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The crucial role of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in the modern business landscape is undeniable. It’s not just about being searchable anymore – it’s about being found by the right audience, at the right time, in the proper context.
But this is harder than you think. Currently, the number of searches on Google daily is over 7 billion – and for SEO, Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites, creating substantial opportunities and challenges with being found online.
Today we are joined by two SEO experts, Brandon Leibowitz, Founder of SEO Optimizers, and Jesse Ringer, Founder of Method+Metric, to discuss the shift in SEO due to new media forms and the influence of AI on search.
New Media SEO
Historically, SEO has been a field that focused on text-based content, primarily aiming to optimize websites for search engine crawlers. However, this notion is shifting, with the rise of new media types transforming the scope and complexity of SEO.
Voice search has become increasingly prevalent, with a significant fraction of consumers using it daily. Instead of typing keywords into a search bar, users are now asking Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to answer their queries. Consequently, businesses must adapt to this change, optimizing their content for voice search by using conversational language and considering user intent.
Furthermore, the proliferation of audio content, particularly podcasts, has also compelled SEO strategies to be revamped. Audio SEO is a relatively unexplored frontier that offers significant opportunities. Transcribing audio content into text and integrating SEO principles ensures search engines can crawl and index this content, thus boosting visibility and reach.
Video content has grown exponentially and has become a crucial element in digital marketing. Video meta tags, descriptive titles, captions, and detailed descriptions improve video SEO, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank video content effectively.
SEO + AI
These shifts necessitate businesses to move beyond traditional SEO practices, forcing them to embrace more sophisticated and nuanced SEO strategies. AI is proving to be a game-changer, altering the SEO landscape profoundly.
AI’s most significant contribution to SEO is its ability to analyze massive amounts of data and discern patterns that humans cannot. This allows businesses to understand search engine algorithms better and create more targeted and effective SEO strategies.
For instance, AI-powered tools can conduct advanced keyword research, providing valuable insights into the keywords and phrases users are searching for. AI can also help generate SEO-friendly content, optimizing for readability, keyword density, and sentiment.
Moreover, AI is reshaping user experience, a crucial factor for SEO. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants offer personalized and instant responses to user queries, thus enhancing user satisfaction and engagement. This positively influences SEO, as search engines favor websites providing high-quality user experiences.
However, it’s not just about using AI to optimize SEO strategies. It’s also about understanding how search engines are employing AI. For example, Google’s AI algorithm, RankBrain, uses machine learning to understand search queries better and provide more relevant search results. Understanding how these algorithms work can enable businesses to align their SEO strategies with the latest search engine updates.
SEO Challenges
Despite the opportunities, these changes also bring challenges. The complexity of SEO is growing, and the learning curve is steep. However, businesses that can successfully navigate this evolving landscape will gain a significant competitive edge. Companies must be agile, continuously learning and adapting their SEO strategies to embrace new technologies and changing consumer behaviors.
Furthermore, businesses should consider ethical and privacy concerns related to AI and voice search. Being transparent about data usage, respecting user privacy, and ensuring AI is used responsibly, will be essential in maintaining consumer trust.
SEO is a technical necessity and a strategic imperative for businesses. It’s about surviving and thriving in an increasingly complex digital environment. With new media and AI reshaping SEO, companies that can effectively adapt and leverage these changes will be better positioned for success.
Chris Hood (00:00):
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. The crucial role of search engine optimization in the modern business landscape is undeniable. It’s not just about being searchable anymore, it’s about being found by the right audience at the right time in the proper context. But this is harder than you think. Currently, the number of searches on Google Daily is over 7 billion. And for S E O, Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites, creating substantial opportunities and challenges with being found online. Today we are joined by two SEO experts, Brandon Liebowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and Jesse Ringer, founder of Method and Metric, to discuss the shifts in SEO due to new media forms and the influence of AI on search. To support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media, or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:08):
Connecting access. It’s the Chris Hood digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (01:40):
Let’s talk a little bit about SCO and meet our guest. Brandon, would you mind introducing yourself?
Brandon Leibowitz (01:46):
My name is Brandon Leibowitz and I’ve been involved with digital marketing since 2007, helping people get more traffic to their website using search engine optimization, doing some paid ads, but really focused more on the SEO side of things. Kinda got my degree in business marketing and after I graduated from college, first job I got outta school was helping a company out with their seo and I didn’t really know much about it. They said, don’t worry, we didn’t know much either. We were like, take you to classes and workshops and seminars. And this was back in 2007 and after working there for a few months, just kind of realized this is probably the future. Everyone’s gonna have a website and there’s a lot of different ways to get traffic, but s e was just a way to get free traffic. So I thought, let me focus on that. Over the years, working at different advertising agencies and before work, after working on my lunch breaks, I’d work on my own company and built that up to eventually where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this and really been doing that ever since just tapping into that s e o traffic.
Chris Hood (02:39):
Awesome. Jesse?
Jesse Ringer (02:41):
Yeah. my name is Jesse Ringer. I am the founder of Method and Metric. We are an SEO agency. I got a similar start to, to Brandon where Yeah, going through school, it was like an elective course to do SEO and exiting outta school in 2011. Yeah, I was approached by a friend who needed some SEO help and my naive little brain thinking I knew it all was like, sure, of course I could do that. And it, it kind of just spun off from there helping other friends with websites and, and then soon other people started to, to find it. Yeah, at a similar interest in the fact that, you know, it’s, it’s content, it’s marketing, but it’s also very data driven. And you know, blending the two worlds of creativity and then strategic analytic introspection, I think bodes well for, for what it is.
Chris Hood (03:29):
Great. It’s wonderful to have both of you joining me today talking about s e o. And here’s the reality. SEO is probably something that everybody who’s listening knows, they understand what it is, but it’s also one of the most mysterious things that we have to do in marketing. And as a result, I think there’s a lot of myths. There’s a lot of misperceptions. So simplify it and explain what is SEO and why is it so hard for people to understand what it is.
Jesse Ringer (04:02):
I think it’s so hard for people to understand what it is because it’s so many things like it’s, it’s content, it is keywords, it’s links, it’s, it’s what your website does and how it works. And there’s so many moving parts to it. And so especially now as Google’s algorithm has evolved and Bing is continuing to, to move into the AI space, like we have to continually adapt. And I think people that don’t follow it day to day kinda get lost in the minutiae of what actually SEO is
Brandon Leibowitz (04:40):
Intangible too, which makes it tricky and they just don’t really understand how it all works or that it takes time. Especially that’s the one big thing is everyone’s just like, I, why am I not ranking and just takes time for Google to trust you and to wanna really show you. So that’s a big part. And yeah, SEO is just that mystery that everyone’s like, what is it? But it’s really just trying to tap into Google and try to tap into that free traffic that they’re offering by ranking your website. But nowadays Google show websites, they show images, videos, maps, so just trying to optimize as much content as possible just to try to take up as much free real estate without spending money on paid ads.
Chris Hood (05:16):
I think that time piece that you touched on is really critical. Most people believe, Hey, I’m gonna hire somebody do seo, I’m gonna move up to number one on the search results and it’s gonna be done in a couple of weeks. But that’s just not the case.
Jesse Ringer (05:30):
That’s true. The number of clients that we get are like really hung up about one specific keyword. It’s, it’s, it’s always an interesting conversation being like they don’t rank number one for this keyword, but they rank number one for like a dozen others and like the dozen others don’t matter to them. And so it’s always like this yeah, interesting conversation of trying to only be like, these things drive traffic, these things are valuable too, not just this one big keyword that you wanna rank for.
Brandon Leibowitz (05:57):
Yeah, those are kind of like the ego keywords or like, I wanna rank for this, but sometimes I’ll show ’em like, nobody searches for this keyword, let’s use a p synonym or plural. But they’re still stuck on it. But the biggest thing is just that time of how competitive are your keywords versus your competitors? Like really the timeframe comes down to like your website versus your competitors. How much SEO have you done and how much SEO have your competitor’s done? And that kinda lets you know how much time it’s gonna take cuz it could take a few months if you have an established site with some good seo. But if you’re a brand new website, it could take six months or longer depending on how competitive those keywords are. And that sort, just trying to set those client expectations ahead of time and let ’em know, all right, these are keywords you wanna target, it’s gonna take this amount of time. And just letting them know upfront, like if you wanna rank quickly paid ads, maybe social media is gonna get you some traction, but SEO is more of that long-term play where you have to just be ready to build it up and build it up and build it up and eventually over time and gonna get that traffic. But just gotta be patient with it all.
Chris Hood (06:53):
And to both of your points, let’s be very clear here what you’re saying is it is possible that you might have a keyword that you will never be able to rank up into the top 1, 2, 3 positions that they’re hoping to correct.
Jesse Ringer (07:11):
Yeah, in my experience, yeah, totally. It’s, it’s always depending, like if you see Amazon or eBay or you know Wikipedia in there, it’s gonna be really hard for you to outrank those websites.
Brandon Leibowitz (07:24):
Yeah. Especially when they’re going after one word, two word keywords where it’s just like, these are so broad and there’s no intent behind it. Let’s focus on more long tail keywords that have buyer intent, more transactional type keywords that are gonna actually perform. So it’s just trying to figure out, all right, what keywords are good and which keywords are just those ego keywords that look good on paper, but they’re not gonna really do much for your business. Let’s focus on the ones that are gonna really move the needle and get you more leads in sales.
Chris Hood (07:51):
So from a purely marketing perspective, for leaders who might be listening to this show and they’re trying to figure out how do I manage all of this? And we know that the algorithms are constantly evolving, what is some tips that you can just lay out there in terms of a better understanding of how SEO is going to work or a better understanding of how they can implement this in their strategies?
Brandon Leibowitz (08:16):
Yeah, I always say SEO’s like a puzzle. There’s hundreds of pieces to it, but some pieces are a lot bigger than others. So you wanna focus on like the more important aspects like content, meaning text, like Google feeds off text. The more text you have on your website on each page, not just your homepage, but every page should have some text on it that’s gonna help the search engine really read, understand, and know what this page is about. But unfortunately, they don’t really care what you put on the website because they don’t trust you. So you gotta build that trust up. And building trust up is usually done through getting what are called backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you that are related and authoritative to what you’re doing, the more trust Google’s gonna give to you and, and then they’ll look at those keywords on your website. So I mean, there’s lots of aspects, but those two I’d say are probably the biggest pieces is content and backlinks and then everything else is important, but without those two in place, it’s gonna be really, really tough to rank.
Jesse Ringer (09:09):
Yeah, I think yeah, adding to that it’s like, you know, be aware that it does take time and being patient with that you know, SEO is like a savings account that it compounds over time. That trust that you’re building up, you know, being consistent with your, your marketing and your messaging and your, your website experience, you know, builds that trust and authority and that you can’t rush it, you can’t accelerate it, you can’t buy trust and so you kind of have to just take your time with it and, you know, watch it compound over time as you continually deliver a good experience. Yeah,
Chris Hood (09:48):
And to give you my own personal experience with some of this, I’ve had my website chris hood.com for 20 plus years and I’ve been building content for 20 plus years and there is still keywords, search results that don’t favor me as much as I would like them to. And it’s more than just that trust, right? Like I think that is a big part of it, but it’s also in the relevancy of the content that you’re producing and how it can be consumed across multiple channels, like, like you said, through back links, e even social media and how much you are talked about or shared, you know, across those different channels. And so this is very hard and I, again, I, I do think that there’s a lot of people out there that believe SEO is just gonna solve everything for them.
Brandon Leibowitz (10:41):
Yeah, I wish it was that easy. I wish I had that. Just a little magic ball, rub it and gets to the top. But there’s so much more that goes into it. Like nowadays it’s like eat so e E A T where it’s expertise, experience, author and trust kind of go into it. So just getting the trust from the backlinks is good, but now there’s so many other, because people gain the system too much from Google. So they’re like, I see these backlinks, but we don’t trust you still. Like we don’t believe that you really are, you say you are. So we wanna see that your, your name is all over the internet like that you’re an authoritative subject matter expert in this, especially for like health and wellness and financial niches. Those ones, they really put the emphasis on E but like now it’s pretty much for every website.
(11:21):
Just gotta build that trust across the board and just try to figure out, all right, how do I make myself a trustworthy, credible site? And having an old website is good, but there’s so many other variables that go into, like you’re saying, just having an old domain with some authoritative is good, but you can’t just throw out some content and expect it to rank. You still have to do the marketing and promote it, share it on social, get those social signals, get back link sent to that page, interlinking those pages together so Google follows and crawls them on your website and a lot of other variables. But it does help helping that authoritative site. But still there’s other things that you have to do to push it up that top to the top.
Jesse Ringer (11:58):
Yeah, like you said, like you have to do the work. Like you can’t rest on that content that you produced 20 years ago or even five years ago, like blog posts that are, you know, two plus years old, don’t rank as well as fresh content. And if you’re not putting in the time to, to stay relevant and you know, engaging with your audience across all the different channels, right? Like then you’re gonna really struggle to, to maintain the rankings that you once had cuz your competitors are doing the exact same thing and they’re trying to outrank you and they’re moving, you know, just as quickly if not faster in a lot of spaces. And you know, you need to to keep pace with that in order to maintain or even grow your, your audience and rankings.
Chris Hood (12:40):
We’re talking about written words, text, blog, articles, but in today’s world we’re also seeing a move towards a lot of other types of mechanisms to find content voice as an example, we’re producing a podcast right now and it’s all audio yet we know that audio can easily translate into text and even now we can translate text into audio. But how is some of the new media and forms of communication impacting seo?
Jesse Ringer (13:20):
Man, that’s a, a big one cuz I think, you know, voice searches pretty huge and people tend to speak in more complete sentences when they’re using voice devices, whether it’s like a Google Home or Alexa or even just their phone. So there, there’s that component. But on the flip side, like even with video content, Google still isn’t great at discerning what that media file contains, whether it’s audio or video or even just an image. And so text is still hugely important for it. You should be, you know, transcribing your, your content you should be describing your images quite vividly. And this also helps with accessibility. So people that you know are blind or colorblind or have you know, cognitive disabilities being able to reach those people as well also benefits your seo.
Brandon Leibowitz (14:17):
Yeah, yeah, the new media, I mean there’s so much new stuff that’s coming out, it’s just trying to stay on top of it and just figure out what’s next. But like you were saying, like yeah, images, videos, audio, Google still struggles with that. They’re getting better but they still need you to kind of spoonfeed them because they’re not there yet. Like if you upload a video to YouTube, they’ll transcribe it but it’s not perfect so you still gotta go in there, edit it, tweak it. So I would still, like you said, manually transcribe everything or if it’s like an hour long podcast, maybe like timestamp it and have like a summary and description because an hour long transcript might be a little bit too much, but it’s all about who your audience is and if they’re gonna read that, then as long as it offers value, Google says do it. So offering value, it’s gonna be beneficial. Great. But if you’re just doing it for SEO purposes and it’s kind of spammy, then probably stay away from it cuz probably gonna be more harm than good in the long run nowadays cuz Google’s on top of it and they’ve seen all these tweaks and changes in ways that people try and manipulate the system that it might work temporarily, but in the long run it’s probably gonna do more harm than good, which we don’t wanna get you penalized or anything like that.
Jesse Ringer (15:19):
Yeah, yeah. One other thing is like make sure you’re adding value to your audience and not just trying to be self-serving about it. Like if you are, like Brandon said, transcribing this content with like keyword stuffing and tons of internal links to your webpages, like Google’s gonna figure it out, right? But if you’re adding real value to your viewers, your audience and then Google will reward that and and people will see that too and they’ll come back and keep continuing to consume your content.
Chris Hood (15:49):
I think the video piece is also very interesting. Google is still struggling with some of this, but there is also a belief that the metadata is going to be enough to convince Google and search engines what the content is. What we know is that you could upload a video of us talking and say that it’s a red car driving down the freeway and at what point does Google able to transcribe it and say, well no this isn’t actually a red car traveling down the freeway, it’s three people talking. Sometimes we do try or people are out there trying to manipulate that meta by actually injecting the keywords into it and we’re getting smart enough to be able to decipher what that video content really is and then be able to reward as well in that SEO space.
Brandon Leibowitz (16:38):
Yeah, but Google’s all about relevancy too. So it’s like if someone searches for red car and then this video ranks and it’s us three talking, then someone’s gonna watch that video for maybe like 10 seconds, 20 seconds and hit that back button unless it’s really engaging like, oh I wanna learn about seo but they’re searching for red car, they wanna see stuff about cars, so they’re gonna look at that average watch time and that’s gonna send them a negative signal saying, all right, this website or this video ranks for this keyword. But everyone that watches this video, they only stay for like 10 seconds. Maybe we shouldn’t rank you for this video. It’s kinda like the Google dance where they might rank your website at the top of the search results and then they see that all these people are coming to your website. But let’s say like half of ’em hit that back button, that bounce rate, Google’s gonna be like, maybe we shouldn’t keep you up here, maybe we should drop you down a little bit.
(17:23):
So you manipulate it but if the use, it’s all about user experience now too. That’s a big part of the algorithm is looking at how people behave on your website or when do they watch your video content cuz Google owns YouTube so it’s just making sure they stay and that they engage because if not that tells Google’s not what they’re looking for and they wanna have a good user experience, they wanna make sure that you find what you’re looking for. Otherwise, if you’re searching on Google for red card and then our video pops up, that’s a good user experience. People are gonna be like, what’s going on Google or YouTube, why are you showing me this? And that’s gonna get people to not use Google or not use YouTube and that’s the last thing they want. They wanna keep you on there as long as possible so you keep spending more time and watching more ads and clicking on more ads cuz that’s how they make all their money.
Jesse Ringer (18:05):
Yeah, brand, you bring up a good point about like this is all about Google making more money, right? Like the, the search results are great because Google knows that they contribute to more revenue and if they start to get, you know, sloppy with their, their results and there are too many ads or too many irrelevant links, like people aren’t gonna spend time there, right? And they have so much data that they already know what’s gonna work and what isn’t and they’re always testing that. So and again like you, you can game the system all you want but it won’t be sustainable and you’ll be eroding that trust and you’ll be eroding the authority and everything that you’ve been trying to build up, you know, over time. And then in the end it, your website won’t rank as well as it it could have.
Brandon Leibowitz (18:46):
Yeah then you gotta start from scratch and kind of start all over again or gotta look if you’ve been penalized and try to clean up all that stuff, which getting outta the penalty is really, really, really tough and time consuming. So it’s better to just avoid that at all just because that temporary bump in traffic might look good but it’s gonna be temporary and short-lived and eventually Google or your competitor’s gonna tell Google what you’re doing and then Google’s gonna penalize you and drop you down
Chris Hood (19:11):
That good experience in what Google is trying to enforce benefits you as well. We’re starting to see that things like site speed, mobile experience, you talked about accessibility, all of those are now factors in rankings that’s not just for making money, but it also does benefit you. We know from statistics that consumers will not return to a website if they have a bad experience on it. Why would you not want to improve your experience? Because it’s not only helping your customers, but it’s also helping your rankings in the same process.
Jesse Ringer (19:46):
Yeah, it’s also helping your bottom line too, right? Like repeat business is fantastic and repeat visitors is so good and important. Like you need to have that. Yeah and I think that all of those things like Google knows that if they, they’ve done this before with like the mobile first index algorithm and moving everything to having SSL certificates. Like these are good trust things that consumers want and people shopping on the intranet want, they wanna be able to trust those websites. And so yeah, Google does give us, you know, some insight into what people care about and what they need in terms of a good online experience and it’s just up to us to make sure that we’re kind of following along with that. And it helps us, you know, in a way that we can generate more traffic through Google because we’re playing by their rules within their sandbox to kind of like figure out how to best reach the, the people that we’re trying to connect with.
Brandon Leibowitz (20:39):
It’s kind of like those paid ads when you run Google ads, they’ll reward you if you have a good user experience. Like you make everything streamlined and smooth, easy to use, your website loads quick, all that stuff. Just like with seo, like with paid ads, they’ll actually reduce the cost per click. So if you’re running paid ads and your ad might be a dollar per click, if you have a well optimized website with a good user experience, Google’s gonna drop it down to like maybe like 98 cents a click. Not a big difference, but over time it’s gonna add up and helps you save money because Google wants you to have a good user experience, they want you to get more conversions, more sales and they wanna reward you cuz they know if you have a good user or get lots of conversions, you’re gonna keep spending more money on those paid ads. Kinda like the seo, they want you to have a good user experience, make sure everything’s aligned, that people are happy they stay on your website because that’s gonna keep people going on Google versus Bing or Yahoo or Duck dot go or any of these other search engines. So they just want, they wanna keep you there.
Chris Hood (21:34):
I also don’t know how many people realize where personalization comes into this conversation. Not just what you personalize from your own website, but Google will build relevancy based on your prior history, your prior search results, what they believe you are looking for. And so the three of us could do a search right now for the exact same keyword and in theory we’re all going to see something completely different that’s based on our individual search criteria and history. How much does that really impact the way we produce content and market our websites?
Jesse Ringer (22:15):
That’s a great question. Oh, I mean it’s extremely hard to anticipate that kind of experience individual an individual level. But you know, we advocate for all of our clients. Like you get people to the website once, like then you have a great chance of seeing them again and again. And so I think for us at least, like we can’t predict when Google is gonna show one of our clients’ blog posts that maybe doesn’t rank all that well normally versus you know, for someone who’s been to the website before. And so we’re always just like thinking about the funnel steps of like where does this content piece fit, you know, and how to keep people on our site as well. You know, once they’ve come to the website, how do we engage them so that they take one extra click, they go one step further than just that original blog post or landing page. And so yeah, I’d say that that’s kind of how we think about it, but man, yeah.
Brandon Leibowitz (23:10):
Yeah, it’s tricky with the personalization, knowing what they’re gonna show because like you said, if we all search right now, if we’re on the same browser searching on desktop, it’s gonna be slightly different. But like Google changes if you’re mobile versus desktop, if you’re on iPad, your geolocation, what browser you’re on, there’s so many variables that go into it that’s kind of tough to predict and really optimize for that. But for like geolocation, you could kind of do a little bit like that. Like if you’re like a plumber and you’re based in Los Angeles and you wanna hit some surrounding cities and maybe create some content around those surrounding city pages. But even that, it’s tough to know what’s gonna show. It’s not gonna show and it’s personalization part is tricky, but you just try to put your best foot forward and try to optimize as best as you can and hope that Google’s gonna wanna show you for those different spots and those different areas. But like one thing that you could do for the personalization is just make sure your website’s mobile friendly, which hopefully everyone’s website is mobile friendly nowadays, but if it’s not, they’re not gonna show you on mobile devices. And mobile brings in over half the traffic from most websites. So little things like that could help out with personalization, but it gets tricky when they’re really personalize it. Cause they look at your search history and there’s so much variables that go into it that it’s really tough to understand what they’re looking for.
Chris Hood (24:20):
How about the next stage of personalization, which if you haven’t predicted already, is ai. Now AI is not only impacting search results and obviously we can get into long form search results, but also in theory it’s going to be able to personalize exactly what I’m looking for when I’m looking for it. How do you think that’s going to play into a lot of organizations’ marketing strategies?
Brandon Leibowitz (24:50):
Yeah, AI’s changing things up a lot, so it, it is tough to really see what’s gonna happen, but for now, I mean it’s tricky. Like you can’t really buy off chat g d or Bard or any of these ones. So it’s like maybe more informational searches, but transactional, we’ll have to see how that’s gonna work. Like if you’re like buy a red car or something like that, they’re not gonna really, I mean they give you lists of places and like reviews and things like that, but in terms of like e-commerce and things like that, I don’t think it’s gonna affect it yet, but love to see, they might incorporate that into the, the AI results, but it’s just so dynamic and it changes so quick right now that it’s really tricky. But just trying to be aware, I feel like AI is kind of like that featured snippet where they’re just gonna take one result and show it right there. And if you’re not that top one then, but then you’re not getting traffic either to your website. I don’t know, it’s really strange how it all works and it’s gonna really, I mean it is already thrown a big curve ball and everything and we’re just have to hold onto to it and see what’s gonna happen because it’s just so dynamic it changes so quickly right now it’s tough to really predict what’s gonna happen.
Jesse Ringer (25:50):
Yeah, like we were talking about it earlier, like with Google and their experience, like if go people don’t trust that that experience on Google, they’re not gonna come back. And I think Google’s gonna be testing a lot of that, that side of the experience, right? Like I, if it’s good for the user, then that’s great, but on the flip side, like if the creators are not being rewarded, whether that is through traffic or revenue, then who’s to say that they won’t start blocking Google from using their information in those search results? And so, you know, th this has happened before where Google has been showing results without giving credit to the creators and you know, they, they had to do some changes around that. And so that part will be really interesting from a website perspective. You know, like I’ve I was hanging out with a friend who teaches a course on on and he was saying like, ever since chat G b t like 40% of the class have almost the identical answer for every question.
(26:50):
You know, they’re all just replicating it. And so, you know, if you’re using AI to create your content, you’re gonna be have very generic and similar content to everyone else using the exact same kind of prompt or or request. So, you know, the the uniqueness, the the the expertise and all those kinds of things that you’re trying to cultivate that we’ve been talking about all episode. You know, if you start leaning to heavily on ai you’re gonna erode a lot of that stuff because it’s just gonna be a generic answer that everyone else already has.
Chris Hood (27:27):
I think content building with generative AI is one thing. The other side of this is I see a lot of advertisements and videos online streamline your s e O with AI or keyword research leveraging ai. Now I do think a lot of that is really just overly hyped, but there’s probably a belief though that AI can help do your jobs both of you, what you’re doing, whether that’s keyword management or keyword optimization. Do we see AI seriously helping in those areas?
Brandon Leibowitz (28:02):
Definitely helps out a little bit. I mean I take everything with a grain of salt and don’t just copy verbatim what you see or read on there because it’s not a hundred percent accurate. Maybe in like five or 10 years once more people use it and use it and it gets more accurate. But it definitely does help speed things up a little bit like keyword research, you could do that. I mean you even like throw it in there and say Hey, what do you think for a title tag or meta description? But I’ve done that and it doesn’t work too well. Schema is a really good one where you’re trying to write schema code and I’m not the best at coding and I just go into chat G B D and stuff like that. Like hey, can you write schema for this FAQ or local schema or whatever type of schema you’re putting in there?
(28:41):
And again, it doesn’t work perfect. I still validate it and half the time it’s wrong, but the other half of the time that’s right saves me a lot of time. So it’s just being aware that it’ll help out. It’s a tool. I just have to use it as a tool and not just copy it verbatim and rely on it completely cuz it’s not a hundred percent accurate, but it does help speed some things up. But the back links, like that’s the part that you can’t really help out with is building back links. It could definitely help out with like writing content articles, blogs, press releases, all that stuff. But in terms of, again, that publish and building those relationships with other websites, that’s something that I don’t think it could do yet. Another tool to just help speed things up, but I can’t replace it yet.
Jesse Ringer (29:18):
Yeah, like from a strategic perspective I think it’s a long ways off, but it does save us a lot of time and on a tactical side of things, it’ll be really helpful and we’ll just have to continue to, you know, integrate it into our processes and you know, it would be shortsighted of us to completely discount it and be like, it’s not gonna take our jobs or it’s not gonna like make us irrelevant. But at the same time, like there’s still gonna be businesses and, and marketers that need strategic ideas and strategic support versus like, write these thousand meta descriptions or product descriptions or image alt texts. Like if we could get that off of our plate, that would be huge and give us time to actually think about the strategic direction of each brand that we work with. You know, like that stuff is still gonna be very hard for AI to, to take away from us, but crafting messaging and stuff like that. And obviously like Brandon said, like there’s always gonna be an need to review it and edit it. Like that lawyer that decided to use chat gpt as his opening arguments and they referenced TV show cases, you need a review process, but it will cut out a ton of time, right?
Chris Hood (30:28):
You’re not going to have an AI who’s going to reach out on your behalf to ask for links from some of the other services that might be comparable to you. There’s still a lot of work that has to be done by a human. No one’s automating that quite yet for us. Well, gentlemen, it has been an honor to have you both here. It’s been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for joining.
Jesse Ringer (30:50):
Thanks for having us, Chris. Thank you for having us
Chris Hood (30:52):
On. And of course, thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and grow. And if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show. And please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. The crucial role of search engine optimization in the modern business landscape is undeniable. It’s not just about being searchable anymore, it’s about being found by the right audience at the right time in the proper context. But this is harder than you think. Currently, the number of searches on Google Daily is over 7 billion. And for S E O, Google uses over 200 factors in their algorithm for ranking websites, creating substantial opportunities and challenges with being found online. Today we are joined by two SEO experts, Brandon Liebowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and Jesse Ringer, founder of Method and Metric, to discuss the shifts in SEO due to new media forms and the influence of AI on search. To support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media, or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:08):
Connecting access. It’s the Chris Hood digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Your digital evolution starts Now. Here’s your host, Chris Hood.
Chris Hood (01:40):
Let’s talk a little bit about SCO and meet our guest. Brandon, would you mind introducing yourself?
Brandon Leibowitz (01:46):
My name is Brandon Leibowitz and I’ve been involved with digital marketing since 2007, helping people get more traffic to their website using search engine optimization, doing some paid ads, but really focused more on the SEO side of things. Kinda got my degree in business marketing and after I graduated from college, first job I got outta school was helping a company out with their seo and I didn’t really know much about it. They said, don’t worry, we didn’t know much either. We were like, take you to classes and workshops and seminars. And this was back in 2007 and after working there for a few months, just kind of realized this is probably the future. Everyone’s gonna have a website and there’s a lot of different ways to get traffic, but s e was just a way to get free traffic. So I thought, let me focus on that. Over the years, working at different advertising agencies and before work, after working on my lunch breaks, I’d work on my own company and built that up to eventually where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this and really been doing that ever since just tapping into that s e o traffic.
Chris Hood (02:39):
Awesome. Jesse?
Jesse Ringer (02:41):
Yeah. my name is Jesse Ringer. I am the founder of Method and Metric. We are an SEO agency. I got a similar start to, to Brandon where Yeah, going through school, it was like an elective course to do SEO and exiting outta school in 2011. Yeah, I was approached by a friend who needed some SEO help and my naive little brain thinking I knew it all was like, sure, of course I could do that. And it, it kind of just spun off from there helping other friends with websites and, and then soon other people started to, to find it. Yeah, at a similar interest in the fact that, you know, it’s, it’s content, it’s marketing, but it’s also very data driven. And you know, blending the two worlds of creativity and then strategic analytic introspection, I think bodes well for, for what it is.
Chris Hood (03:29):
Great. It’s wonderful to have both of you joining me today talking about s e o. And here’s the reality. SEO is probably something that everybody who’s listening knows, they understand what it is, but it’s also one of the most mysterious things that we have to do in marketing. And as a result, I think there’s a lot of myths. There’s a lot of misperceptions. So simplify it and explain what is SEO and why is it so hard for people to understand what it is.
Jesse Ringer (04:02):
I think it’s so hard for people to understand what it is because it’s so many things like it’s, it’s content, it is keywords, it’s links, it’s, it’s what your website does and how it works. And there’s so many moving parts to it. And so especially now as Google’s algorithm has evolved and Bing is continuing to, to move into the AI space, like we have to continually adapt. And I think people that don’t follow it day to day kinda get lost in the minutiae of what actually SEO is
Brandon Leibowitz (04:40):
Intangible too, which makes it tricky and they just don’t really understand how it all works or that it takes time. Especially that’s the one big thing is everyone’s just like, I, why am I not ranking and just takes time for Google to trust you and to wanna really show you. So that’s a big part. And yeah, SEO is just that mystery that everyone’s like, what is it? But it’s really just trying to tap into Google and try to tap into that free traffic that they’re offering by ranking your website. But nowadays Google show websites, they show images, videos, maps, so just trying to optimize as much content as possible just to try to take up as much free real estate without spending money on paid ads.
Chris Hood (05:16):
I think that time piece that you touched on is really critical. Most people believe, Hey, I’m gonna hire somebody do seo, I’m gonna move up to number one on the search results and it’s gonna be done in a couple of weeks. But that’s just not the case.
Jesse Ringer (05:30):
That’s true. The number of clients that we get are like really hung up about one specific keyword. It’s, it’s, it’s always an interesting conversation being like they don’t rank number one for this keyword, but they rank number one for like a dozen others and like the dozen others don’t matter to them. And so it’s always like this yeah, interesting conversation of trying to only be like, these things drive traffic, these things are valuable too, not just this one big keyword that you wanna rank for.
Brandon Leibowitz (05:57):
Yeah, those are kind of like the ego keywords or like, I wanna rank for this, but sometimes I’ll show ’em like, nobody searches for this keyword, let’s use a p synonym or plural. But they’re still stuck on it. But the biggest thing is just that time of how competitive are your keywords versus your competitors? Like really the timeframe comes down to like your website versus your competitors. How much SEO have you done and how much SEO have your competitor’s done? And that kinda lets you know how much time it’s gonna take cuz it could take a few months if you have an established site with some good seo. But if you’re a brand new website, it could take six months or longer depending on how competitive those keywords are. And that sort, just trying to set those client expectations ahead of time and let ’em know, all right, these are keywords you wanna target, it’s gonna take this amount of time. And just letting them know upfront, like if you wanna rank quickly paid ads, maybe social media is gonna get you some traction, but SEO is more of that long-term play where you have to just be ready to build it up and build it up and build it up and eventually over time and gonna get that traffic. But just gotta be patient with it all.
Chris Hood (06:53):
And to both of your points, let’s be very clear here what you’re saying is it is possible that you might have a keyword that you will never be able to rank up into the top 1, 2, 3 positions that they’re hoping to correct.
Jesse Ringer (07:11):
Yeah, in my experience, yeah, totally. It’s, it’s always depending, like if you see Amazon or eBay or you know Wikipedia in there, it’s gonna be really hard for you to outrank those websites.
Brandon Leibowitz (07:24):
Yeah. Especially when they’re going after one word, two word keywords where it’s just like, these are so broad and there’s no intent behind it. Let’s focus on more long tail keywords that have buyer intent, more transactional type keywords that are gonna actually perform. So it’s just trying to figure out, all right, what keywords are good and which keywords are just those ego keywords that look good on paper, but they’re not gonna really do much for your business. Let’s focus on the ones that are gonna really move the needle and get you more leads in sales.
Chris Hood (07:51):
So from a purely marketing perspective, for leaders who might be listening to this show and they’re trying to figure out how do I manage all of this? And we know that the algorithms are constantly evolving, what is some tips that you can just lay out there in terms of a better understanding of how SEO is going to work or a better understanding of how they can implement this in their strategies?
Brandon Leibowitz (08:16):
Yeah, I always say SEO’s like a puzzle. There’s hundreds of pieces to it, but some pieces are a lot bigger than others. So you wanna focus on like the more important aspects like content, meaning text, like Google feeds off text. The more text you have on your website on each page, not just your homepage, but every page should have some text on it that’s gonna help the search engine really read, understand, and know what this page is about. But unfortunately, they don’t really care what you put on the website because they don’t trust you. So you gotta build that trust up. And building trust up is usually done through getting what are called backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you that are related and authoritative to what you’re doing, the more trust Google’s gonna give to you and, and then they’ll look at those keywords on your website. So I mean, there’s lots of aspects, but those two I’d say are probably the biggest pieces is content and backlinks and then everything else is important, but without those two in place, it’s gonna be really, really tough to rank.
Jesse Ringer (09:09):
Yeah, I think yeah, adding to that it’s like, you know, be aware that it does take time and being patient with that you know, SEO is like a savings account that it compounds over time. That trust that you’re building up, you know, being consistent with your, your marketing and your messaging and your, your website experience, you know, builds that trust and authority and that you can’t rush it, you can’t accelerate it, you can’t buy trust and so you kind of have to just take your time with it and, you know, watch it compound over time as you continually deliver a good experience. Yeah,
Chris Hood (09:48):
And to give you my own personal experience with some of this, I’ve had my website chris hood.com for 20 plus years and I’ve been building content for 20 plus years and there is still keywords, search results that don’t favor me as much as I would like them to. And it’s more than just that trust, right? Like I think that is a big part of it, but it’s also in the relevancy of the content that you’re producing and how it can be consumed across multiple channels, like, like you said, through back links, e even social media and how much you are talked about or shared, you know, across those different channels. And so this is very hard and I, again, I, I do think that there’s a lot of people out there that believe SEO is just gonna solve everything for them.
Brandon Leibowitz (10:41):
Yeah, I wish it was that easy. I wish I had that. Just a little magic ball, rub it and gets to the top. But there’s so much more that goes into it. Like nowadays it’s like eat so e E A T where it’s expertise, experience, author and trust kind of go into it. So just getting the trust from the backlinks is good, but now there’s so many other, because people gain the system too much from Google. So they’re like, I see these backlinks, but we don’t trust you still. Like we don’t believe that you really are, you say you are. So we wanna see that your, your name is all over the internet like that you’re an authoritative subject matter expert in this, especially for like health and wellness and financial niches. Those ones, they really put the emphasis on E but like now it’s pretty much for every website.
(11:21):
Just gotta build that trust across the board and just try to figure out, all right, how do I make myself a trustworthy, credible site? And having an old website is good, but there’s so many other variables that go into, like you’re saying, just having an old domain with some authoritative is good, but you can’t just throw out some content and expect it to rank. You still have to do the marketing and promote it, share it on social, get those social signals, get back link sent to that page, interlinking those pages together so Google follows and crawls them on your website and a lot of other variables. But it does help helping that authoritative site. But still there’s other things that you have to do to push it up that top to the top.
Jesse Ringer (11:58):
Yeah, like you said, like you have to do the work. Like you can’t rest on that content that you produced 20 years ago or even five years ago, like blog posts that are, you know, two plus years old, don’t rank as well as fresh content. And if you’re not putting in the time to, to stay relevant and you know, engaging with your audience across all the different channels, right? Like then you’re gonna really struggle to, to maintain the rankings that you once had cuz your competitors are doing the exact same thing and they’re trying to outrank you and they’re moving, you know, just as quickly if not faster in a lot of spaces. And you know, you need to to keep pace with that in order to maintain or even grow your, your audience and rankings.
Chris Hood (12:40):
We’re talking about written words, text, blog, articles, but in today’s world we’re also seeing a move towards a lot of other types of mechanisms to find content voice as an example, we’re producing a podcast right now and it’s all audio yet we know that audio can easily translate into text and even now we can translate text into audio. But how is some of the new media and forms of communication impacting seo?
Jesse Ringer (13:20):
Man, that’s a, a big one cuz I think, you know, voice searches pretty huge and people tend to speak in more complete sentences when they’re using voice devices, whether it’s like a Google Home or Alexa or even just their phone. So there, there’s that component. But on the flip side, like even with video content, Google still isn’t great at discerning what that media file contains, whether it’s audio or video or even just an image. And so text is still hugely important for it. You should be, you know, transcribing your, your content you should be describing your images quite vividly. And this also helps with accessibility. So people that you know are blind or colorblind or have you know, cognitive disabilities being able to reach those people as well also benefits your seo.
Brandon Leibowitz (14:17):
Yeah, yeah, the new media, I mean there’s so much new stuff that’s coming out, it’s just trying to stay on top of it and just figure out what’s next. But like you were saying, like yeah, images, videos, audio, Google still struggles with that. They’re getting better but they still need you to kind of spoonfeed them because they’re not there yet. Like if you upload a video to YouTube, they’ll transcribe it but it’s not perfect so you still gotta go in there, edit it, tweak it. So I would still, like you said, manually transcribe everything or if it’s like an hour long podcast, maybe like timestamp it and have like a summary and description because an hour long transcript might be a little bit too much, but it’s all about who your audience is and if they’re gonna read that, then as long as it offers value, Google says do it. So offering value, it’s gonna be beneficial. Great. But if you’re just doing it for SEO purposes and it’s kind of spammy, then probably stay away from it cuz probably gonna be more harm than good in the long run nowadays cuz Google’s on top of it and they’ve seen all these tweaks and changes in ways that people try and manipulate the system that it might work temporarily, but in the long run it’s probably gonna do more harm than good, which we don’t wanna get you penalized or anything like that.
Jesse Ringer (15:19):
Yeah, yeah. One other thing is like make sure you’re adding value to your audience and not just trying to be self-serving about it. Like if you are, like Brandon said, transcribing this content with like keyword stuffing and tons of internal links to your webpages, like Google’s gonna figure it out, right? But if you’re adding real value to your viewers, your audience and then Google will reward that and and people will see that too and they’ll come back and keep continuing to consume your content.
Chris Hood (15:49):
I think the video piece is also very interesting. Google is still struggling with some of this, but there is also a belief that the metadata is going to be enough to convince Google and search engines what the content is. What we know is that you could upload a video of us talking and say that it’s a red car driving down the freeway and at what point does Google able to transcribe it and say, well no this isn’t actually a red car traveling down the freeway, it’s three people talking. Sometimes we do try or people are out there trying to manipulate that meta by actually injecting the keywords into it and we’re getting smart enough to be able to decipher what that video content really is and then be able to reward as well in that SEO space.
Brandon Leibowitz (16:38):
Yeah, but Google’s all about relevancy too. So it’s like if someone searches for red car and then this video ranks and it’s us three talking, then someone’s gonna watch that video for maybe like 10 seconds, 20 seconds and hit that back button unless it’s really engaging like, oh I wanna learn about seo but they’re searching for red car, they wanna see stuff about cars, so they’re gonna look at that average watch time and that’s gonna send them a negative signal saying, all right, this website or this video ranks for this keyword. But everyone that watches this video, they only stay for like 10 seconds. Maybe we shouldn’t rank you for this video. It’s kinda like the Google dance where they might rank your website at the top of the search results and then they see that all these people are coming to your website. But let’s say like half of ’em hit that back button, that bounce rate, Google’s gonna be like, maybe we shouldn’t keep you up here, maybe we should drop you down a little bit.
(17:23):
So you manipulate it but if the use, it’s all about user experience now too. That’s a big part of the algorithm is looking at how people behave on your website or when do they watch your video content cuz Google owns YouTube so it’s just making sure they stay and that they engage because if not that tells Google’s not what they’re looking for and they wanna have a good user experience, they wanna make sure that you find what you’re looking for. Otherwise, if you’re searching on Google for red card and then our video pops up, that’s a good user experience. People are gonna be like, what’s going on Google or YouTube, why are you showing me this? And that’s gonna get people to not use Google or not use YouTube and that’s the last thing they want. They wanna keep you on there as long as possible so you keep spending more time and watching more ads and clicking on more ads cuz that’s how they make all their money.
Jesse Ringer (18:05):
Yeah, brand, you bring up a good point about like this is all about Google making more money, right? Like the, the search results are great because Google knows that they contribute to more revenue and if they start to get, you know, sloppy with their, their results and there are too many ads or too many irrelevant links, like people aren’t gonna spend time there, right? And they have so much data that they already know what’s gonna work and what isn’t and they’re always testing that. So and again like you, you can game the system all you want but it won’t be sustainable and you’ll be eroding that trust and you’ll be eroding the authority and everything that you’ve been trying to build up, you know, over time. And then in the end it, your website won’t rank as well as it it could have.
Brandon Leibowitz (18:46):
Yeah then you gotta start from scratch and kind of start all over again or gotta look if you’ve been penalized and try to clean up all that stuff, which getting outta the penalty is really, really, really tough and time consuming. So it’s better to just avoid that at all just because that temporary bump in traffic might look good but it’s gonna be temporary and short-lived and eventually Google or your competitor’s gonna tell Google what you’re doing and then Google’s gonna penalize you and drop you down
Chris Hood (19:11):
That good experience in what Google is trying to enforce benefits you as well. We’re starting to see that things like site speed, mobile experience, you talked about accessibility, all of those are now factors in rankings that’s not just for making money, but it also does benefit you. We know from statistics that consumers will not return to a website if they have a bad experience on it. Why would you not want to improve your experience? Because it’s not only helping your customers, but it’s also helping your rankings in the same process.
Jesse Ringer (19:46):
Yeah, it’s also helping your bottom line too, right? Like repeat business is fantastic and repeat visitors is so good and important. Like you need to have that. Yeah and I think that all of those things like Google knows that if they, they’ve done this before with like the mobile first index algorithm and moving everything to having SSL certificates. Like these are good trust things that consumers want and people shopping on the intranet want, they wanna be able to trust those websites. And so yeah, Google does give us, you know, some insight into what people care about and what they need in terms of a good online experience and it’s just up to us to make sure that we’re kind of following along with that. And it helps us, you know, in a way that we can generate more traffic through Google because we’re playing by their rules within their sandbox to kind of like figure out how to best reach the, the people that we’re trying to connect with.
Brandon Leibowitz (20:39):
It’s kind of like those paid ads when you run Google ads, they’ll reward you if you have a good user experience. Like you make everything streamlined and smooth, easy to use, your website loads quick, all that stuff. Just like with seo, like with paid ads, they’ll actually reduce the cost per click. So if you’re running paid ads and your ad might be a dollar per click, if you have a well optimized website with a good user experience, Google’s gonna drop it down to like maybe like 98 cents a click. Not a big difference, but over time it’s gonna add up and helps you save money because Google wants you to have a good user experience, they want you to get more conversions, more sales and they wanna reward you cuz they know if you have a good user or get lots of conversions, you’re gonna keep spending more money on those paid ads. Kinda like the seo, they want you to have a good user experience, make sure everything’s aligned, that people are happy they stay on your website because that’s gonna keep people going on Google versus Bing or Yahoo or Duck dot go or any of these other search engines. So they just want, they wanna keep you there.
Chris Hood (21:34):
I also don’t know how many people realize where personalization comes into this conversation. Not just what you personalize from your own website, but Google will build relevancy based on your prior history, your prior search results, what they believe you are looking for. And so the three of us could do a search right now for the exact same keyword and in theory we’re all going to see something completely different that’s based on our individual search criteria and history. How much does that really impact the way we produce content and market our websites?
Jesse Ringer (22:15):
That’s a great question. Oh, I mean it’s extremely hard to anticipate that kind of experience individual an individual level. But you know, we advocate for all of our clients. Like you get people to the website once, like then you have a great chance of seeing them again and again. And so I think for us at least, like we can’t predict when Google is gonna show one of our clients’ blog posts that maybe doesn’t rank all that well normally versus you know, for someone who’s been to the website before. And so we’re always just like thinking about the funnel steps of like where does this content piece fit, you know, and how to keep people on our site as well. You know, once they’ve come to the website, how do we engage them so that they take one extra click, they go one step further than just that original blog post or landing page. And so yeah, I’d say that that’s kind of how we think about it, but man, yeah.
Brandon Leibowitz (23:10):
Yeah, it’s tricky with the personalization, knowing what they’re gonna show because like you said, if we all search right now, if we’re on the same browser searching on desktop, it’s gonna be slightly different. But like Google changes if you’re mobile versus desktop, if you’re on iPad, your geolocation, what browser you’re on, there’s so many variables that go into it that’s kind of tough to predict and really optimize for that. But for like geolocation, you could kind of do a little bit like that. Like if you’re like a plumber and you’re based in Los Angeles and you wanna hit some surrounding cities and maybe create some content around those surrounding city pages. But even that, it’s tough to know what’s gonna show. It’s not gonna show and it’s personalization part is tricky, but you just try to put your best foot forward and try to optimize as best as you can and hope that Google’s gonna wanna show you for those different spots and those different areas. But like one thing that you could do for the personalization is just make sure your website’s mobile friendly, which hopefully everyone’s website is mobile friendly nowadays, but if it’s not, they’re not gonna show you on mobile devices. And mobile brings in over half the traffic from most websites. So little things like that could help out with personalization, but it gets tricky when they’re really personalize it. Cause they look at your search history and there’s so much variables that go into it that it’s really tough to understand what they’re looking for.
Chris Hood (24:20):
How about the next stage of personalization, which if you haven’t predicted already, is ai. Now AI is not only impacting search results and obviously we can get into long form search results, but also in theory it’s going to be able to personalize exactly what I’m looking for when I’m looking for it. How do you think that’s going to play into a lot of organizations’ marketing strategies?
Brandon Leibowitz (24:50):
Yeah, AI’s changing things up a lot, so it, it is tough to really see what’s gonna happen, but for now, I mean it’s tricky. Like you can’t really buy off chat g d or Bard or any of these ones. So it’s like maybe more informational searches, but transactional, we’ll have to see how that’s gonna work. Like if you’re like buy a red car or something like that, they’re not gonna really, I mean they give you lists of places and like reviews and things like that, but in terms of like e-commerce and things like that, I don’t think it’s gonna affect it yet, but love to see, they might incorporate that into the, the AI results, but it’s just so dynamic and it changes so quick right now that it’s really tricky. But just trying to be aware, I feel like AI is kind of like that featured snippet where they’re just gonna take one result and show it right there. And if you’re not that top one then, but then you’re not getting traffic either to your website. I don’t know, it’s really strange how it all works and it’s gonna really, I mean it is already thrown a big curve ball and everything and we’re just have to hold onto to it and see what’s gonna happen because it’s just so dynamic it changes so quickly right now it’s tough to really predict what’s gonna happen.
Jesse Ringer (25:50):
Yeah, like we were talking about it earlier, like with Google and their experience, like if go people don’t trust that that experience on Google, they’re not gonna come back. And I think Google’s gonna be testing a lot of that, that side of the experience, right? Like I, if it’s good for the user, then that’s great, but on the flip side, like if the creators are not being rewarded, whether that is through traffic or revenue, then who’s to say that they won’t start blocking Google from using their information in those search results? And so, you know, th this has happened before where Google has been showing results without giving credit to the creators and you know, they, they had to do some changes around that. And so that part will be really interesting from a website perspective. You know, like I’ve I was hanging out with a friend who teaches a course on on and he was saying like, ever since chat G b t like 40% of the class have almost the identical answer for every question.
(26:50):
You know, they’re all just replicating it. And so, you know, if you’re using AI to create your content, you’re gonna be have very generic and similar content to everyone else using the exact same kind of prompt or or request. So, you know, the the uniqueness, the the the expertise and all those kinds of things that you’re trying to cultivate that we’ve been talking about all episode. You know, if you start leaning to heavily on ai you’re gonna erode a lot of that stuff because it’s just gonna be a generic answer that everyone else already has.
Chris Hood (27:27):
I think content building with generative AI is one thing. The other side of this is I see a lot of advertisements and videos online streamline your s e O with AI or keyword research leveraging ai. Now I do think a lot of that is really just overly hyped, but there’s probably a belief though that AI can help do your jobs both of you, what you’re doing, whether that’s keyword management or keyword optimization. Do we see AI seriously helping in those areas?
Brandon Leibowitz (28:02):
Definitely helps out a little bit. I mean I take everything with a grain of salt and don’t just copy verbatim what you see or read on there because it’s not a hundred percent accurate. Maybe in like five or 10 years once more people use it and use it and it gets more accurate. But it definitely does help speed things up a little bit like keyword research, you could do that. I mean you even like throw it in there and say Hey, what do you think for a title tag or meta description? But I’ve done that and it doesn’t work too well. Schema is a really good one where you’re trying to write schema code and I’m not the best at coding and I just go into chat G B D and stuff like that. Like hey, can you write schema for this FAQ or local schema or whatever type of schema you’re putting in there?
(28:41):
And again, it doesn’t work perfect. I still validate it and half the time it’s wrong, but the other half of the time that’s right saves me a lot of time. So it’s just being aware that it’ll help out. It’s a tool. I just have to use it as a tool and not just copy it verbatim and rely on it completely cuz it’s not a hundred percent accurate, but it does help speed some things up. But the back links, like that’s the part that you can’t really help out with is building back links. It could definitely help out with like writing content articles, blogs, press releases, all that stuff. But in terms of, again, that publish and building those relationships with other websites, that’s something that I don’t think it could do yet. Another tool to just help speed things up, but I can’t replace it yet.
Jesse Ringer (29:18):
Yeah, like from a strategic perspective I think it’s a long ways off, but it does save us a lot of time and on a tactical side of things, it’ll be really helpful and we’ll just have to continue to, you know, integrate it into our processes and you know, it would be shortsighted of us to completely discount it and be like, it’s not gonna take our jobs or it’s not gonna like make us irrelevant. But at the same time, like there’s still gonna be businesses and, and marketers that need strategic ideas and strategic support versus like, write these thousand meta descriptions or product descriptions or image alt texts. Like if we could get that off of our plate, that would be huge and give us time to actually think about the strategic direction of each brand that we work with. You know, like that stuff is still gonna be very hard for AI to, to take away from us, but crafting messaging and stuff like that. And obviously like Brandon said, like there’s always gonna be an need to review it and edit it. Like that lawyer that decided to use chat gpt as his opening arguments and they referenced TV show cases, you need a review process, but it will cut out a ton of time, right?
Chris Hood (30:28):
You’re not going to have an AI who’s going to reach out on your behalf to ask for links from some of the other services that might be comparable to you. There’s still a lot of work that has to be done by a human. No one’s automating that quite yet for us. Well, gentlemen, it has been an honor to have you both here. It’s been a fabulous conversation. Thank you for joining.
Jesse Ringer (30:50):
Thanks for having us, Chris. Thank you for having us
Chris Hood (30:52):
On. And of course, thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and grow. And if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Hood Show. And please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
