Latest / The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection / Episode 6: SEO FOMO in the Age of AI Search

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Episode 6: SEO FOMO in the Age of AI Search · The Same Side: A Digital Marketing Podcast Rooted in Human Connection

• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the same side, a digital marketing podcast rooted in human connection.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Jonathan Dance, Director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the wonderful world of SEO.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or GEO, or is it AEO?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I swear, sometimes being in the digital marketing social media space can make you feel like Will Farrell's character, Buddy the Elf, when he gets to New York.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's thrilled to be here on the leading edge in a big bold world, but he's also overwhelmed, and in truth, he's not sure what any of it means.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just listen to all the ways SEO has been described in the past few years since AI exploded into the marketing world.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: GEO, which is generative engine optimization, AEO, answer engine optimization, LLMO, large language model optimization, AIO, AI optimization, AAIO, agentic AI optimization, and there are more, but I'm not going to go through them because it's frankly mind-numbing.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: All right, bear with me here.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to wear out this elf analogy.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So LinkedIn is the Gimbals department store.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The parents and kids are everyone in marketing and they're lined up to talk with Santa Claus.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or should I say SEOTlaus?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good one.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Buddy is enchanted by the faux winter wonderland in Gimbals, right along with the kids.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: The parents know what they're seeing is a farce, but they stand in line anyway, so this is kind of LinkedIn and the SEOs speak.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this year Santa will be awesome.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that Christmas wish will come true.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe they'll use that one weird trick to rocket your website to the top of the search results.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe, probably, just like Buddy, the marketers will find out that the jolly guy in red sits on a throne of lies and smells of beef and cheese.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that assessment is way over the top, but it was a wild ride.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully it illustrates the point.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: If not, just either move on or go back and listen to it again.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And look, I don't think people who are selling SEO services are evil.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to build organizations out of money, but I think what they're trying to do is to survive and to be relevant in the changing landscape and do what businesses do.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're leveraging the relative lack of knowledge.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we do this too at DR, right?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of it's more in the presentation than in the actual services.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is when the businesses are barking on your timeline all day, every day, and you're 100% sure that you're falling behind.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it creates this panic.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the reality is, is that everyone, and I mean everyone, the agencies, the standalones, the independents, the uh software platforms, they're all learning this on the fly.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has it all figured out.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so you don't need to be in a hurry to throw your money at the first or second or thirtieth business that comes knocking.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll get to why here in a bit.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I do want to say, I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you to lean on your agency here.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Agencies also get bombarded by companies offering amazing things all day, every day.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And here at DR, we've learned how to separate signal from noise, and you can be sure your agency is probably pretty good at it too.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, if you were around in the digital marketing space 20 years ago, you would have been part of a different, yet eerily similar digital marketing boom when search engine rankings were as simple as the methods of gaming them.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: One algorithm, keyword stuffing for days, link farms, babies crying, pork chops and beaujolais.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that last little bit was from a John Prine song.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, this went on for several years, and the tried and true methods of killing it in organic search, they worked.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you couldn't figure it out, you could always bid on keywords and strive, spend money, that is, to show up in the three sponsored ad slots above the organic results.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: At least until your competitors got wind of your aspirations, but you could actually be the universal number one ranking website for a keyword.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Those days are gone.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're just gone.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Personalization came, uh, your search history getting factored into your search results, your location, and even intent signals, depending on what you're doing on the web.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And all of this destabilized the tried and true methods.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so at that point, people started scrambling again, trying to get ahead of it, trying to be useful to the people that they were serving.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: The crazy thing is, is that that's when we started seeing what showed up in the number one slot for me probably wasn't what showed up in the number one slot for you, even if we searched for the same keyword.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so what's up with AI search then?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's even more complicated.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the complication lies primarily in how the algorithms work.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom line is that instead of just getting a list of results based on what's on a web page, you're getting results based on chunks of information from many different websites.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Those get assimilated into one mostly coherent, detailed answer.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times, this is information that, like we imagine these AI engines out there carefully combing all these websites and pulling this information back.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not really the case.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, it's relying a lot on memory, and you get these results in Google search results in AI chatbots like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: despite all that sophistication, these next gen search engines still need context clues to help them understand how it all fits together.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And guess where that comes from?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let me diverge into a trip down memory lane once more.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's Germaine, I promise.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: In 2007, I had a custom website and content management system built.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: The guy who did the work for us, when I asked him about SEO, he said something to the effect that clean code and relevant content are the best SEO.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's always stuck with me.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that was almost 20 years ago.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's still the case today.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if those things aren't in place, if your content is scattered, if it's not well organized, if your website code is funky, if you're not getting all of your pages crawled, you're still going to suffer, whether it be in regular Google search engine of days of old or the more modern ones with all the AI bells and whistles.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm not saying this is the only SEO strategy, but it is the foundation.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: There are other tools such as Schema Markup Language, which can help as well.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Schema is basically a tool you can use to help clarify what your content is about even further.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, it's another layer on top of your architecture and your navigation and your internal linking.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's been around for about 15 years, and we've been using it here at DR for at least the seven years that I've been here.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, it's a shared markup language developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and eventually Yandex jumped on board.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I know it's crazy, right?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: That these big companies would sit down and agree on anything, but they did, and the idea was to standardize structured data across search engines.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: By adding schema to your web pages, you are explicitly declaring what your pages are.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: The schema categories also include subcategories, and those indicate the completeness of the content.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of search engines inferring what the page is about, you're actually telling them.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you an example.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: A phone number in your footer text is just a string, but a phone number in schema is explicitly typed as a phone number in a specific format tied to a specific business entity.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Same with dates, prices, ratings, and all of it is essentially disambiguated from the surrounding pros.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it stands out more when your site is crawled.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Just file that away for the future.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So back to SEO.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: SEO.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we'll call it for now, despite all the fancy new names.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Generative search engines are still search engines.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in this day and age, everyone's pretty aware that there are a lot of agents that are calling up information based on your website.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the way you find that information is by searching.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: By continuing to use the original terminology, I feel like it provides an anchor to the foundational work that I'm going to be talking about here that needs to be done so your website will be seen.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so the fundamentals, they haven't changed.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: AI works on top of the same foundation.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: For example, if your site architecture has every page at the top level instead of grouped in some logical manner, you're saying to search engines that every page is important.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is just an example of something very simple that can be fixed.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe if you have a two or three-page site, it doesn't matter.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But most business sites are more complicated than that.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we've all seen them in the tourism space, it's not uncommon to have places to stay, places to eat, things to do, very common buckets of content.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then within those buckets, you might have subsections of different types of things to do, different types of restaurants, et cetera.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So while AI search and zero-click search results have eaten into our organic traffic, it's still important to make sure your site is organized for crawlability, that it sends signals to search engines, whether mundane or AI fueled, to provide context for your information.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so another piece of this too is creating content.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: You always want to be refreshing content and updating content.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what's critical is that your content is not only organized within the website page by page, but also the way your content is on the page.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes back to some of the basic things for human readability.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have summaries?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have bulleted lists?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do you make it easy for someone to hit the page, understand what it's about, and get the information that they need?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean it needs to be super short, it just needs to be well organized.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: These are the same signals that search engines are using to understand your site.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are other tools such as internal linking, linking between content pieces, to again help provide more signals to show how these things relate to each other to search engines.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: You may have heard of the acronym EAT or EAT, basically E-A-T.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you hang out in the SEO realm at all, you're bound to come across this.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what that stands for is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's Google's framework for judging content quality.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that might be even more important than ever.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: If the AI results are synthesizing an answer from your content, don't you want it to be all those things?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there are these basic foundational things that need to be done from the get-go.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: That upfront work is what's going to do the heavy lifting.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we do website projects for our partners, we don't start with designs.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: We start with discovery to see what they already have.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then the first most important piece is getting the architecture right, organizing what they have in a way that not only makes sense to them, but also will make sense to search engines, make sure the relationships between content make sense.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what about all these people selling complete AI visibility?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I see them every day on LinkedIn.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think they know what they're talking about, but they make it seem like it's this brand new thing.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they also make it sound like they know something that we don't.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess maybe they do on the technical side of this, but and this is a pretty sizable but, the target itself is moving, not just your measurement of it.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is even a perfect infinite sample measurement taken today compared to one taken next month could differ because the underlying model, the index or ranking behavior has changed.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because your content has changed, it's because the machines behind the scenes have changed, the algorithms have changed.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you're trying to detect a signal against a background that's also in constant motion.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you might be asking yourself, but what am I supposed to do?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: First, you can look in GA4.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Google just added a default channel called AI Assistant, which you can further break down by applying a source medium dimension to see which AI assistants are sending traffic to your site.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the thing about the default channel AI assistant is that rolled out in June of this year, so it doesn't apply retroactively.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to see what kind of traffic AI was sending before that, you can just go to the session traffic source medium and apply a filter for the big players in your results ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just know that you will not get insights into AI assistant impressions.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: All you're getting is the traffic that AI assistants are sending to you.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: It only counts clicks.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you still can't see how often your content actually shows up in an AI answer unless it gets a click.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: There are a few other free tools you can use to make sure your house is in order, including Google Search Console.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have this set up for your site, do it today.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's fairly easy.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: You might need the help of a webmaster or one of your dev guys, but it's incredibly important because it gives you an idea of how your site is performing in organic search.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: It also identifies indexing issues, crawl errors, mobile usability.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: It provides Core Web Vital results to help you understand if your pages are loading well and what might be hindering that.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: A quick pro tip tools like Core Web Vitals are great for providing more or less a vibe of how your site is doing, but don't go chasing 100s for your score in these tools, or you might lose sanity points.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: It can depend on your internet connection.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: It can depend on what other things you have going on your local machine that might be hindering the ability for sites to load.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I find it's always good to check on the front end how your site loads in, say, an incognito or private browser to actually experience what a typical user might experience.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because while you're chasing these core web vital numbers, your site might be loading fine.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: It might be performing the way you want it to.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want to dig into your site's architecture, the free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider will crawl up to 500 URLs.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: There is an option to look at the results in a hierarchical view so you can see how your pages are organized.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: It allows you to see child pages and parent pages, which pages belong to which section of the website.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you have pages that should be a child of a certain section but it's not, you can clean that up pretty easily by adding the page to the correct section or giving it a parent page.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that will result in a new URL.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: For example, if you have a page that talks about the best hikes in your region and it's under tourism site.com/slash best hikes, it would be better to nest that page under the appropriate website section, for example, outdoor activities.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And once you've moved the page, most websites content management systems or CMS, they should have this easy-to-use functionality.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: But once you've moved the page, your new URL would be tourismsite.com forward slash outdoor activities forward slash best hikes.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now it has context for users and search engines alike.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: One other tip is to make sure you create a redirect from the old URL to the updated URL in case the old URL is out there on the web somewhere because you don't want to lose your link equity, your page authority, and those historical trust signals that you've built up over time.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Alrighty, let's take a deep breath and pat ourselves on the back.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of information, right?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And like I mentioned earlier, the good news is that everything doesn't need to happen right away.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Search algorithms of all stripes move in fits and starts.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: The best thing you can do is create a roadmap of the tasks ahead of you.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Content plan, website crawl, triage list for things like broken links, missing pages, compressing images and videos that are too large, whatever your audit reveals.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then you methodically work on that list regardless of what's happening around you, regardless of who's calling you to offer services or hitting you up online or emailing you, you're gonna focus on that list to make sure that your foundational housekeeping is in good order because that's gonna serve you well into the future, regardless of how the search landscape changes.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes down to it, SEO is actually showing up.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's doing the work, being there day in and day out.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no sea of twirly whirly gumdrops or candy cane forest.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Although if you can bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the work, if you can summon something like Christmas spirit, you may just find there's more to it than what you see at first glance.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll close by saying it's important not to make SEO, especially the foundational stuff, harder than it needs to be.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: The goal here isn't to have the latest and greatest just because someone said you should.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to do work that helps you achieve your business goals.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Remind yourself what it is you're actually trying to accomplish.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to the people you work with, both in your organization and outside of it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: The best approach is one that moves things forward, but also works for you.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this helped or at least got the wheels turning.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time on the same side.