's changing a lot. I'm going to still talk about SEO because, uh, you know, I'm more focused on search optimization, not so much search engine optimization because these aren't even search engines anymore. They're large language models. They don't this it's not even like appropriate to say that anymore. I would be thinking more about AI search or large language model optimization things like that. Um, but more importantly what you need to be thinking about more about what are the things that are not going to change. What's not going to change? Okay. And what's not going to change is what I showed you today. Okay. And I'll just just to kind of re-emphasize this point. This is what's not going to change. Very simple which is topic domination. Okay. That is not going to change. All right, this little pyramid as silly and elementary as this is. Okay, memorize this. Please, for the love of God, memorize this because if you if you memorize this, you will always know what to do. You will always know what to do. It doesn't matter what new AI launches or what platform comes or the new techn it doesn't make a difference because this is what matters. This is how you
Create content that perfectly aligns with your ideal client profile and actually solves their problems.
And at the end of the day, you should be solving your ideal client profiles problems everywhere. You should be doing it everywhere. You should be doing it on your website. You should be doing it on YouTube. You should be doing it on social media. You should be doing it through paid ads. You should be doing it offline. You should be doing it everywhere, because if you're serious about growing your business and getting more customers and driving revenue, then you would take it that seriously. And this is the the the foundation that you need to do it correctly. Okay?
So, stop chasing all of this stuff. Don't don't be obsessed with one particular platform. I think the days of specialization are pretty much over. Um, if you just specialize in one thing, you're probably going to be in trouble. You really want to be thinking about how do we, you know, build, like I mentioned before, build a strategy that helps us generate more leads or more customers. Okay, simple as that. Keep the main thing the main thing.