Episode 246 – Google Web Guide – The Future Of Google Search

Ken

Google keeping people in Google and not passing them to the site that provided Google with the content that Google decided was worthy of returning for the search result in the first place. It's not a good thing for most publishers.

Ian

You need to understand what people are searching for, how they're searching for it today in order to guide the content you create.

Paul

Hello, welcome back to another episode of Marketing Guides for Small Businesses. I'm Paul from Changeescape web in St. Louis and today I'm joined by Ian Cantle from Outsource Marketing in Toronto, Canada. Jeff, join us. And also joined by Ken Tucker from Changescape Web in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today we're talking about Google Web Guide, which is kind of the future of Google search, which is kind of a more semantic approach around concepts as opposed to links. We'll be getting into that and in some ways it could have a significant impact on certain things that you do. So Ken, let's start with you. What exactly is Google Web Guide and why is Google moving in this direction?

Ken

So the Google Web Guide is like as you said, it's all about, you know, starting to build relationships between concepts and that those that's becoming as important as links. Historically, inbound links have been a really big deal for search engine optimization. So it's an experimental AI feature that is really looking at organizing or reorganizing search results into clusters of related concepts instead of just sending or returning a list of links. So it's using Gemini AI, which is Google's AI for both interpreting the query and also for relevant content. And it's grouped by search intent so it gives users multiple angles to explore a topic. Exploratory searches would be like how does solo travel in Japan is going to yield clusters Back about transportation, etiquette, accommodations, things like that. If you have multi part questions.

Ian

You'Re.

Ken

Going to see additional clusters such as how to stay close with family across time zones, clusters for scheduling tools, video calls, relationship tips, those kinds of things. Google is moving to this really to provide a better understanding between the connection of ideas. For a very long time Google has been focused on semantic key, you know, keyword relationships and content clusters. So there's already been some organization there in terms of what we do as SEOs to help with the classic Google search results. Google's Dow just taking that and it's going to be presenting it, you know, in this experimental form as these clusters, you know, really to build out, you know, the concepts, leveraging what it considers to be entities. And it provides more context now to the backlinks that that are provided. So by clustering the results, Google can structure a map of knowledge and provide more context and nuance more easily. At least that's the theory. And it supports the large language models better by giving them that semantically grouped data, instead of just a series of flat links that are on the search results page that you see as a list, it's striving for the semantic understanding using fan out queries, breaking one query into many related ones to capture multiple meanings and intents. And then it groups those into clusters, semantically related clusters, so that you get a different and distinct interpretation of each of those semantic cluster subtopics, if you will. So it's really moving beyond just an understanding of what historically search has been and really trying to shift more toward providing more contextual meaning and understanding based on the search.

Paul

Can you talk a little bit about the, like, the technology behind how it works? Don't have to get too deep into that, but the technology.

Ken

I'm not sure what you mean.

Paul

Thank you. Well, maybe you did answer it. It's the thematic content, the query fan out. And one thing it looks for is what Google calls unstated intent. So Google looks at, okay, this is what the searcher asked for, but based on other queries related to this, we think they might also be looking for this.

Ken

So what you're saying is it's using its knowledge and history of past searches and looking at, you know, what somebody is searching for in particular. And it's saying, okay, well, yeah, I get this. This is the one, you know, this is the way they're expressing their concern. But it's kind of like, if I understand what you're saying, it's kind of like what Google has done in grouping, you know, you know, other, other searches related to, you know, kind of at the, at the bottom of the search results page, but now it's presenting it in a more obviously in a different layout, but also pulling more data based on those related searches.

Paul

Yeah. Because I mean, God, if anybody has data, it's Google.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

Not that it's always accurate, but they've got it.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

So Ian, how would this, everything Ken talked about, how would this look from a content perspective? I mean, what. Because I think this is really going to change how publishers have to present content. So how would that look? What would that look like?

Ken

Sure.

Ian

Yeah. What I find fascinating about these discussions because I know we're all super dialed into, you know, always the changing landscape of SEO and, and now the introduction of the different AIs and, and large Language, language models and how that's changing people's search behavior. And what I always find fascinating in the last two years is that really like the, the structure of content of what you should be doing to rank on what we're talking about today with, with Google's new model that they're leveraging, right? This, this, this playbook of, of what they're doing in order to leverage AI in their search results doesn't dramatically change anything we've been talking about for like two years. Like it, it follows the eat principle of, of Google's building of content that's going to put you as an authority in your space on a particular subject. And so what that means is like let's, let's look at a topic. Say actually you, I think you put this in your notes Paul, where like what would you have to do to put together a comprehensive guide to beach running? And so I took that a little bit further and, and I just kind of thought well how would you do that? Right? And what are the best practices that help us go with these new changes in Google? And so let's imagine you're creating a comprehensive guide to beach running. You're a runner, you love to run on the beach. And let's look at what Google's content philosophy is. So first you'd focus on the quality and usefulness you need to make sure that you're creating content that is both useful to the people searching for it of that topic and it's high quality and higher quality than other content that currently exists. Right? You always have to be doing better than what exists. That means your guide wouldn't just be generic tips, but maybe you'd share real insights as a beach runner about how to choose the right kind of shoes for a particular type of sand. Maybe you would have a section on hard sand, soft sand, gravel, like who knows, I mean you could take this pretty far and make it an exhaustive comprehensive guide how, how to run like what your style should be. And I'm not a runner, so please forgive me runners out there, but you know the technique you need to use to run on particular textures of sand and even how to plan your runs appropriately around tides, around weather, you know, know how to prepare yourself, what you should take with your, with you on these runs, how to map out like where you might need to take a rest or whatever. You'd also want to show why you are an authority in this space. What's your experience? What's your expertise? Maybe you include anecdotal evidence like you know from I'm a seasoned. Maybe it's your own evidence of how you've run on beaches before. Maybe it's video, maybe it's, you know, here's a story of something I did when running on a beach and this is the result, maybe positive and negative. You can pull in other beach running experts to help, you know, provide other anecdotal support for what you're saying. It helps build that trust and authority because you're not just giving theory, you're actually showing that you really know what you're talking, talking about as a beach runner, as I obviously am not. And of course, you'd want to also make it super user friendly. You'd want to make sure that it's easy to read on mobile, that it's got a table of contents, that it's got clear headings, that it's got an FAQ section, that it's just as easy for readers to jump to the part that they care about through that table of contents, to skim, to scan, to watch, you know, techniques and videos and that kind of stuff.

Paul

Really.

Ian

In other words, you just want to make sure that you're creating something that's super, super helpful, authoritative and a pleasure to use so that people spend time on it and ultimately link to it, share about it and that will help you tremendously. And that's kind of the model. I mean it's again, it's not super, super complex. But I think from all of our experience in this field that the type of content we come across so often is surfacey content. Especially now with, I got to say, like when I see people taking shortcuts with AI because they're trying to just produce content for the sake of producing content for whatever reason. Usually it's an SEO reason, but there's such light, almost frivolous content out there where you kind of get it, you look at it and you're like, that was AI written. Like, it sucks. Like, and that's not to say AI written content can't be good, but it's a tool used by experts where you really leverage it to a much higher place. What do you think? Or.

Ken

Paul?

Paul

Sorry, I think there's a couple things you said in there that I look at. I kind of look at it as the concept of content silos has been around for a while there and I think it's this taken to a whole new level. And I have no way to prove this, but I think part of the reason that Google wants us exhaustive content is because they want authority and they want expertise. And if you, if you're a painter and you have two pages on your website, one about interior painting, one about exterior painting, that's not, that's not very authoritative. And like you said, there's a lot of very shallow content out there. And there's so much of it. It's Google's like, okay, how do we know who the real authority is? So yeah, that's a good segue because as with anything AI driven or involved with AI, is this a threat or an opportunity for publishers or is it both?

Ken

So by publishers, you know, it really just means anybody who creates content that's put on the website, specifically on your, on your website, I think is generally what we're talking about here, since we're talking about how it relates to, you know, to changes in search of and the search results. So as a publisher, I think it's clearly a threat for many publishers, but I also think that there's a segment that hasn't been impacted and may not be as largely impacted by this. So let me start with that first. If you're doing local search, where the local search algorithm is triggered, where you're going to get a Google Map result, you know, there, you know, based on intent, because you're expressing intent, because you're looking for a provider in a particular geography for a solution or product or service, those, those aren't as impacted right now. They may be and they probably will be. But the first real major impact is based on informational searches. And what's happening is you're seeing a very large biasing to the very large publishers that are out there. The Reddit, the Wikipedias, YouTube, they make up 15 to 17% of the citations that are showing up in both AI summaries and traditional search. That's only going to favor them and it's going to hurt everybody else, at least in the short term. Until all of this is normalized and we and everybody figures this out, we're seeing a dramatic decline in referral traffic where people simply are not clicking on links in search results, where it's an information based search, they're reading the AI summary, they're not even clicking the citation links to find out who provided that information. It's literally just Google keeping people in Google on a Google property and not passing them to the site that provided Google with the content that Google decided was worthy of returning for the search result in the first place. So it's not a good thing for most publishers, especially if you're focused on informational based Searches. Now that's how it stands right now. That's based on, you know, research from the, you know, from Pew Research analysis that was done. So that's a real challenge most of the time, you know. Well, not most of the time but a large percentage of the time people stop their search after they get the AI overview to give them the answer. I bet we've all done it. We've all, you know, whether it's, you know, doing a search for is, you know, how old is Brad Pitt, you know, you're going to get an AI summary that tells you that you're not going to need to click through and you know, and find, you know, read a link that talks about how old he is. You literally just needed that piece of information. Well that's, that's great for the user but it's not great for the content provider or the publisher, if you will, who provided that information that Google decided to say, ah, I'm going to go grab this information from this source. Yeah, I'll cite the, you know, I'll cite the source but, but nobody's going to click on it. So it's like okay, well traditionally you want to get people on your website, you want to get them to spend time on your website. Dwell time is very important. So for a lot of publishers this is not a good thing at all. And, and, and I don't know how it's going to change anytime soon. So what's happening and how can you deal with it? Well, there is a little bit of an opportunity but again it's, it takes more time and effort than historically has been needed from many of these, of these publishers. And I think the great news is those businesses that have been working, you know, with, with companies like ours where we focus on omnichannel and, and multi type of content creation for an SEO strategy, they're going to do better than those that like you said, Paul, just have, I do interior painting, I got a page on that. I do exterior painting, I got a page on that. And that's pretty much all you know about me on my website. I got a five page website. Here's how you contact me. Here's an about yada, yada, yada. Well that's not, that's not going to win in the future for search now, local search, it's a different story right now. You might be able to get away with that if you're only trying to rank in a 3 mile radius, a 1 mile radius based on where your business is located and if there's not a lot of competition, but that's not the case for most small businesses out there. So what do you do? You, you have to start thinking about publishing in multi formats, diverse formats, doing video, doing images, creating text, creating content in a variety of different ways that people like to consume information across multiple channels. So now again we've talked about this statistic in the past. Google owns like 92% of all searches or something crazy like that. The breakout is, you know, 60 some odd percent is driven by the classic Google search to return the classic Google search results page. And then you know, the, the other chunks of that to, you know, to add up to the total of 92% is Google Image searches and YouTube searches. And you know, Google owns YouTube, so, so it's already, you know, kind of favoring itself anyway because it wants you to create content for platforms that it's already created and already dominates. But what's great about that is if you've taken an omnichannel approach and Ian, I know you and Jeff and Paul and I, we talk about this, we've been doing this for a long time. You know, we're leading a lot of times in our content creation strategy by creating video first and then repurposing video into a blog post, into a press release, into newsletter articles, into social media posts, into short form videos that you put on various social platforms, including YouTube Shorts. Putting that video on YouTube, embedding it on your website, you know, doing that variety of content and having a repurposing content machine is the answer right now to giving you a leg up on how this world is shifting. And so for businesses out there that are looking for search engine optimization.

Paul

You.

Ken

Need to know this is going to come to you. It's coming to you sooner maybe than you even realize where you have to have an omnichannel multi format content strategy that, that is going to help you. If search rankings and being found in search results is critical for your business, you know, putting that on different platforms, diversifying your platform so that you're not only relying them on Google because Google pulling information from other sources and it wants to see your content spread across other sources. We've talked about this in the past too where mentions of a business or a business's expertise on a topic is, has, is becoming as important as an inbound link from another website. So getting your mentions, press releases used to be a big deal, then they weren't a big deal because all of the SEO value for the, you know, for the links that were clicked went back to the major publishers, the PR webs and tools like that decision and whoever. But now just a mere mention of a business in an article published on a different website is getting you a little bit of credibility and a little bit of, you know, a little bit of juice from an SEO perspective. So, you know, you really have to rethink your content strategy and your content publishing strategy to, to factor in what channels are really going to give you the best bang for the buck. And, and repurposing your content is absolutely critical. Creating content and, and developing it in formats in places where people are already going to be gravitating to is going to be super important. And all of that is going to feed up into Google and it's going to feed up into these new clusters that they're, that they're returning in these different nuances. And so you also have to think about the variety of ways that people are searching. You know, for example, if you're a home remodeler, you know, people might ask, what are the most popular remodeling trends? They might talk about or they might be wondering about how do you select the right company to do your remodeling? They may talk about, you know, are tariffs going to impact the pricing for my remodeling project? If I lock in now, is that going to protect me from price increases in the future? They're multidimensional aspects. It's not just going to be, oh, here's a list of companies that can provide remodeling services for you. You're now going to be looking at a multifaceted collection of clusters to help you in what Google is prescribing to you. And it's flat out prescribing that to you based on the data and experience that it's been collecting over decades on search behavior. So it's clearly a threat. It's much more of a threat for businesses that are in the information business or large retailers, you know, where their products, you know, are sold. So like, you know, a company like, like Nike provides content, has a lot of credibility and trust with the search engines. But all of those providers that sell Nike running shoes, for example, you know, they, they have a little bit more of a challenge now because of the way this is shifting. So in general, let me just kind of summarize. You know, I think best practices moving forward, you should diversify your content formats. Like I talked about, repurposing is your best friend. AI is your best friend in repurposing. So if you don't like AI, get over it because it's the only way you're going to be able to be productive enough to create the content and the variety of content and publish it out to the channels that you need. If you're not using Reddit right now, you might want to start putting, you know, content and getting involved in, in, in, in, in Reddit, in, in the appropriate threads there. YouTube is absolutely critical. I think YouTube is now a mandatory channel for every business regardless of your size. Rely on other sources of traffic and other, you know, and drive traffic through again as we've said for the entire life of this podcast. Email marketing, so important, absolutely critical. Doing podcasts, still doing some social media. Although social media doesn't carry the juice that it used to in the early, early, early days of social media, it's still an important source of getting people to get onto your website to learn more, use you know, AI driven tools around AI voice or chat to really provide questions, answers to questions that people are asking about that having that FAQ driven content again as we talked about in this podcast, consistently for at least the last year or more and probably the life of the podcast, honestly, you know, having a robust set of FAQs on your website, but then also now training AI to be able to provide those answers. When you do get people on your website, you can't afford to let them go away without capturing that lead. It's just simply a must, It's a prerequisite anymore. Making sure you're leveraging structured data, the right structured data for the right type of content on the right types of pages that you have on your website. That's super. That's because that's been a staple of SEO for a while now. It's almost mandatory. If you're wanting to show up in search, you gotta simply be doing that. Unless you're lucky enough to where you're in a non competitive environment and you're one of only three or four businesses and you're going to show up on the Google Maps results pretty decently anyway. But I don't think most businesses are in that case. You've got to do things to strengthen Google seeing you as a trusted source and authority. So the old eeat expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, super critical. More so maybe than it has been in, in the direction that we're moving. You've got to do that. Which means you have to publish content. But oh gosh, I just said publishers are being hammered by the new model that Google has. Well, that's why You've got to diversify your content in terms of types, channels and use repurposing and then, you know, maybe even starting to build your own communities and keep people within your own communities. You can use third party tools, you know, discord, Slack, Facebook groups, you know, LinkedIn groups, things like that, or you can create your own through a variety of third party solutions that are out there. But again, I think building your own ecosystem and community is going to become more important. That's also going to demonstrate some authority to Google because you've built this community of experts and expertise. Take advantage of that, then you're competing against AI right now. Flat out, you're competing against AI. Google is implementing it right now. Every search you do is driven. The results are driven by AI. So don't fight it, take advantage of it. If you're not using AI, you've buried your head in the sand and you've become the most popular ostrich on the most isolated planet in the solar system. It's a huge mistake. You just need to get over it. AI is a scary thing. I get it. Work with a trusted agent to help you navigate the world of AI and take advantage of it, because it's here. You're already using it. Your competitors are probably already using it. The tools that your competitors are using may already be using it. Probably nine times out of 10, they're already using it. So you don't fight it. Leverage it as a technology to help you.

Paul

Yeah, go ahead, Paul. For people that are creating this thorough, exhaustive content, I think it can help them. But I also, I think Google knows this is a threat because I'm not going to go too deep in the weeds here, but the Pew Research Group did a study that showed how AI overviews are eroding traffic. And of course Google had a response to that. Part of their response was that they haven't observed significant drops in aggregate traffic to websites. Well, if this industry saw a 50% increase and another industry saw decrease, well, there's no change in aggregate traffic.

Ken

Yeah, yeah.

Ian

And it, and it depends on the type of searches you do. Right. As you were talking about, Ken, if it's an informational search, I think most of us now are looking at the, the AI summaries because usually they're concise, they give us the answer we're looking for. One of the things, I think that just as, as you were going through that Kennedy, you did a great job. One of the things I was thinking about was, and, and I shouldn't have left this out when I was talking about creating comprehensive content. But it fits with what you're talking about too is have a plan. And your plan should, should be driven by and informed by keyword research or whatever we want to call it. Right. But it, it still is keyword research, regardless of how we view keywords and semantics and all of that kind of stuff. Topical understandings. Because you need to understand what people are searching for, how they're searching for it today in order to guide the content you create. Because you don't want to just be creating content for content sake, you know, you don't want to be. Yeah, you, you want to have a purpose. You want your research to guide your content plan to guide your content creation, to guide where you publish and share it. Have a plan. Get somebody to help you with a plan. Even ask AI for a plan that would give you a rudimentary one. It might not be the best plan and you probably will have a tough time knowing if it's going to work for you. Whereas an expert can probably help you better. But make a plan. If you fail the plan you plan to fail.

Paul

Yep. Yep. So Ian, part of this new playbook you will for web guide is GEO and aeo. And you can explain what those two things are. That, that too, and just ex. Is this gonna affect how people do things, what they should do? Do they need to do things differently than they've been doing them? We've talked about, about the exhaustiveness of content, but can you talk about those two things in particular?

Ian

Sure, yeah. First, I'm going to say I love acronyms. Secondly, I'm going to say I, I think authoritative people in our space feel like if they create an acronym first that they will be an authority for, for the space. So I've noticed since AI, you know, has been around for four years or so for us, like how we've been leveraging it in big, big ways behind the scenes. You know, I've noticed just this influx of new acronyms and I'm like, guys, like, we just need somebody to agree on what we're going to call this. Because I don't really care about all the different acronyms. I care about producing results for my clients. But so SEO is Search Engine Optimization, GEO is Generative Engine Optimization, AEO is Answer Engine Optimization. And so just to differentiate those a little bit, Generative Engine Optimization is optimizing content for visibility and citations in AI generated search results. So think Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of those. Answer engine optimization. AEO is optimizing content to provide direct answers for search results like snippets. Voice assistants like Alexa. Oh, and I've got my microphone on, so she's going to talk Google, all of the different ones. Right. And then there's other ones. Like when I did a search on what are the latest acronyms related to, you know, AI. It's, it's ridiculous. And, and you know, we need to get over this acronym thing and just, you know, focus on what's most important. Yeah.

Paul

And just, just to confuse things a little further, when people talk about, talk about optimizing for the AI models, it's, that's not what you're doing. You're optimizing for the LLMs. That's really what you're optimizing for.

Ian

Yeah. And, and if you take that back to. So the only reason why people use LMMs, the only reason why people use Google and search engines is because they're looking for something. Right. So again, it always goes back until we get to the point where the robots are searching for the robots searching for the robots searching for the humans who started it. All right. Now it's the human searching for something and the algorithms or the robots are providing the answer. Right. So, you know, I think you can't, you can't lose sight of that. That as much as you want to make your stuff rank well, the way you do that is, is to actually give the solutions that people are looking for in an exhaustive, comprehensive, easy to understand way. And, and the LMMS and Google are rewarding that because that's what they want in order to hand it off to the user. So at least at this point.

Paul

We'll talk about that tomorrow with a change. Good.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

So Ian, moving on. Talk about creating content for webguide. There's two pillars or best practices, at least for now. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Ian

Yeah. So the two pillars as I know them and please jump in if, if I've paraphrased them wrong here, Paul, but pillar number one is, is people first content, which is actually what I was just saying a second ago, but build topical authority through comprehensive interlinked content. We can, we can dig into more. That's about, if we want. Pillar two is search engine optimization best practices. So mastering technical and semantic SEO, search engine optimization for an AI powered audience. That's kind of how I took the, the two pillars to be. Does that ring true with what you were thinking, Paul?

Paul

Yeah, And I think structured data is, it is more critical than ever.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

Because even though you know, we talked a while back about the percentage of search and Google is still the 9,000 pound gorilla but with people using things like Chat GPT to search for stuff, it's, it's only like 8, 9% but it went from 0% to 8% in a, in just a few months and that's only going to increase. And these LLMs rely on structured data more than anything else for you to rank. So it's structured data. Used to be. Yeah, you should do it if you have time, but it's not real top of the list priority. Well now it kind of has to be.

Ken

Yeah. Now it's a prerequisite. I mean it's a foundational element, whereas before it's something that you might need to do to get over the top if you were in a competitive market. Really it's kind of the way I, you know, with structured data was just that cherry on top to get, you know, to just make sure that you're checking off all the boxes that are important for the search engines. Now it's a foundational box, you simply have to have it.

Ian

Yeah, and, and going back to, you know, what we were talking about, like all everything, the Google algorithm, the Gemini AI, the interlinking of those, the other LMMs, like all of them leverage information that currently exists and, and they're able to. The beautiful, the. Well then I don't know if it's beautiful, but it is fascinating is that AIs are extremely good at connecting dots. Right. So if you have your website, your Google Business profile, your Apple maps, citations. Ken, you were talking about press releases. Like if you have all of these sources that are, are pointing to your business as the authority in roofing in Bradford, Ontario. Right. Like then the chances are good, unless somebody else can be more authoritative than you, that you're going to rank well in these. One of the things I should have said too when we were talking about AEO and Geo was that from, from the most recent information we've seen that nothing actually changes from how Google crawls things like their crawling engine. The back end of Google Elements that Google uses have all remained exactly the same. What's changed is how Google parses the information on the AI Gemini and how it presents it in the front end. Like the actual stuff that's going on in the back end of how Google crawls websites and information according to the latest information is saying it's still the traditional indexing model, it's just a different way that they're leveraging that information. So if you want to show up, you need to be in all of those key areas, creating content for people in, in all of those authoritative ways and leveraging every single lever from an SEO standpoint that you have at your disposal. And if you do all that, if you make it a great experience for people, if your website's mobile, responsive, fast loading, like there's so many things involved in helping your website and your business show up today that it's a very multifaceted object to, to really understand. And it's only gotten more complex with AI and it will continue to get more complex with AI, which is why.

Paul

You need AI to do it.

Ken

Yeah, I want to, I want to kind of explore the fanning out concept a little bit around topical authority. You know, I think my experience, you know, with the local businesses that we typically work with, you know, and these are, these are businesses that, you know, that are, want to be found from local searches, you know, service provider in a city, service provider near me, solution provider, whatever. Those are the types of businesses I'm talking about here. You, you, before you, you certainly had to have location content on your website. You certainly had to have services content on your website. But now with this fanning out concept, you also have to start thinking about incorporating objections, alternative solutions, anything that's semantically related to what you offer. You may now have to provide content on your website to continue ranking, to maintain that topical authority because you need to broaden out all of the contextual and dimensional aspects of what that search might really imply. Do you agree with that?

Paul

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because that's, that's kind of what Google's talking about. One of the resources when looking at this was a kind of a mind map of sorts. And it's also one of the tools that we, that we use. They have a, a module in there that they call pruning and they're saying with a lot of this new stuff that Google is doing, or the way they're doing it, is that you kind of, you need to look at your website and what it would, what this software will do and it's AI driven obviously, but it will, it'll look at your website and look at these clusters, not content clusters in the way we're talking about them right now, but these clusters of areas on your website and you may have some very tightly clustered things that you rank well for and then you have these outliers that are just basically diluting what you're trying to rank for. And it may even be something you don't even do anymore. And they're saying you should probably get rid of this on your website, especially if it's irrelevant. And that's something that nobody does. Nobody does. We, we don't do. I admit we don't do it and we should because it, it's time consuming and, but it, it's diluting what you're, what you're feeding Google because Google is like, okay, this content is on the website but it gets no traffic. So why is it there?

Ian

Yeah, guys, well, while we've been talking, I, I just find this stuff fascinating sometimes. I don't know if you dig into this with your metrics, but I've started to not so much share this with clients except kind of in passing if the discussion comes about regarding how AI is sweeping across the world and it's radically changing how people find my business. Like just from a search result standpoint. Again, whether they actually come to your website or not is the other question. But like when we look at it for our clients like we're seeing like, for local businesses like dentists and that kind of stuff, we're seeing between like a 1% mostly and maybe a 5 to 6% of people coming to the website through any of the AI engines. So again, I, I just share that because the one thing I hate for, I hate to see people do is throw enormous amounts of energy at something that's not going to produce the results right now the good news is, is that everything we're talking about is going to help you rank on Google right now as well as the AI engine. So it, it's just upping the game even more, I think.

Paul

Yeah, I think you just have to be aware of this, be aware of what's going on and adjust your strategy accordingly because you're exactly right. It's. Most of the search traffic is not coming from ChatGPT or these, these other AI models, but it will and this is your opportunity to get ahead of that.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. You know, one tool that I think is really valuable for our viewers and listeners to think about now more than ever is answer the public because it is the fanning out. And so it will, it will pretty easily show you, you know, the queries that people are doing related to a search that you're doing kind of in the, almost in this fan structure. So I think, you know, that that tool, you know, is maybe emerging as, as a, as a more important tool than it has been for the last several years in my mind.

Paul

Do they still have a free version?

Ian

Neil Patel bought it out right yeah.

Ken

Neil Patel has it.

Paul

Yeah, he did.

Ken

Yeah. And, and I know if you, if you follow Neil, he periodically does have promotions to get it at a, at a pretty nice discount. So. But it, but it's a, it's a heck of a tool and it could.

Paul

Oh, it is.

Ken

You know, as Ian was talking about with the content planning aspect, this is a tool that really could be a, you know, a nice, a nice little add on to help you build out your content strategy.

Paul

Well, look at that. We kind of sort of didn't go over time.

Ken

Hey, I blame it on Jeff.

Paul

So does if anybody, unless anybody has something else to add, this is probably a good place to wrap up.

Ian

We.

Paul

You could go into, you could go into depth on something like this for hours, but I think it's a good place to wrap up. Ian, you want to take us out?

Ian

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for being with us today. We hope you found this podcast episode in this particular topic of interest. As you can tell, we talk a lot about SEO, marketing, AI, all sorts of things that are relevant to small businesses. As you try to figure out your marketing puzzle, Ken is ready to smash that button. So please subscribe. Please follow us, Please review us the only way we get more exposure, which of course, you know, we want to spread the word as much as we possibly can and that's why we take the time to do this as marketing guides. We want to make sure we're helping as many small businesses as possible get their marketing under control and moving their businesses in the right direction. So thanks for joining us. Have a wonderful week. Subscribe and until next week, keep calm and mark it on, folks.