Ep 382: Why Most SEO Agencies Are Lying to You About AI and What to Do Before It’s Too Late with Steve Wiideman

Let's make sure that we are visible everywhere that somebody is going to want to purchase from us. And if we can enable it, let's have them make the purchase right there. Right on the TikTok store, right on Facebook, right on, you know, ChatGPT. I think that's where we need to start thinking.

I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And today we're speaking with Steve Wiedemann, known as SEO Steve. He's the founder of Wiedemann Consulting Group and co-author of the SEO Strategy and Skills, which is a college textbook used at universities across the States.

Now he's got over three decades of experience in search, and he's helped brands like Disney, Sketches, Publix Storage, Honda, and so many big brands. And as a practitioner, artist, and adjunct professor at UCSD and CSUF. Steve specializes in multi-location e-commerce SEO and is one of the most trusted voices on navigating SEO in the era of AI search.

And in this pod, we talk about AI search, we talk about AI, we talk about Google overviews, we talk about zero clicks, what zero clicks means for our websites and our blogs. We also talk about if you're gonna buy a blog now or a content website now, how do you go about growing it?

How do you go about scaling it? We also talk about the bad news on where we may never be going back to again with Google and Google traffic and what that looks like moving forward.

We talk about why we shouldn't be optimizing for traffic. And this is the same principle. We should never be optimizing traffic. We should be optimizing for revenue. And then how do we get our brand and our content seen in a world with AI content?

An insane volume of content. We talk about the dynamic between quality content versus volume of content, and then why quality plus viral is the answer. And then which platforms to be seen on and why.

We talk about how AI overviews work, how AI search with different LLMs works, and how that's important to understand and use to your advantage when building up a blog and/or your own brand. So we talk about SEO in general, but we get specific into how do we scale our business using SEO and AI moving forward?

This is such a valuable podcast. Now, of course, we always talk about acquiring businesses. So if you're on this podcast, that's what you're here for. And if you're here for that, obviously do yourself a massive favor and decrease your lit risk of buying a lemon by getting my due diligence framework.

It's what I use, it's what my clients use. It's made people for millions of dollars, saved people millions of dollars, and it's free. I'll leave a link for you in the description. Also, I'd love to be able to give you some money.

I'd pay finder's fees of $2,000 and up to anyone who refers me to a deal that we go away and acquire. So if you own or you know anyone that does own a business doing over 250 nets per year, hit me up- email, text, comment, let me know, introduce us, we can have a chat, no obligations of course. But for now, dive into the pod. Enjoy.

SEO Steve, you're back. Been a long time. Welcome.

Absolutely. So excited to do this one. It's been a few years, actually, maybe… Thanks, thanks for having me.

And we thought we were nerdy last time; now we're gonna be talking about AI and stuff, right? So get ready for some nerdism.

Yeah, I mean this is gonna be a big chat. Google AIs, right? So Google AI mode, AI overviews, and no, there have been three core massive updates in twenty twenty five. Well, like what? I don't know how far back we go, but it's been a wild time for Etsy Po.

Well, principle-wise, nothing's really changed, right? In fact, Google even pointed that out when they did their updates to their guidelines just a few days ago. They said, you know, look, there's a lot of chatter around AEO and GEO and hacks that people are talking about and and chunking content and all this.

And look, this isn't something you need to worry about. Just stick to the principles of creating a really unique, helpful, firsthand experience-driven content. Continue to put your brand out there, not just be myopic on where you rank in Google, but do all the things that you would normally do on your website natively on those platforms.

I think Rand Fishkin talked about that in a thread he did recently, and pay attention to what we know is the most important ranking signal, and that's user behavior. If they have 10 choices, regardless of the features that are in the search results, are you in all those features, and do you stand out? Have a better value proposition. Do you have better rich results that make your listing the more compelling one you want to choose?

I mean, that was what Twenty-Three had when they had those court documents that got released. And Google made it very clear that, yeah, it's what's in the document and it's what other people say about the document, and it's how they interact with it.

And it's how the the interact with it that's always been the what's the the conch controversial topic. Does Google use click behaviors in their rankings? And for years, everybody's been like, no, it's not possible. I'm like, but for twelve years I ranked number one for SEO expert in search results.

And it wasn't because I changed the content or got more links. I never did any of that. I just bragged about being number one for SEO expert and had people challenge it and search for it. Every day, people were searching based on what I was telling them to do.

And they did that, and they chose me, and I stayed at the top of the search results. In some cases, some of the agencies I work for had teams of salespeople doing the same thing. So fundamentally, nothing's changed. Thinking about how we address zero click.

And how we build more awareness for those statements and semantic triples that represent our business across the web. So that's amplified more than ever. We used to call it co-occurrence, co-citation, you know, and even semantic triples, but now we're calling it citations.

Right. Now we're going to build citations differently than we might for a local business, more about just making sure we show up for things. So, yeah, I think there has been an evolution in the in the ff what we see in the SERP. And I think there's a lot less click traffic that we're going to initially see, but that zero-click visibility is absolutely still important and very crucial to our overall marketing objectives.

And now we finally have an excuse to stop being so myopic on a Google web search and start thinking more broadly about how we address search everywhere that people are searching. Search, network, social, from forums, discussions, video sites- thinking a little bit more multimodal as opposed to just paragraphs of text to try to rank an article.

So I'm glad. I'm really happy that Google is evolving because it's forcing the industry to create better stuff instead of just creating garbage that we have to filter through, and hopefully they'll stop wasting their time on it. Maybe even start taking some of that old content down. And you know, we're gonna start seeing a better overall search in the World Wide Web.

Absolutely love how it is evolving to make things actually valuable and better for us. There was that portion of time where people were just like, AI content, just getting so many blogs out there, just an unlimited amount of blogs with AI content on their sites, and just like, come on, like now it's all like this, especially the latest update.

That March update made it very clear. We're going to address AI-created content. Yeah. And they said it in different ways. They said it in a way to say, We really want unique, non-commoditized, original content with unique perspectives. Tell us something we don't already know.

Right. That's basically what Google's saying. And we've been using EEAT as a way to communicate that. And there's been some fog in communication around it because some SEOs were trying to preach that EEAT is something that Google looks for because they put it in their webmaster quality guidelines and their quality rater guidelines.

And the reality is that EEAT is really what serves the users to decide whether or not this page was uniquely helpful or if it just looked like regurgitated content from the last link I clicked on in Google.

Right.

Nothing.

It's like all great content from people with authority that can showcase authority. And the reason I wanted to get you back on, Steve, is I've seen content sites and a lot of blogs just get absolutely decimated.

And then now in the last year, and especially through twenty twenty six, I've started to see blogs have stable traffic, and a lot of them, and people are looking at and are acquiring more blogs and content sites now. How would you suggest somebody? I mean, you've already basically alluded to it, but like how if somebody buys a blog, say today, and they've had stable traffic for, you know, a year, where do they go with content creation?

It used to be a game of get as many blogs out there as you can. Now it's a game of like, obviously create great content. How would you say they would scale their blog? Would you be suggesting more video content, adding a YouTube channel to the to the brand? Like how does somebody go about this?

It's that multimodal approach, right? Let's take our landing page and look at all the attributes, the same attributes that would appear in a Google video search, a Google image search, a Pinterest search. You know, it's paying attention to the different ways that people are going to consume that content. Do you have audio and video on the page for people that don't want to read it?

Is there a TLDR at the top that gives them exactly what they need? Or do you think this is 2005 and they're going to read your whole article? Because they're probably not. They're probably going to click the summarize this for me in whatever AI extension they have on whatever browser they happen to be using.

So the way that we're approaching it for content-specific websites is around authority and expertise, is really get those experts participating to share their unique viewpoints. Those experts are never going to let AI write their stuff for them. They're going to want to write it.

From their voice and from their experience and what they've learned. And they're gonna wanna argue other points from what you know other folks are saying online. So I feel like enlisting experts that are, and this doesn't go back to author rank or any of that, right? This really helps the user see that the person who wrote this is somebody who's authoritative and has experience in the industry.

They might even search for them and say, hey, is this person someone I should trust or believe in? Or they might even just ask their AI, hey, who's the author of this page? Are they, you know, what are their credentials to be able to talk about this? And while it might be only four or five percent of people who are doing that, you know, when we forecast what's gonna happen as we grow as searchers in the next five years, those types of things are going to be done for us by the AIs to understand exactly what, you know, our needs are and and personalize our experiences.

So as a content creator, we're enlisting the right experts with the right voice in the right formats and addressing, like I'd mentioned before, not just what we're doing on our website, but taking that same approach and replicating it.

So if you're if you're a personal injury attorney or solicitor, depending on where you're searching from in the world, and you specialize in car accidents or automobile accidents, and you've got a few pages on your website that talk about causes and negligence and maintenance issues and lawsuits and so forth, we want to have that content represented everywhere that that our customers are going to be searching for that kind of content.

That means Reddit, that means Quora, that means Facebook, and even depending on your industry, things like TikTok and Instagram and Threads, as well as on YouTube. So that as they're searching, as they're learning, as they're going through their journey of discovery, they've seen us multiple times.

And when a decision point comes where they want to or have to decide to do something, and they see our brand, they're gonna recognize it and say, Yeah, I saw this on Facebook. Yeah, I saw these guys when I was watching a YouTube video. Actually, I saw them on my Google Discover feed because I was looking at content in Google Discover, figured out I might be interested in this topic.

So I I feel like that that prominence of each of those passages that we have on our our website represented across all of those different channels and yeah that might mean hiring another intern or someone to help manage it all and tracking it, you know, through a nice CRM or spreadsheet to make sure that every passage and every semantic triple about our business is is equally represented on these third party platforms.

I don't think you're gonna have any trouble showing up and appearing in LLMs because RAG, the retrieval-augmented generation, is going to search to see what's in search results, whether it's GPT using Bing or Gemini using Google. And then it's going to use that whole visibility citation thing we just talked about.

And it's going to say, you know what? I think this is a credible source because I found this particular statement across 20 other websites on pages that actually get engagement, not just you paying to blast content everywhere like we were back in 2003, but in real conversations and real destinations that we have active users and traffic.

I think that's the key: there are so many people now going, okay, so I need to get my statement of I do this service across these different networks. I wonder if there's a tool out there where I can just blast it out there to all these random things. And they're gonna come out. We're already seeing a few of them, and it's gonna be really annoying.

And it's just like the article blasters and video blasters of the early two thousands. And then it's gonna fizzle away because the quality of the pages that they're getting these citations on is gonna signal to the search engines and LLMs that we're trying to gain the results. And not only will it not help us, but it could work against us.

I don't know if there's gonna be a manual penalty or something we can request re-inclusion for, so I don't know that I would even take the risk of putting myself.

So it's basically a short-term solution when we know that it's gonna have no actual significant way. And I was gonna ask the question of like, how do we optimize for AI visibility? And you shared being on multiple platforms, but for somebody that's looking at this and thinking, okay, I've got a blog, or I've got a business, and I wanna make sure I can get visibility and do and play this SEO game very, very well.

Going on all the platforms is not the answer. Like you did say before, is it's going to the platforms where your people are, your niche or your industry is playing in and your audience is, I should say, more so more so where your audience is and where it's the richest, and it might be two or three platforms and then doing them very, very well versus just sticking with just the just the website alone, right?

Right.

Anyways it be it ends up being like the onions old bit where they had, Hey, we've got we've got bots that are following bots now to make sure that we've got enough likes and engagement to you know, to look like we've got a really important presence and if we're doing this, you know, we're gonna have all these these agents going out and just publishing, you know, nonsense everywhere where the only people who are engaging with it are the other bots that they built to follow it and make it look like it's important.

So I don't think that is healthy for the internet. I don't think it's scalable. And I think it actually leaves a really bad impression if somebody called it out and saw that you were doing something like that simply to try to show yourself as a a prominent brand.

I think a competitor could take a screenshot, give it to the LA Times and the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and say, look at this garbage that these brands are doing to make themselves look more important or to show up in prompts and LLMs. So anything that we can do to stay active in real conversations and tell real stories and tie in those statements into the storytelling that we're doing in all these authentic ways.

I think that's really what's gonna matter in the end. But if it feels like you're taking a shortcut or it feels like you're taking a hack, just don't do it. Think creatively. If you can't figure out a way to do it and AI is not giving you ideas, hit up an SEO consultant and ask questions and say, How are you seeing brands do this successfully? And there are always stories.

My favorite story, if you're interested- it's a really short one- is one of my team members here, Brian, and I worked looking for a fun place to have lunch that we hadn't been before. Always the Where do you want to go? Where do you want to go? And we're like, I don't know.

So we went to the new Ask Maps when it came out. It's within Google Maps; there's this cool little AI feature, Ask Maps. Yeah, we started searching. We went a few pages deep, tried to find something new. And there was a new place that had just opened up; it was called Good Buns, and it had only been open a couple of months. But they were kind of nowhere to be found. I had to literally s just scroll through to find anything. And we went in there, and the place is dead. There's nobody there. The staff was super friendly. We had the best Smash Burger I think I'd ever had in my life. And we're like, hey, let's hook this guy up. And so we took all sorts of pictures and video and, you know, did all the kind of in-line editing while we're eating to make it look good.

And then I left a review, ew and I basically started it with this: this hidden gem has the best burger in Braina Park right in the first sentence of the first review, which is the semantic triple, right? Good Buns offers the best location.

And so two days later I'm at a conference just giving a talk on the same topic of A, I and I said, Hey, out of curiosity, if anyone can pull open their their Ask Maps right now within Maps and say, Where can I get the best burger in Buena Park? I'd love to hear what you see.

And they're all like, Good buns, and I'm like, isn't that amazing how important those semantic triples are and real user sentiment can make a difference? And now this brand new location that just opened up is number one in Google within two days.

For a query that's that was really just one sentence that you know made all the difference. Yeah. So anyway, it's kind of exciting to see what the technology can do. Is this sustainable if, after a period of time, nobody else says Best Burgers in Bonaparte?

Probably not. But if they are the best, which I thought they were, they're gonna sustain that authentically without having to be influenced by someone who knows a little bit about SEO.

And then it's gonna have more reviews put into it, and yeah, it'll change and evolve. But that's a great story to share. Like this is how you can do it with the same principles that have been around.

And we made everybody hungry. Isn't that great?

But Burgers too. What? How do you share with people that do have blogs and then mostly earn revenue from ads or affiliate, not so much having their own brand yet? How do we how have you been sharing with people to solve the zero-click game? AI overview getting traffic to their site.

Great question. One thing we have to remind ourselves of, and this is a this is a really, really tough bill to swallow, is that we're not going to get back the traffic we lost. We're not gonna somehow re-optimize our pages and suddenly start getting more traffic from searching.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, especially if it's an informational search, right? It's not somebody looking for a product or service. So I think that's the tough bill we have to swallow. Is that okay we can continue to grow and take our brand and our blogs and and monetize it and do really well.

But we have to not think about trying to get back something that's not gonna come back. Which means spreading our content a little bit across other networks, as I'd mentioned.

Which means building a a really solid workflow that includes doing all the right topical and entity research, addressing all the right structured markup for our pages for knowledge graphs, and getting people involved in that content that are gonna want to share and maybe even link to that content so that we can continue, you know, to pass that initial page rank for that retrieval augmented generation part of our LLMs. And you know who always did that best?

There are so many amazing folks out there in the industry. And there was a friend of mine who used to work with a company called Sparefoot, and his name is Brian. And what Brian would do is every single time he did a post, he would blast out to all the different groups and networks and things that he was involved in and newsletters.

And he would get almost, within a day, he'd almost get between three and five links back to his page. His name is Brian Wallace. He runs a company called Now Sourcing. And it was brilliant because at the time, you know, I'd been doing some consulting for another similar brand that focuses specifically on the same industry.

And I'm like, how is he doing this? We put this great content out there and then it's crickets for several weeks and we'll start to see some impressions and clicks, and within a year the page is doing okay.

But Brian would, right out the gate, right after he launched this incredible page with incredible media and custom design graphics on it. He would blast it out to networks and his LinkedIn would, in some cases, would get like 135,000 engagements when he's just sharing a post about something, which when we think about reach and the value of reach, means a small percentage of those people who find the page interesting are going to share it and link to it or reshare his post and their followers will reshare it and potentially link to it.

So I think it's gonna be less about just creating content, putting it out there, and moving to the next piece. It's gonna be about how we build our collaborations and our UGC plan to get engagement to that content as quickly as we can.

The faster you can do it, the faster you rank, just like when you're selling a book on Amazon, right? You're gonna tell everybody in a day from now, and two days from now, my book's gonna go live.

And I really need your help in making sure that the internet knows that this is the best book on this. And, you know, you offer incentives and do whatever you need to do to get as much action as you can because the longer it waits without action, the lower the overall score's gonna be.

Just like in the old days of Google Ads, you go out there and spend an atrocious amount of money to get that top-ranked position in Google Ads. So you get the higher CTR, quality score would kick in, and then you could relax and cost normalize. So it's sort of the same philosophy with our content now.

But we also have to think outside of just the page. Once the page is there and we've we've done, you know, our our blast of getting some engagement to it and getting it shared and lighting the fire, let's take that content now and and take those important statements from that content and get them across all of our social channels in a way that's meaningful and useful and maybe even humorous if we can figure out how to do it.

So that more people engage with it and follow it. I think that's that's the workflow addendum as we're thinking about our content creation in and of itself is not useless but not nearly as as meaningful as it used to be, that we need to fast follow that with some off page. And the best way to do that is just really build a strong group of folks you network with that are willing to share, contribute, and link to that content.

Yeah, I love that. How it's it's kinda like you you it's coming back to just incredible content. Like people are only gonna link to it if it's incredible. People are only gonna share if it's incredible and it's valuable in many different formats, as we've mentioned before.

Text, video, audio, gifts, whatever the way is gonna be nuanced to the subject you're talking about. And then how you get that piece of content people to come back to that piece of content from socials or different places,s and then create something that is so that main hub piece of content goes viral because of all the clicks from social and YouTube and other places.

Yeah.

And you gotta get really, really creative sometimes because a lot of times your marketing department is run by technical gurus who don't necessarily have a little bit of that creative eye that you need.

And in some industries, like what if what if your job is to do SEO and we're not gonna call it AEO anymore, but you know what I'm talking about? And your responsibility is to make sure that you're out there. And you're working for a SaaS company that sells data protection services.

Like,e how do you create content that's interesting when you sell data protection services,r or you're even more nerdy, and you get into something more granular for corporate or enterprise content management or something, right?

It's really sometimes you have to you have to really think out of the box to introduce topics in ways that are interesting. And some industries it's much easier. Like for public storage.

My God, it was so easy. All we had to do was, you know, partner up with the right folks to create some really funny, engaging videos on how to store your car and bring in a DeLorean, you know, for a day and rent a DeLorean and do a little five-minute clip on how to store your car with a really humorous film student, right?

Or how to store glassware, and you know, you can create some fun characters for those videos where perhaps the public storage employees are sitting there, crossing their arms, never talking, and the person who's the entertaining personality is trying to break and make you laugh.

You know, so you're doing some storytelling, you're making something entertaining, but you're tying it into storage because you're making it, you know, again around how you store something.

Glassware moving a refrigerator, moving a piano. There's a lot of cool things you can do. But yeah, as you said, for industry, you know, sometimes you just have to be really creative.

Absolutely. Google now. Like coming back to Google, what we've mentioned, like the same thing, the same thing; it's just value. We wanna create value, wanna create something that's gonna go viral, it's great content, EEAT, all the same principles.

But Google does evolve, and it changes, and it's changed so much. How do you think people should think about Google in relation to their business moving forward?

Sure. A year ago, I would have said focus on visibility and prominence around the different topics that people are interested in. But now,w as we've watched these platforms figure out that they can keep more people on their platform and keep them coming back if they didn't promote content with outbound links to it.

So this zero-click ecosystem we're creating that we're seeing, we're seeing ChatGPT having its instant checkout. And even this morning on the Google Marketing Live, they were talking about how now you can make purchases in YouTube, and Agentic Commerce keeps people on the platform and enables them to purchase and take action and book reservations or do whatever without ever actually having to visit another website.

So I think where the mindset needs to be is: is is is oursites agentic commerce friendly? Have we done our research to make sure that we've enabled all of the right markup and then our our pages are organized well and you don't even need markup theoretically to be able to qualify for agentic, but do you do you have the right fields and the right data to allow these these platforms to consume your content and interact, you know, with with your payment processors in the same way that a competitor might, without them ever having to leave ChatGPT, without them ever having to leave YouTube. You know, your product feeds feed into all the ads,s and you don't have to worry about getting a visitor trying to improve your conversion rate.

Instead, just focus on trying to have the most rich product feeds. I think that was the term Google used this morning, but rich product feeds and really rich content on your pages that can be consumed and pulled in for the best use of agentic.

And you're gonna see a lot of users finally start to untether themselves from their phones and focus really in on voice searches,s and you know, hey, hey chat. I hear my kids saying that now. I'm like, Do you mean ChatGPT? Like, yeah, we just all call it chat.

I'm like, okay. Hey chat, I need to purchase a such and such. Can you find me one under ten bucks that I can buy online through a brand that, you know, that I've already purchased through so I don't have to go through all the repurchase thing?

Yeah, I noticed that you purchased this product on Amazon three weeks ago. Would you like to purchase? I've connected your Amazon account. I've got access to everything. Would you like to use the card you have on file ending in zero zero nine? Or would you like to use this other card or a new new payment method?

And then you just say, Yeah, same card on file. Yeah, great. Would you like it ship to the same address? Yes. Great. Okay, your order's placed. Should be there in twenty four hours. Twenty-four hours. Without ever having to touch your phone. So I think I think that's where we're going.

And as business owners, we need to think about how can users interact wusers canthin those platforms without ever visiting our website. And I know that might mean in three to five years we really don't get any traffic except from those people who get our newsletters or who decide to click on us from a social network, even if our post was demoted for having a link.

I think we need to get out of that mindset of, " Let's drive traffic to our site and instead get in the mindset ofLet'ss make sure that we are visible everywhere that somebody is going to want to purchase from us. And if we can enable it, let's have them make the purchase right there, right on the TikTok store, right on Facebook, right on, you know, ChatGPT.

I think that's where we need to start thinking,d and if we need to get with a consultant to help us through that process, great. But you could probably use ChatGPT to get you started.

You know, and then if you have some trouble troubleshooting and getting it to work, then hire a consultant. The AI's, you know, are pretty intelligent now, and I don't know that we need to spend a lot of money on consultancies for basic things. When it comes to creative things, native experience to just, yeah, add and you know add your shop, add your buy link it up with your whatever merchant account or whatever it is you can get paid into.

I'm sure it's gonna be pretty native. It's it's just wild to think that if if that's the case, it really s means like it really reemphasizes that we need to be heavily across the two to three platforms that our audience is hanging out on.

For me, it's podcasting, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.There,e and we don't really do we post on Instagram,m but we don't get anything on Instagram. Twitter, it's not really that my audience is on Twitter, but I fail at that pretty well. I just don't I just don't value it as much as the other ones. But yeah, really emphasize making sure you're on those platforms, right, where your audience is.

Right. And test all the platforms, really. I mean, if you can. The partnerships and collaborations and UGC, Ican'tt I can't express how important those are becoming more than ever because of this shift, this trend of, hey, let's stop thinking so much about our website and about and about our click traffic from search engines and let's start thinking about making sure we can appear as much as we can everywhere.

And that means now building more collaborations, more networking, more, and this has worked for a lot of the major brands. I mean, every time you see a brand like I think it was Applebee's recently partnered up with Wyndham,m and now you can get points and get free meal,s and going to Applebee's can help you get points for your hotel and travel.

Those types of relationships, you know, and loyalty programs, they build continuity, they build consistency, they reduce churn rates. So I think that mindset is really important. The UGC part, probably more than ever. I was calling it influencer marketing. I'm like, we need to get everybody who has a following on TikTok and out there talking about us.

But the reality is anyone in any of those networks could have a video that picks up momentum. They don't have to be an influencer. It's not weighted the same way that that search engines are around authority. video from somebody who's posted videos and never got any interactions could suddenly get a million.

One of our attorneys just hit a million views on somethin,g and the max views he's had is like a hundred. But it was interesting enough. It got picked up in the what's the word I want to use?

The rapids of the particular social network. I think it was a YouTube short. And it can work. So the UGC component of it is, hey, if we can get into these UGC networks, and even Google Ads this morning on Marketing Live are evolving their paid platform to include campaigns where you can reach influencers.

So they're kind of taking away a lot of that from these niche networks. But those UGC folks are out there and they'll work for pennies on the dollar. Join brands, and God, there was another one I just I just got introduced to recently.

Thereares thousands of folks out there who are sitting at home looking for ways that they can make money. And you're like, hey, I'll pay you forty bucks to create a video and share our product.

And that one little person who decided to give you a chance and take your 30, 40 bucks, create a video,o and my God, that video got five thousand, they got some followers,s and they got some subscribers out of it,t and we got some customers. I lost a client specifically because of that UGC slash influencer approach.

Who they paid fifteen thousand for an actual influencer to try their product,t and they just went viral. They made like a million bucks and like, yeah, we're gonna put our money into influencer because that's quicker.

I'm like, Well, what happens when that kind of dies out and fizzles away? Your content still needs to be there, and like, yeah, we'll do that later. I'm like, Okay, we'll be here. But that',s but that's the reality of the world we live in. And it's hard when we spent thirty years obsessing over being number one in Google, you know, and driving traffic to our website.

To think in terms of we need to drive business, not traffic. We need to br drive awareness an,d you know, build some brand equity. We need to think outside of the Google bubble. And it's really hard to do for businesses that have lived in their in their careers for the last three decades, you know, trying to be number one in Google.

Yeah.

Just searchin,g just searching for c,o just searching for traffic and traffic doesn't equal dollars, does it? It's really about how do you build a relationship with people so you can get in your audience, in a specific audience, so they can have some level of trust to be able to go and work with you or purchase through you.

That's that's how business works, right? And then how do you buil,d like we t we said, how do we how do you create content that helps you build that relationship with them in different areas, and a lot of testing and a lot of relationships, a lot of contributors.

I would measure metrics now in terms of how do we calculate or how do we look at indicators that lead to growth? And part of those indicators would be the number of collaborators that we have in our network. How many people do we have that are brand liaisons of ours that we could send a note out to and say, Hey, brand liaison, hey fan, you know, we really appreciate you. We did this cool thing. It would mean the world to us if you shared it.

You know, we'll give you a shout out if you, you know, if you are willing to give us a shout out. And then you reward those folks, you give them recognition, you thank them, you do cool things for them, and they'll be fans for life. Now every time you produce something cool, you can share it with that network, and hopefully at some point, ten to twenty of those folks are gonna, you know, share that with the world and their followers. And you're not gonna need a link building team or an outreach team anymore. You're just gonna need more fans who really appreciate and love your brand.

Yeah.

And that comes back to just being consistent in the space and continuing to show up and serve. You said you don't need to do anything extraordinary. What was the Jim Rohn quote? Well, that Jim Rohn quote is that you don't have to do extraordinary things to be successful. You only have to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Yeah.

And to do something extraordinarily well,l it means being consistent over a long period of time in that space and adding value. And it's not just this; the biggest risk is that every single time somebody bought a blog or a content site, I would say if you've got ninety percent or more traffic, seventy percent or more traffic to from Google, it's single-source dependency, which is a massive risk. And we all bought, even me, yeah.

Your eggs in one basket.

But that's because there were thirty years or three decades of just traffic coming from Googles and of course updates and people were able to recover from and it just seems like now like if you're buying a content site, maybe it's been smashed by the help for content update and AI over the design sort of stuff.

But if the traffic's been stable for twelve months, you can buy that that already has a part of a brand and then go and take that content that's already there, make sure it's amazing, and then distribute it across multiple platforms to build the relationship with the audience on those two to three platforms that was important.

In an authentic way, not in a spammy way.

Right. Yeah. And don't just rely on ad revenue and affiliate revenue, or especially ad revenue on your site. You can maybe rely on affiliate revenue and push people to affiliate products if that brand or blog doesn't have its own.

You know, and that way you're not worrying about, like people were, so Google was like, just smashing sites that were just affiliate sites because it was just like content led to affiliate link and then people were like, how do we…

Doorway pages and everything else. Yeah. I remember that. It's depressing to hear for a lot of businesses when I when I say it. But when we watch a client who said, Hey, I just produced a hundred pages of content last week. Can you help me do the markup for it? And then we're gonna put it all over our site.

And then that content just it just doesn't perform. And then I take another website in the same industry,y and we spend a week creating a single page of content that's around the same topic as those other hundred pages they created. And within a few weeks, we already see that page that was that took more time, energy, effort, and research outperforming those hundred pages.

It's worth it. And yeah, it's expensive. And if you find the right resources who can do that kind of great content, then instead of scaling your content, scale your team. If it's working and it's driving revenue, hire more writers. Don't try to write content with AI thinking it's gonna be a good long-term solution because, as we found out in March and some of the latest updates that Google's made, they're not fans of that.

And they know because users hit those pages and they're like, Yeah, this looks like it was AI. I don't really see anything that tells me anything authentic about the character of this brand. I just see what seems to be AI content. And those little words, just like in the movie A Beautiful Mind, start to stand out to users and like AI, dash AI, right?

And it's a turnoff. And eventually users are gonna be like, Yeah, I wanna pay attention to brands who care about me and are willing to take the time to really understand me and what I want.

And those are gonna be the brands that I latch on to.

Yeah.

How do you think Google continues to do well in this space if there's zero if people aren't creating content now just to rank in Google?

Sure. Well I'm I mean,n you see the ad evolution now. They're having ad,s and they announced it this morning, ads in Google Maps, the demand gen ads. You know, they're tapping into UGC and influencers to make that part of their ad platform,m and you know, through YouTube, our users and influencers and so forth.

I think that's playing a role in at least,t you know, the the the ad side of things. On the organic side of things, I mean that's not really a profitable product for them. The organic is what brought their audience to them, and now people already know to Google something.

They don't need to think about where they're gonna go to search. It's just making sure the search experience is still helpful for users. And now having ads and AI overviews and ads and Gemini and ads and maps, ads and product feeds in YouTube, I feel like the the experience for users now without having to leave YouTube, without having to leave Google is a safer experience with less viruses to worry about and I think a little more trust, transparency and and hopefully a much more efficient shopping experience for the e-commerce side of things.

So I feel like and and it kind of,s 'cause I remember I remember Ask, I think Ask just finally went out of business. But Ask dot com and they had the old Ask Jeeves. I missed Jeeves. He was still cool. But that's what killed them. They were the best search engine.

They were far better than Google and anyone else when they first came out. But they got ad obsessed and everad-obsessed,e the fold became ads. And it was just exhausting for users to have to scroll to be able to see organic results.

And I started to fear that that's the direction that Google was going. And then I saw the AI overviews. I saw how they started putting sponsored results in the middle of some of the organic as opposed to always on the top. So I think they're testing and working on ways to still provide a great organic experience.

And I think they're making their ads appear to be a little bit more organic. Even though it kind of feels unethical. I feel like you should know, prominently,y I'm looking at an ad, and these people didn't earn this position; they bought it. But my experience in Google hasn't changed. I'm still getting everything that I want,t and I can still see the answers that I need and get what I want out of there. Even though I probably spend half my day in ChatGPT or doing work in Perplexity computer.

Yeah.

It's wild to see how the migration over to LLMs- chat, Claude, all the different ones.

I don't even know if I would call it migration. I mean, as I said, I'm still using Google in the same way I always did. but when I'm when I wanna do things, when I wanna interact with things, when I want really to explore a topic, I mean that's where I'm gonna g:s go: to the LL to explore something.

But if I'm just looking for a quick answer or am shopping for something, Google is still there. And that's why their share of voice hasn't changed. Yeah, the use of all these other tools is going up, but they're still going to Google, and they're still Googling,g and nothing's really changed there.

I'm not even worried about Google traffic anymore. Now that AI overviews are prevalent enough, I have a new baseline. We just build off that baseline. But my reports this year suck because the AI overviews weren't as prominent at the beginning of last year.

And now I'm looking at the data on some of the chain work with, and I'm just trying to explain to them that the SERP, you know, was a clickable result before and now is an AI overview. So we're losing out on some of the traffic.

Guess what? Our revenue's still the same. Behavioral query is by or near me, or something where an AI overview isn't going to be enough for them. Revenue's doing great. It's just click traffic, you know, that took a hit. Anyway, that's that's how how search evolves. Honestly, I thought today after the event that the big announcement was gonna be that AI mode is now the default experience ithe n in Google.

And I was like, all right, get ready for the triage, right? Because it's coming any point in today's big meeting, I thought for sure was going to be to announce that, but it didn't. And so the apocalypse didn't happen.

And we're all, you know, now thinking a little bit harder about what that effect is going to be and how we plan to manage it. And how we're managing it is is reminding our audiences that we're not we're not being myopic on Google. We want to make sure that we're found anywhere. Our consumers are going to be searching for information about us and we're going to measure that.

By how many people come into our our store, into our aurant, not by how many people click and go to our website.

Always measure it by by revenue, not by traffic. Yeah. That's that metric. Yeah. Steve, so good to have you come on. Thank you so much for sharing. Where can we send to your Steve Wiedemann site or…

So fun.

I'm just SEO Steve everywhere. I love challenges. So what I love if if anyone's listeisng in and you've got a real challenge, why aren't you running for something? Send it over, because I love powering through those.

I'm on these office hours with my students at UC San Diego every week and half the time nobody shows, but I've gotta be on So I love that time to look at my social and and see if anyone's a any questions. So SEO Steve everywhere, hit me up and if I can try to help troubleshoot something, I'm all about it. I love us.

Steve, thanks for coming. Appreciate you. Everybody, yeah, absolutely. See you guys on the next one.