SEO. You might think you know everything about search engine optimization, but AI is changing the game more rapidly than ever. The new search landscape isn't just about Google anymore—AI-driven tools like Chat GPT are redefining visibility and relevance. How can your business adapt and even thrive in this evolving scenario? I'm diving into the latest trends and offering practical steps to future-proof your SEO strategy. So stay tuned to this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
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Speaker 1: Hey, SEO as we know it is changing, and if you're
00:00:04
still optimizing just for Google , you're already behind In the
00:00:07
age of AI.
00:00:08
Search engines are evolving.
00:00:09
Whether it's traditional results or new AI-driven tools
00:00:12
like ChatGPT, the rules of the game are shifting.
00:00:15
In the next episode, I'm diving into how you can adapt your SEO
00:00:19
strategy to not only stay visible, but thrive in this new
00:00:22
era of AI-powered search.
00:00:24
We'll talk about how search engines are getting smarter, how
00:00:27
AI chatbots are influencing search results and the practical
00:00:30
steps you can take today to future-proof your business.
00:00:37
Speaker 2: But you got to stay tuned for this next episode of
00:00:39
the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:00:40
Digital Social media Content, influencer Marketing, blogging,
00:00:43
podcasting, vlogging, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, facebook,
00:00:47
instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing Whew,
00:00:54
there's a lot to cover.
00:00:56
Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or
00:00:59
business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert
00:01:02
advice.
00:01:03
Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer
00:01:08
is your digital marketing coach .
00:01:13
Helping you grow your business with digital-first marketing,
00:01:18
one episode at a time.
00:01:25
Speaker 1: This is your digital marketing coach, and this is
00:01:29
Neil Schafer.
00:01:29
Hey everybody, this is Neil Schafer.
00:01:35
Welcome to episode number 384 of this podcast.
00:01:36
I am your digital marketing coach, neil Schafer, and it is a
00:01:37
pleasure and honor to serve you Today.
00:01:39
We're going to start with the latest news that I think you
00:01:42
should know about.
00:01:42
Well, first of all, your website may not be hosted on
00:01:47
WordPress, but if it is, there's been a little bit of drama that
00:01:50
you might want to know about a legal dispute between WP Engine
00:01:55
and Automatic.
00:01:56
Now, for those of you that don't know, automatic is
00:01:58
actually the company that I guess I mean.
00:02:01
Wordpress is open source, but Automatic, I guess, owns the
00:02:04
implementation of that code or offers services around it, and I
00:02:08
believe that WP Engine is a web host that Automatic actually
00:02:11
invested in, wp Engine being one of the first enterprise-grade
00:02:16
WordPress-specific web hosting services that I also used to
00:02:20
host neilschafercom I guess back then it was
00:02:22
maximizesocialbusinesscom on their web hosting services, but
00:02:26
now there has been a trademark issue and there are some WP
00:02:31
Engine written plugins that no longer appear in the WordPress
00:02:35
repository.
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Anyway, there's a lot of bad blood being spilled between the
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two.
00:02:39
If you are not on WP Engine, you have nothing to be worried
00:02:42
about, but if you are on WP Engine, you might want to
00:02:43
worried about, but if you are on WP Engine, you might want to.
00:02:47
Well, you probably already know about the situation, but you
00:02:49
might want to look for alternatives.
00:02:50
I switch from WP Engine to BigScoots and if you go to my
00:02:54
affiliate link, you might get a special deal.
00:02:56
It's neilschafercom slash BigScoots S-C-O-O-T-S.
00:03:00
We'll put the link in the show notes as well, and I am saving a
00:03:03
lot of money and the performance is actually even
00:03:06
better.
00:03:06
And they are obviously WordPress only as well.
00:03:09
So that would be my quick advice for you if you're looking
00:03:12
for a shortcut into how to resolve that situation.
00:03:16
And today, well, we're going to be talking about Google and SEO,
00:03:19
but, interestingly enough, we know that Google search results
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have been impacted by their generative AI search results.
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Have been impacted by their generative AI search results,
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and now they are doing the same thing for online shopping.
00:03:30
So if you have a Shopify store or if any of your products and
00:03:35
services are integrated, you know your catalog is integrated
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with Google shopping.
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They are now using AI features that will determine just like
00:03:43
search results that are being influenced by AI.
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Google Shopping is as well, so you'll want to if you haven't
00:03:50
looked recently where you are ranking for Google Shopping
00:03:54
who's in front and really start to reverse engineer.
00:03:57
What is it that Google is doing to decide what products are
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ranking in their online shopping experience is doing to decide
00:04:01
what products are ranking in their online shopping experience
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?
00:04:05
Another really interesting bit of news is that SEMrush, one of
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the leading SEO tools, bought a company called Third Door Media.
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You might not have heard of Third Door Media, but you've
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probably heard of Search Engine Land and Martech.
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These are media sites that have conferences, but they also have
00:04:26
really really good search engine optimization.
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They've published a lot of blog posts and, if you didn't know,
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semrush actually acquired Brian Dean's Backlinko, another
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website that has tremendous search engine optimization.
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Acquired them some time ago and you know well this isn't under
00:04:42
NDA, but there was an agency working on behalf of SEMRush
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that actually contacted me, believe it or not, asking if
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there was a possibility of collaborating with SEMRush in a
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similar way of basically forwarding SEO-related content
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SEMRush's way.
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So they have been really really aggressive in doing this and I
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believe I checked this the other night.
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If you do a search for what is SEO, you know Backlinko comes up
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, semrush comes up, search Engine Land comes up.
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So basically they own three of the top 10 results for that
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keyword term.
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And this actually is really related to what I'm going to
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talk about today, which is how AI is changing SEO, and we're
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still very, very early on, but there is some early advice I
00:05:25
want to give you.
00:05:25
This is one of the ways in which you can future-proof your
00:05:30
business and basically buy search engine rankings
00:05:33
organically by purchasing other media sites.
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I believe we're going to see more of this.
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We've seen it in the podcast world how HubSpot they have the
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HubSpot network and they basically bought out various
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podcasts, for lack of a better word.
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It would not surprise me if we see the same thing with blogs,
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and I think SEMRush is really smart for doing what they did.
00:05:51
So if you want to be the first to find out about this news,
00:05:53
make sure you go to neilschafercom slash newsletter.
00:05:55
All the articles I share with you actually come from that
00:05:58
newsletter and sometimes are shared before I even record
00:06:02
podcast episodes, as it is this week.
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On personal news, I'm really excited to announce that my book
00:06:09
, digital Threads, has won its first award.
00:06:11
Digital Threads as you know, I did a Kickstarter for it in
00:06:15
August.
00:06:15
I distributed those books in September.
00:06:17
It wasn't on sale on Amazon until October 1st, but it
00:06:21
already won first place in the Fire Book Awards and it was
00:06:26
first place in the Entrepreneurship and Small
00:06:28
Business Division of Business Books.
00:06:30
Really, this book was written for small businesses and
00:06:33
entrepreneurs, so really excited that it has gotten that
00:06:37
recognition that I was hoping it would get.
00:06:39
And well, there's a number of other awards I've applied to.
00:06:42
We'll see what happens, but the reviews are coming in.
00:06:45
The paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook are all now available.
00:06:48
Actually, if you don't have an Audible account, I'll be putting
00:06:55
a link in the show notes where you can actually go and, for
00:06:57
free, get access to my book Digital Threads, the audiobook
00:07:00
version.
00:07:01
But it only works if you have never subscribed to Audible
00:07:05
before.
00:07:05
In fact, I've yet to share this with anyone, so you're the
00:07:08
first to hear this.
00:07:09
But if you go to digitalthreads neilschafercom right
00:07:12
N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-Rcom slash digitalthreadsaudible one word
00:07:18
you will be able to sign up there and get Digital Threads
00:07:19
audiobook for free.
00:07:20
That Digital Threads audiobook for free that is a $20 value.
00:07:23
Once again, you have to be a first-time subscriber to Audible
00:07:26
and that also is an affiliate link.
00:07:28
It is called a bounty link or a hunter bounty.
00:07:31
I forgot what the word is, but I'm basically helping Audible
00:07:35
gain new customers.
00:07:36
But it's a win-win because you get to hear my recording because
00:07:38
I narrated it personally of Digital Threads.
00:07:40
So I highly encourage you to check that out and, in addition
00:07:44
to digital threads, the reviews coming in sales coming in.
00:07:47
Same thing for maximizing LinkedIn for business growth.
00:07:49
I have been selling it for 99 cents.
00:07:57
It will go up to $1.99 and it will continue to increase from
00:07:58
there, starting pretty much a day or two after this is
00:07:59
recorded.
00:08:00
So if you haven't gotten it at that price, it is available.
00:08:01
Anywhere you get eBooks, I highly recommend you grab it now
00:08:04
while you can, at that ridiculously, if I may say so
00:08:08
cheap price, all righty.
00:08:10
So let's get into today's topic, which is really the changing
00:08:14
landscape of SEO in the face of AI, and obviously we are still
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very, very early on in what is going on.
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I've had a lot of people ask me questions.
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We've had a lot of conversations about this in the
00:08:28
Digital First group coaching community, which I encourage you
00:08:31
to check out as well if you'd like to take part in those
00:08:33
conversations.
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But nobody knows for sure what is going on.
00:08:37
Right, we can only sort of guess and I have yet to see any
00:08:41
data, but there are a lot of people that are starting to say
00:08:44
similar things, similarly enough that make enough sense.
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I think it's time for me to sort of share my perspective
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with you.
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So there have been people like Neil Patel and Christopher Penn
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as well, I think.
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They talk about SEO is not search engine optimization, it's
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search everywhere optimization.
00:09:00
And the idea being now, there's two different facets to this.
00:09:05
There are the search engine results that the AI generative
00:09:08
search experience in Google gives out, which I believe and
00:09:14
even when I look at perplexity results I still see it is based
00:09:18
on pretty much top ranking spots in the Google search ranking
00:09:23
algorithm.
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So with that aspect, I've always thought not much has
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changed.
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But when you have AI search engines like chat, gpt, the
00:09:33
difference is that they don't necessarily need to, and I guess
00:09:36
perplexity is another example of that.
00:09:38
To some extent, you know search engines.
00:09:40
Uh, one of the ways that Google constructed its search engine to
00:09:43
try to figure out domain authority was looking at
00:09:45
backlinks and digital threads.
00:09:47
For that reason, I have a dedicated chapter on backlinks.
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It is one of the 20 strategies that I go into details on.
00:09:52
I still think it is very important, because how else does
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a search engine know what site has authority if it can't see
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backlinks?
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If it can see backlinks, it can try to see which sites are more
00:10:04
popularly attributed to or linked to, and therefore, that
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is one point, not the only point , but one point which, or one
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signal which indicates the authority of that website.
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But with AI right, ai doesn't need to look at backlinks in
00:10:19
order to be able to give out the information.
00:10:21
It could leverage what search engines already have, or it
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could just look not at necessarily backlinks, but at
00:10:27
brand mentions.
00:10:28
And this is where the search everywhere optimization is.
00:10:31
Hey, the more you are talked about anywhere and everywhere,
00:10:36
the easier it's going to be for the AI to catch you.
00:10:40
And what I thought was really interesting was I was at a B2B
00:10:45
marketing expo.
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This is a conference that is nationwide I think it's mainly
00:10:49
small businesses, although there were some enterprises speaking
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but it comes every year to the Los Angeles Convention Center.
00:10:55
I know it comes to maybe 10 or 15 cities in North America.
00:10:58
Not sure if it's in New York or not, but it's free to attend
00:11:02
and I go to sort of keep my finger on the pulse of what is
00:11:05
going on in B2B marketing.
00:11:08
So, as you can imagine, there were a ton of booths and
00:11:12
speeches about AI and there was some generative AI, but a lot of
00:11:16
it was sort of like AI in your organization, ai in HR, ai in
00:11:21
accounting, ai to automate workflows what have you
00:11:24
Obviously the word generative AI boots and speech as well, but
00:11:27
there was one particular speech, which was basically a speech
00:11:32
called SEO 3.0, visibility in chatbots plus AI meets B2B
00:11:38
marketing, put on by a guy named Kevin Lee.
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Kevin, it turns out we were connected on LinkedIn without
00:11:44
knowing it.
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His website is diditcom.
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We'll have to have him come on the podcast at some point, but
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he gave a pretty convincing conversation about what are the
00:11:53
things that you need to consider doing with this emergence of
00:11:59
using chatbots for search, as well as the generative AI search
00:12:03
experience within search engines like Google.
00:12:05
So we have this search everywhere optimization concept.
00:12:09
He actually looked at it with a different concept called
00:12:13
Barnacle SEO.
00:12:15
Now some also refer to this as Parasite SEO, and I reflect back
00:12:19
to SEMrush.
00:12:19
If you can't appear, I mean Google is not going to put the
00:12:23
same website on all 10 links, you know, on all first page
00:12:27
search results, unless it's a branded keyword like SEMrush.
00:12:30
I can imagine them doing it so you can try to appear on the
00:12:34
other posts or you can buy out.
00:12:37
You know the media companies, which is what SEMrush did.
00:12:39
But normally the concept of Barnacle SEO or Parasite SEO is
00:12:44
that we are going to try to rank , or I should say we're going to
00:12:47
try to get mentioned in every one of those pages on the first
00:12:53
page of Google search.
00:12:53
So let me give you another explanation.
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I think that SEMrush has a great article, basically
00:12:59
semrushcom slash.
00:13:00
Blog slash Barnacle SEO B-A-R-N-A-C-L-E hyphen SEO.
00:13:05
So let me read what their definition is, because I think
00:13:12
this will give you a clear understanding.
00:13:13
Barnacle SEO is a practice that involves attaching your website
00:13:15
or business to a larger website that ranks highly for your
00:13:17
target keywords to leverage their authority to your
00:13:19
advantage.
00:13:20
The term Barnacle SEO was coined by Will Scott of Search
00:13:23
Influence way back in 2008.
00:13:25
So this is nothing new, and the primary goal of this approach
00:13:29
is to boost your own website's performance, typically through
00:13:32
increased traffic and lead generation.
00:13:34
So when you compare it to traditional SEO, it gets really
00:13:38
interesting.
00:13:38
Barnacle SEO involves performing traditional keyword
00:13:43
research in a way that goes against how you do it for
00:13:45
traditional SEO.
00:13:46
So for traditional SEO, you target search terms with a
00:13:49
relatively low keyword difficulty, which often rules
00:13:52
out terms with very high search volumes.
00:13:54
Right, because it gives you a higher chance to rank on the
00:13:57
first page.
00:13:58
But with Barnacle SEO, you're going after competitive keywords
00:14:01
you wouldn't normally not be able to rank for, just not in
00:14:05
the same way.
00:14:06
So, for example, small business owners often use Barnacle SEO
00:14:09
with local business listings like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
00:14:12
So New York City Hotel, you might not appear in the top 10,
00:14:16
but if Yelp and TripAdvisor do, and you could be mentioned in
00:14:20
Yelp and TripAdvisor in a best New York City hotel list I know
00:14:24
that I often see these results coming from Yelp.
00:14:26
You are therefore being mentioned in one of the top 10
00:14:31
articles in the search engine results.
00:14:33
So these websites have high authority and a greater presence
00:14:36
in search results.
00:14:37
So a small business can improve their visibility by creating a
00:14:40
profile on these sites and rank for competitive terms with their
00:14:43
profile page rather than their own website.
00:14:47
So the blog post goes into further barnacle SEO techniques.
00:14:51
Use Google business profile as well as other listing websites.
00:14:55
This is a best practice of SEO.
00:14:57
Reach out to top ranking websites.
00:14:59
So if there are search engine rankings for specific keywords
00:15:02
that you want to rank for and it is not a business directory of
00:15:06
sorts or a citation site of actually reaching out and
00:15:09
developing a relationship with the webmaster and maybe
00:15:12
submitting a guest blog post or other sort of collaboration.
00:15:15
This is the sort of thing that I talk about in digital threads.
00:15:17
So the third one is submit guest posts to authoritative
00:15:20
websites.
00:15:21
Obviously, if the website accepts guest posts, then that's
00:15:24
really the shortcut here.
00:15:25
And number four pitch your expertise to journalists and
00:15:28
hope that when they publish something like the New York
00:15:31
Times and it becomes a first page ranking, that you are noted
00:15:35
in it.
00:15:35
Obviously, social media platforms also have become
00:15:38
search engines so they can be valuable for referral traffic.
00:15:41
So build a robust social media presence and then use Reddit and
00:15:45
other forums.
00:15:45
So when you think about the top 10 search results, you might see
00:15:48
a LinkedIn Pulse article, you might see a Reddit forum article
00:15:52
or a Quora article.
00:15:53
So you know, this is the reason of search everywhere.
00:15:57
Optimization is not just to be everywhere but to be strategic
00:16:01
about where you appear, where it makes sense, where these sites
00:16:04
and really Google is sort of, with the latest update, has
00:16:07
really prioritized these sites to make sure that you have brand
00:16:11
visibility in those sites and when you have brand visibility
00:16:14
in all the top search engine results because of the ability
00:16:17
of AI and go back and listen to the previous episode with Dennis
00:16:21
Yu, who talks about AI's ability to basically grab as
00:16:26
much information as it can take and be able to connect the dots
00:16:30
between people and who is thought of as an authority, what
00:16:33
have you?
00:16:34
You can begin to see that if you are mentioned everywhere and
00:16:36
AI doesn't care about backlinks and they're just analyzing the
00:16:39
top 10 search results for a keyword, that this approach will
00:16:44
increase the chances that you will appear in AI search results
00:16:48
.
00:16:48
Now, when I asked Kevin at the end of the presentation, do you
00:16:52
have any specific data to back this up?
00:16:55
He said what we have we can't share, but he does say that
00:16:58
Barnacle SEO is something that his SEO agency has been doing
00:17:02
for some time, and especially for longer tail keywords.
00:17:05
Obviously, the longer tail keyword, the easier it is for
00:17:08
you to be able to rank.
00:17:10
So some of the other advice that he gave that I thought was
00:17:13
really interesting.
00:17:14
And we think of search engine results as only being blogs, but
00:17:17
obviously we have forums, we have social media.
00:17:19
We can't forget YouTube as well , and we know that the
00:17:24
transcripts of YouTube that's being ingested by LLMs or large
00:17:27
language models as well, and we know that the transcripts of
00:17:28
YouTube that's being ingested by LLMs or large language models
00:17:29
as well.
00:17:29
So YouTube becomes critically important If you think about the
00:17:32
volume of content as well.
00:17:34
Right, a podcast which I also have as a live stream on YouTube
00:17:38
.
00:17:38
So you know, you have a YouTube transcript, you have a podcast
00:17:41
transcript.
00:17:42
You know the YouTube video or this podcast interview as an
00:17:46
example, is human content, right , and the thing is, you can try
00:17:51
to create AI-generated content in your blog, but because
00:17:54
AI-generated content is regurgitated, it won't rank
00:17:58
because it's not helpful and simply regurgitated.
00:18:00
Right, because what search engines want and we begin to see
00:18:04
why Google doesn't say you can't use AI, but it's not going
00:18:08
to help you, because they're looking for really, really
00:18:10
useful and almost personal and really, really original content.
00:18:14
And this is another thing that Kevin made clear in his
00:18:17
presentation.
00:18:17
So he also mentioned and this is still really experimental and
00:18:21
he mentioned so as well and I sort of asked him about this as
00:18:23
well and he mentioned so as well and I sort of asked him about
00:18:25
this as well he brought up the concept of LLMO optimization and
00:18:27
this is really optimizing the chatbots, the LLMs, you know,
00:18:34
optimizing Claude and Google, gemini and ChatGPT, so that if
00:18:38
someone was to type in you know what are the best-selling
00:18:41
marketing books of 2024, that you would have mentioned it
00:18:46
enough in your conversations.
00:18:49
In chat GPT that you can actually influence how it gives
00:18:53
the information to other people.
00:18:54
This has the potential to be spammy, right?
00:18:57
You remember the backlink factories and the private SEO
00:19:02
networks and we've gone through a lot of these spammy things,
00:19:05
blackout things in the SEO world .
00:19:07
This might be another one.
00:19:09
We do not know how effective it is because then you could have
00:19:11
these link farms basically become LLM optimization farms.
00:19:15
But it is something that he mentioned, that he has been
00:19:19
experimenting with.
00:19:20
But he also said it requires a year for LLMs to ingest new
00:19:25
information.
00:19:25
So not sure if that is going to be a valid strategy.
00:19:30
You can try it and if you do try it, you want to make sure
00:19:33
that you use a chat GPT, if possible in incognito mode, so
00:19:38
that it doesn't attach the information to you personally,
00:19:41
and obviously you have it set so that it shares the results.
00:19:44
You know you have that setting where you can share the results
00:19:47
with the LLM.
00:19:48
You obviously want to turn that on, but, I think, more
00:19:51
important you know what Kevin was saying that I agree with.
00:19:56
When you think about how LLM ingests information and the
00:19:59
potential for, you know, transcripts from videos and
00:20:02
podcasts, this notion of becoming multimodal, right of
00:20:07
having all of your basis covered content-wise, does become more
00:20:11
important and can become a strategic differentiator.
00:20:14
I've already noticed I'm getting more and more requests
00:20:17
to be on this podcast and, as you know, I'm very selective as
00:20:19
to who I invite.
00:20:20
And you know I see more and more companies that are
00:20:24
launching their own podcast and I think it makes a lot of sense.
00:20:27
So we've seen a renewed interest in YouTube for a lot of
00:20:30
reasons, but without a doubt, this AI and the way the LLMs
00:20:35
ingest information is a way in which you can potentially tip
00:20:41
the scales in your favor.
00:20:42
So the net of this is you still need to be doing traditional
00:20:46
SEO.
00:20:47
I still believe and unless data proves me otherwise, that
00:20:50
backlinks are one way.
00:20:52
I mean it's just a natural way in which Google is going to
00:20:56
recognize authority.
00:20:57
Can it be gamed?
00:20:58
Yes, is it the only point in which they look at?
00:21:00
No, but I still think it is one of many points, but it still
00:21:03
has its importance for that reason.
00:21:05
But this concept of appearing basically it's digital PR, right
00:21:15
?
00:21:15
Another word for part of SEO, and digital PR has always been
00:21:16
part of SEO.
00:21:17
Well, maybe it's a little bit more important now is really the
00:21:18
way to think about it.
00:21:19
So it's getting onto podcasts, getting onto YouTube videos,
00:21:22
even short form videos, but creating more videos right as
00:21:26
owned media, creating more audio that's another great way to be
00:21:30
indexed by the LLMs.
00:21:31
It is human content, so you can see how that would be.
00:21:35
That would give it a preference in the search engine results,
00:21:38
and you can see how that would give it a preference in the
00:21:40
search engine results.
00:21:40
And just maybe defocus on some of your other SEO efforts and
00:21:43
maybe focus more on this aspect of digital PR and the aspect of
00:21:48
Barnacle SEO and the link building is still the same right
00:21:52
, by engaging with websites that do appear on a guest blog post
00:21:58
or maybe offering a quote or an infographic, or even appearing
00:22:04
or signing up with, you know, with a Google my Business
00:22:07
profile, or with Yelp or Reddit or Quora.
00:22:10
Some of these are pure brand mentions, but some of them can
00:22:13
lead to backlinks as well, right , naturally speaking.
00:22:16
So this is where I'm at, and I do believe another thing that I
00:22:21
have seen is that search intent once again, I talk a lot about
00:22:26
this in digital threads really changed for a lot of keywords
00:22:30
that I follow.
00:22:31
Now, maybe this isn't for every industry and every business,
00:22:34
but I certainly noticed URLs that I used to get a lot of
00:22:37
traffic for not getting nearly as much traffic anymore, and
00:22:41
when I look at the search results, they're simply changing
00:22:45
the content that appears there, and so I'll give you an example
00:22:49
.
00:22:49
Listicles are one aspect of it.
00:22:52
Tools listicles I do a lot of, because I get asked that
00:22:54
question, neil, what tools do you recommend?
00:22:56
And I'm already noticing for some, I have to get to like page
00:22:59
eight or nine before I see a listicle, whereas before these
00:23:03
updates the listicles were.
00:23:05
You know, there were a few of them sprinkled on the first page
00:23:07
, including my own blog post.
00:23:09
So I think that's one reason why this update, or these sets
00:23:12
of updates, have hit my site more than others.
00:23:14
But if you haven't checked search intent, make sure you do.
00:23:18
In fact, this is something you should be doing to maintain your
00:23:20
library of content and other concept from digital threads on
00:23:23
a regular basis, because it really does change and I give
00:23:26
examples of that in the book for those that have read it.
00:23:28
But even if you hadn't, and you think you're set with your
00:23:32
keywords, go back in and do another search for each one of
00:23:35
those to check your search intent.
00:23:36
If you haven't done so in the last year, because it really has
00:23:39
changed, and if there's a keyword you're targeting where
00:23:42
the results are the generative AI search results from Google
00:23:46
you need to ask yourself is it worth it Trying to compete with
00:23:49
that?
00:23:49
I still believe for most things it is.
00:23:51
But if you were targeting a very simple question that's very
00:23:54
simple for the AI to answer, I'm already starting to pull
00:23:57
away from those keywords.
00:23:58
I'm simply not updating posts and once the traffic drops to a
00:24:01
certain point, I'm basically retiring them.
00:24:03
And now I'm doing the same thing for posts that used to
00:24:05
rank but don't anymore, not because the search intent
00:24:09
changed, but the way that Google looks at search intent and the
00:24:13
results it gives have changed.
00:24:15
That has caused me to start to archive and maybe not pursue
00:24:19
some keywords that two or three years ago I might have pursued.
00:24:21
So that's additional advice based on old school SEO.
00:24:25
But you know it's new tools, old rules, everything you've
00:24:29
been doing, you still do, but you might, like I said, want to
00:24:32
focus a little bit more on the barnacle, seo and just in
00:24:36
general digital PR that I talked about on this episode.
00:24:40
All right, I want to thank you again for listening all the way
00:24:42
to the end.
00:24:42
You know, if you are an avid listener, you might know that
00:24:45
there was a little bit of time gap between this episode and the
00:24:48
last episode, and it's not that I don't love speaking with you
00:24:53
on this podcast, because I do but I also want to maintain a
00:24:56
certain sense of quality.
00:24:58
I recently had a podcast episode episode number 380, for
00:25:02
those that remember talking about it's time to ditch your
00:25:05
social media schedule.
00:25:06
You want to be in the time at the moment participating in
00:25:11
social media, and I almost feel the same way for my podcast.
00:25:14
I don't want to batch record my solo recordings way in advance.
00:25:18
I want to be timely this week's news, what's on the top of my
00:25:22
mind now and I want to be inspired, and I want to inspire
00:25:25
you, and if I don't feel that, I'm not going to record an
00:25:28
episode just for the sake of recording one for the week and
00:25:31
lowering my quality.
00:25:32
So that's my promise to you and I want to be completely
00:25:37
transparent about that.
00:25:38
I do my best to publish these once a week and now I'll be
00:25:41
playing catch up to get to episode number 400 to start 2025
00:25:45
.
00:25:45
But that's the way I roll and I hope you appreciate that.
00:25:48
Not that I've forgotten about you, don't care about you but I
00:25:50
want to maintain the quality of this podcast.
00:25:52
If you enjoy this podcast, man, one thing that would make my day
00:25:56
is to go over to Apple Podcasts , wherever you listen.
00:25:59
If you would leave a review, that would, man you know, take a
00:26:02
screenshot, let me know.
00:26:03
That is the ultimate compliment you can pay me.
00:26:05
And obviously, go to neilschafercom slash digital
00:26:08
threads and neilschafercom slash maximizing LinkedIn for growth
00:26:13
If you want to find out where you can buy those two new books.
00:26:15
And that's it for another, hopefully, what you thought was
00:26:18
an exciting episode of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.
00:26:21
This is your Digital Marketing Coach, neil Schafer, signing off
00:26:24
.
00:26:25
Speaker 2: You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach
00:26:28
.
00:26:28
Questions, comments, requests, links.
00:26:32
Go to podcastneilschafercom Get the show notes to this and 200
00:26:37
plus podcast episodes, and neil shaffercom to tap into the 400
00:26:43
plus blog posts that neil has published to support your
00:26:46
business.
00:26:47
While you're there, check out neil's digital first group
00:26:50
coaching membership community if you or your business needs a
00:26:54
little helping hand.
00:26:55
See you next time on your digital marketing coach.
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