Optimize, Master, and Scale Your SEO in the Age of AI

Speaker A: Google is still in control of the search market and if Google decides tomorrow that all of a sudden, nope, we're pivoting. We don't like AI content. It's all about human writers and they decide anytime we see something as AI, it's gone. Well, if your entire process and everything you do is built around AI and AI content and AI this and that, well, now you have a huge problem on your hands.

Speaker B: Welcome, um, to Modern Marketing Messages, a podcast discussing the latest and greatest in both online and offline marketing tactics, strategies and trends. I'm your host, Rex Paisley, senior marketing specialist@americaneagle.com today we're focusing on artificial intelligence and search engine optimization. It seems like AI has been a common focus lately. AI tools have exploded across the Internet, promising efficiencies and simplicity along the way. In almost every profession, people are trying to apply the best of AI in their work. We're lucky to have Kevin Williams and Harley Helmer here with us today to share how they are utilizing AI in their search engine optimization strategies with americaneagle.com Kevin Harley, thank you for being here.

Speaker C: Thank you for having us.

Speaker B: Kevin, would you start by sharing uh, a little introduction about yourself and your role@americaneagle.com, sure.

Speaker C: I've been at American Eagle about five years now. I originally started at a client, um, launching our first website back in 2005 and launched a series of websites with americaneagle.com. um, had a lot of success in digital marketing, advertising and SEO over the last 20 years. In the last five years I've been uh, helping to lead our SEO team and develop the SEO team. I'm very excited to talk about AI today. I'm um, more of a self taught SEO and so as soon as kind of ChatGPT became fairly popular, I adopted it immediately and started using it for SEO practices. And uh, we've just um, you know, leveraged a lot of different tools and kind of done a lot of research and development in how we can utilize it and have uh, came to a lot of fruition uh, there with our AI policies, uh, and our AI, uh, practice.

Speaker B: And Harley, I've certainly been a fan of your contributions to Search Engine Land for quite a while now and I was excited to see that you are joining us here@americaneagle.com. could you uh, share a little bit more about what you've been up to since joining americaneagle.com?

Speaker A: yeah, I love it. Uh, Search Engine Land contributions have been a lot of fun. It's just a great way to Stay, you know, stay sharp, keep your research skills on point. That's a great organization. Um, well, I've been a part of American Eagle for six months today. Uh, so still, still what I would consider a newbie, uh, to the team. But I've been doing SEO for, uh, just under a decade, so got enough experience in this space, uh, to do some damage.

Speaker B: We're certainly glad to have you here. And, uh, looking forward to what you're sharing here about AI as it applies to SEO. So on with the acronyms. So, Harley, speaking of AI as it applies to SEO, could you briefly describe how it has changed search engine results?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I think the biggest change and the one that everyone is really familiar with is Google's AI overviews. Um, you know, Google, Google now is taking the content that it knows all about, and it's using AI to create an answer for most, almost every query now, uh, and plopping right at the top of the page. So you kind of have to fight past the AI to get to what we would know as the traditional results of ads or organic listings. That's the biggest one.

Speaker C: You know, just comment, uh, that really AI is built into the Google algorithm and how it evaluates, uh, language. And so it's just kind of been more of a focus of Google's to be able to optimize, you know, search results and provide the best result for the query. And AI is helpful to be able to analyze huge amounts of data, to be able to provide, you know, a

Speaker B: better search result, really from both angles of that search engine result page. It not only is displaying AI results in those AI overviews and pushing those organic search results down, but also using artificial intelligence to, uh, better serve those users, uh, the results that they're looking for within Google.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of people don't really realize is Google's been using AI for a decade to scrape and analyze and formulate its rankings. But I think the Gemini and the AI overview specifically is more of a kind of a reaction to some of the market pressures it was getting from ChatGPT and some of the other players in the field.

Speaker B: So, Harley, how do you see users, Website users using ChatGPT and other large language models to do search, to initiate searches?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a big trend in the industry, or maybe it's kind of a scare in the industry that, you know, AI is the Google killer and people aren't using Google as much and they're, you know, leaving the platform for AI Because AI is, you know, doing it better, but that's, you know, that's just not really the case. Interestingly enough, um, a big player in the, in the field, Rand, um, Fishkin, he was the founder of moz. He released a study, unless it was either yesterday or even maybe early this morning, of data that he compiled with Semrush and, um, one of Semrush's subsidiaries, basically showing that if you compare, like, searches, uh, between ChatGPT, which is the behemoth in the AI space, and Google, ChatGPT only gets 0.2%, 0.26% of the total searches. So 70%, they analyzed something crazy like 80 or 86 million searches on ChatGPT, and 70% of them were, hey, ChatGPT, do this for me, write this code, proofread this paper. And those are things that Google wouldn't be able to do anyway. Um, and so they filtered out those 70% of those queries, because that's not traffic that would be being lost from Google. And so what's left is, you know, the 30%, which was a pretty clear 30%, which calculated out to about 37 and a half million searches a day, which is still a huge number if you think about it. But Google just reported their numbers from this past year, and they recorded, was it 14 billion searches a day. And so when we're talking about the disparity of, like, searches. Pizza place near me best, you know, rowboat for dogs, whatever it might be, um, you know, Google still has just the massive lion's share of, of the traffic. Um, and so I think really, what the, what the impact there is. Dumping SEO because AI is taking over, or dumping Google SEO, I should say, because AI is taking over is just not. Just not the case. Um, doesn't mean it couldn't become that. Especially with, you know, the Google antitrust stuff and the monopoly, uh, lawsuits and things going on. You know, it could totally shift in the next three to five years. But at least right now, you know, the data says it's a big trend. It's not really taking away from what Google's doing. Google searches actually increased 21% year over year. So I think there's a little bit of a misnomer because the publicity around AI is so big, depending on who you listen to and where you listen to it. You know, AI is going to take over the world. But, you know, when we actually start looking at the data, at least right now, that's just not the case.

Speaker B: That's an important perspective as far as the intent of those users who are utilizing ChatGPT or other large language models with their search and knowing that intent in what you share maybe lessens that that worry that people turning to large language models click through rate is going to be way, way lower than the traditional click through rate that us as SEO professionals could expect, uh, within Google search. Kevin, are you finding uh, that same thing that the people turning to large language models are not necessarily the searchers that we're looking to capture, uh, with our traditional SEO efforts?

Speaker C: Yeah, to a certain extent. Especially with informational searches. We saw a similar fluctuation in click through rate with rich snippet results near the top. Right. And yeah, I mean you're at the top of the page. You should be getting more clicks than you normally would with the AI overviews. It seems m Google's claiming that it doesn't really reduce clicks that much.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, if you're featured, if you're featured as a link in the AI overview and I think that's an important distinction too, the difference between people using or not using the AI overview on a Google search and people flat out not using Google in favor of ChatGPT. Perplexity. Claude, what have you one of the various large language models.

Speaker C: Yeah, but we, we have seen declines in informational clicks despite not losing rankings and that sort of thing. And it is attributed to AI overviews

Speaker A: to a certain extent, which of course conveniently Google doesn't really give you a metric to accurately track. None of the tools are saying, well you're featured here and so your clicks are down. So we're kind of a, you know, it's a dotted line and there's been

Speaker C: more of a, uh, changes to the search engine result pages to make it more diverse. Right. Whether it's more shopping results for E commerce or image results or video results or you know, informational, uh, results. People also ask. And so they're trying to serve a more diverse, you know, search intent and that's going to result in less clicks. On top of that you have a huge increase in the number of paid ads year over year on Google search, in particular branded searches. And so all of those things kind of combine to a little bit of a muddled um, measurement.

Speaker B: Certainly Google's always been changing their search engine result pages and what's found there and what's displayed. I mistakenly uh, when the AI overviews started showing up, I mistakenly assumed that the AI overviews were showing up every time I was searching. But they're not. Uh, it's just less uh, than 50% of the time case that they're showing up. So specific to the AI overviews, how have you seen the AI overview specifically changing organic search traffic?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I would say the largest fluctuation is from what we would call like top of funnel or informational searches. How long is a, ah, how long is a football field? How many, you know, how many gumballs can fit in a 12 ounce container? Questions that you know the answer is the answer. Um, and you don't really need you know, a high profile ranking website to provide that information. Google can kind of just gather it and then display it from AI.

Speaker C: And initially you know, the AI overview results were very different from the top of Google's search result pages like but now over the last year it's really just developed into these are kind of the top 10 that have the most information and FAQs and that sort of thing on the page. And so it's very reflective of the search result pages now versus kind of a uh, unique and different overview with AI.

Speaker A: Uh yeah, and I think there's some, some additional, you know, changes on the horizon. One of the things that I've seen creeping up a lot more and in the People Also Ask feature specifically Google's also starting to, because People Also Ask is typically a question format. Um, Google's also starting to throw AI overview answers in the People Also Ask which is very interesting. Um, and they're, they're beta testing the, the AI mode where if you go to Google and you perform a search it'll ask you hey, do you want to enter AI mode? And then it basically completely gets rid of the organic listings and turns it into a version of Gemini or ChatGPT where you are literally just conversing with the AI and in kind of a chat feature which I think a lot of users are not users. A lot of um, you know, site owners, a lot of businesses, a lot of people on SEO are a little freaked out about that because there isn't a super easy way to get big back to the original results to go to a website. And so really we just kind of have to see how it all shakes out. I think it really depends. Google's modifying this stuff so fast. Um, I mean it feels like weekly there something new is changing. Whether it's you know, the color of the outline around the overview section or the size of the you know, moniker that says AI overviews or whatever, they're always testing and changing stuff and it's, it does have an effect or an impact on organic traffic specifically. But it's really hard to measure unless, unless you have, like, a proven track record of. I've been ranking number one for this keyword phrase for the last four years. It's never changed. And now all of a sudden, I'm still ranking number one and my impressions are down 4% and my clicks are down 8.2%.

Speaker C: Whatever.

Speaker A: But the fact of the matter is, um, you know, if you, if you've never really invested in SEO before or you've never taken it seriously, maybe you paid, you know, two buck chuck to your SEO. Like, we're still growing websites every day. I've, uh, literally just posted a, in our SEO team chat of a blog. I've been, you know, working on posting articles for the last four months. I've posted four articles over four months, and we've already surpassed 300 clicks to the website. And that's all informational searches where the AI overview does appear. So it still is driving traffic where there was none before. So it's, uh, it's really difficult because a lot of the times, and I realize I'm monologuing at this point, but a lot of the times all the people who are talking about the effects of AI and the traffic, well, those are websites that already have extremely established rankings. They're driving thousands or millions of users every year. And they've got a team or teams of people that are monitoring this stuff like a hawk, and they're seeing a decline in some regard. But if you've never done this before, taken it seriously, uh, you know, still great opportunity, still a killer opportunity.

Speaker B: And the best practices for search engine optimization are still applying to those AI overviews. Is that correct, Kevin?

Speaker C: Yeah, Especially now that the AI overviews are largely the top results. So many of the same things in terms of, you know, providing short, um, concise definitions and then expanding on them in subsequent, um, subcategories and creating good topical hierarchy within your content structure so that it has a primary topic that's reinforced with subtopics that cover the topic as a whole and answer a lot of the questions that people have when they're searching for that topic. Those same things are how we optimize web pages now and will be in the future, as well as with AIO reviews.

Speaker A: Mm.

Speaker C: Um, I'm interested to see, you know, they have been kind of expanding and then they'll scale it back a little bit. You know, Google really started out as this very simple search platform that was uncluttered, right. And was, you know, very, very streamlined. And now you have such A diverse and complicated and cluttered search result. We have seen them scaling certain things back, but. But I would be interested to see if there is maybe another competitor or maybe Google themselves that decides, like, this is a little too cluttered kind of thing. But, you know, that's kind of another topic.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think ads play a lot into that. I mean, they drive, you know, the lion's share of their revenue and so they had to be careful with how helpful their results are versus, you know, how much revenue they can drive. Because if everything's AI, then there's no room for ads.

Speaker B: So it is interesting to see that the, uh, AI overviews aren't showing up so much in product search.

Speaker C: Right, right.

Speaker B: Because they don't want to cannibalize the ad revenue from those search engine results.

Speaker C: Yeah, A lot more shopping on, um, the E commerce searches now versus the AI.

Speaker B: Right. So Harley, how have on page SEO strategies evolved because of AI?

Speaker A: Yeah, I always look at this through the lens of what kind of quality SEO you want to put out. Do you want to put out really high quality SEO or do you want to put out low quality SEO? Uh, in a kind way. Um, and the sticking point here is that AI has made it really, really easy, I mean, scary easy to do low quality SEO, uh, something to do something because it just, there's so much information available that you say, you know, you can literally write one sentence, write me a blog about kites and the best type of string to use for my kite, and it will, it will just straight up write an article and then you can take that and copy and paste and put it right on your website. Now whether it performs or not remains to be seen. But, um, I think as far as like on page strategies, how have they evolved? You know, we at, uh, American Eagle have seen efficiency rates improve because we can feed in the research that we've done, the keyword volumes, the difficulty, the competitor analysis, we can feed in specific pieces of information to guide the AI and then tell it exactly what we want back so that there's no room for error. Um, and we can get a really refined result that way. And I think a lot of the integrations between tools and the new models, um, have sped things up. So I would say, like, how have they, how have they evolved our strategies? Well, it's really changed the level of efficiency and the scope of what we can accomplish.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'd say oftentimes really simple updates, but many, many updates are what is needed for most websites. You know, simply making your headings A little bit more specific and adding, uh, a lead in description where it's missing. We'll multiply that by a thousand pages and that can be a very impactful update.

Speaker B: Um, so you're utilizing the AI tools to scale that on page SEO.

Speaker C: Yeah. You can leverage multiple data sources, whether it's the existing on page elements within the HTML, uh, alongside a customized prompt that has a lot of information on the subject, the brand prompt, guidelines to output. And so with the combination of all of those things, you can really create very specific or make it more unique in different ways. But the more information and the more data sources that you're providing to scale that content, the better that content's going to be. And if all you're looking for as an output is 100,000 one sentence descriptions of your huge product catalog of parts or something like that. Right. Then you're going to end up winning big time. Um, with scaling AI content, if you're trying to write a book, you're going to have to come up with a really good prompt. Yeah.

Speaker A: Or prompt multiple times through the process. I think one of the things that's been a lot of fun for me, um, and I've exercised it even more here at American Eagle than ever before, is the 70% of users, hey, do this for me. I love SEO. I'm great at SEO. I am not a coder. God forbid I need to write some sort of code, whether it's, you know, schema markup for a particular page for structured data, or maybe I want to include a map embed or, um, even if I just don't really like how this particular page appears, I can pull the code, put it into ChatGPT and say, you know, crawl this code, analyze it. It's a page about XYZ. You know, I want the map to appear 100 pixels to the left. Write me some CSS that I can drop onto this page and it'll, you know, it gets the context from the page from the code that I've given it, and then it will write me the CSS and I can go plug it in. And sure enough, most of the time it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Speaker B: Um, it helps your professional blind spots, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So are there other specific aspects of AI that you think are really well suited to, uh, SEO work?

Speaker A: I think in my opinion, content generation is getting there. There's still a lot of, like, I don't know, weird stuff. And I feel like every time we mention content, our content team cries a little bit when we talk about AI. And content together. But, um, for me, my opinion, like, the best use case for AI is when question is, what is 1 plus 1? Answer is 2. Or write me this type of code. Here's the information I want you to put in the code. Because there isn't much variation. You can easily tell when you know it's hallucinating or it doesn't get it right. There's no clearly see right from wrong. Right. Validate. Yeah, any, any application where there's no subjectivity for the AI to take liberties. I mean, it just makes it fast because I can crawl an entire crawl an entire website and upload the crawl and say, I need this schema markup for these 17 pages. Here's the information for that. Go. And then it spits it back out. And then I can say, you know, I want 17 individual text documents, one for each page so that I don't have, you know, I don't have to copy out of the chat. Um, and it'll do exactly what I've asked. I can take it, give it a quick proofread or throw it in the validation tool. If I'm writing schema, give me a green light and drop it right on the site. So I think the less subjectivity there is in the task that you're doing, the better results you're going to get, the more efficient you'll be.

Speaker C: I would say it's like balance, you know, it depends on what you want for the output. If you give too much of a structure and you give too many examples in your prompts, oftentimes it's a little too repetitive then, right? And, and you do want the unique content with added value. I would just again repeat that. Getting multiple data sources. I'll give you an example. We were writing, um, a bunch of descriptions, uh, over and over again for many, many thousands of pages of parts. And what we did was we provided all of the details of, you know, what problems would necessitate these parts, right? What's the broken thing and what's the solution associated with it? And so then it started saying like, oh, well, your refrigerator stopped running. Well, it could be this or it could be that tried to go too far, you know. And so when you give it all those details, right, it's like, wow, it really knows about the subject then, uh, so if you can train it on that sort of thing and then utilize it, that really makes it a lot better for scaling the content. But it's a balance between how specific do you want it as an output and how unique do you want that content and how content rich do you want that content, you know, other aspects of it for on page SEO that are really beneficial. You can do great internal linking work with great, um, internal linking text variation, which is just awesome. You know, a lot of times it's like you link from the same exact text over and over again and that's not as impactful. If you can do text variation on your internal linking and leverage AI to do that, that's huge. We did also just do an awesome project with developing schema at scale for local businesses, um, which is just another way of generating code that normally we would need to have very basic schema because we would need dynamic elements from m, the data layer to inject into the schema elements. But now we're able to make, you know, totally unique schema. Uh, that's like page to page, but scale it. All those aspects of on page SEO has been beneficial, but then you got to put those guardrails.

Speaker B: I think those are great examples of best practices and utilizing AI for SEO when it comes to those that link language and developing schema, uh, are there any other best practices in maximizing AI, uh, as you implement AI into your SEO efforts that uh, you'd like to share today?

Speaker C: In terms of scaling, um, utilizing a tool that actually gets information from the webpage itself and includes that in with your prompt to generate the content has been a really, really good thing for scaling.

Speaker B: So staying within the same tool to help it help train the tool and get better with your results, you know,

Speaker C: that's also important for sure, like staying within the same chat. You train a chat and then work within a chat, uh, for that particular industry topic or client. But besides that, if you can leverage a crawl tool to get the actual HTML from the page or certain elements on the page and combine that with your prompt, that can scale your on page analysis versus your prompting, uh, very, very effectively.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the one that we use the most frequently right now is Screaming Frog. That's our favorite tool, um, or at least it's my favorite tool. And they have an amazing connection where you can literally crawl information or create a custom extraction to pull specific elements off a page and take that page and then turn around and write a prompt inside Screaming Frog and say, hey, Screaming Frog. When I write this prompt, pull from this information and then spit the answer right back out. And so it's all in one solution.

Speaker B: So as we're training these large language models and becoming more dependent upon them, I think people have went almost to that other end of the spectrum to be overly dependent, uh, on them to some extent. Um, how do you think businesses should balance automation with human oversight of AI use when it comes to SEO?

Speaker C: Yeah, there really needs to be a clear editorial process to your AI content policy. @americaneagle.com for example, we do HTML validation. We use AI tools for validation, but more importantly we have content writers and editors that review and edit the content after it's produced, sometimes at scale that's not necessarily possible in some applications. But at least having um, editorial review policies in place to be able to, you know, ensure that it has human oversight is both key to producing high quality content and one of Google's guidelines. Um, when using AI content in order for it to not be spam.

Speaker A: M. Yeah, there's definitely a difference between, you know, a description of a bolt and you know, an article about when to see a doctor if you have back pain. While the information can be coming from reliable places, even through AI, like, you know, the bolt is stainless steel, zinc coated, it's three inches long and it's got a thread pitch of X. Whereas you know, when to see a doctor if you have back pain. Now you're getting into, you know, some really, really heavy stuff. You could, you could affect somebody's life. Seriously, if that information is off, um, and we still see that it is off. I mean, what, what was the. I know it's an old example at this point, but um, somebody asked Google, you know, how many rocks a day should I eat? And Google's AI overview came back and said, oh, well, archaeologists say that you should probably eat between three and six rocks a day. And it's like, what? No, and it's, it's because the AI is not thinking, it's not a human being. It doesn't have reasoning. Obviously they're trying to build reasoning into it, but it's only, you know, it's only the level at which we can program that. And so it's just taking information about rocks and it's taking information about, well, who knows a lot about rocks? Well, an archeologist. So if an archeologist were to give, you know, example of how much you should be eating, it would probably be, you know, so it's just difficult when, when you get into uh, you have to understand the weight of the topic that you're trying to address. With AI, yeah.

Speaker C: And there's a lot of compliance and legal considerations in different industries that you have to be aware of. And@AmericaEagle.com, we really work with a Lot of different healthcare companies, government industries, financial services and these types of areas. You know, it's very, very important to have human, ah, oversight and an editorial process and a vetting process of content to ensure that one, it meets compliance demands as well as human demands. Right. And so there's certain industries where this makes a ton of sense and we can scale content. There's other industries where it's not as feasible because of the industry.

Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense depending on the subject matter of the business, uh, what industry they're in. Do you think there's uh, another subset that we could talk about is like a type of website where it's better for AI use, for SEO, like maybe an E commerce website or a, uh, manufacturing and distribution, you know. Are there specific.

Speaker C: Yeah, mostly websites that are large websites with many, many URLs and slight variations to pages. Um, you gave the example of, you know, fasteners or nuts and bolts. Right. There's many, many different small variations to a galvanized hex bolt versus a stainless steel hex bolt. And there's different applications, uh, to those, whether it needs to be corrosion resistant. And that can be helpful then to produce a small amount of content that describes the application of each bolt. Um, and there's no problem with that.

Speaker B: You sound like you've been.

Speaker C: Yes, I've had to do that like 15 years ago. It was horrible.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think another great, another great one. And this one gets a little bit more nuanced, but what we would call like local businesses or service area businesses, where, you know, let's say you are, you're a plumber, um, and you offer drain unclogging service. Well, the service doesn't change depending on the city you service. However, an SEO best practice is to have a page for each service for each city that you service. So that Google can say, okay, well, when, you know, when John from Naperville asks about drain unclogging, well, this company has a page all about drain unclogging for people in Naperville. Um, and so, you know, you get your drain unclogging service page nailed down and then you say, great, Here are the 45, 65, 80 cities in my area that I service and I perform this service. You know, Google has, Google has said, like, it's okay to have multiple pages that are very similar as long as the purpose of the content doesn't change. So Roto Rooter, and I know, uh, that's a brand, but Roto Rooter service in these 14 cities having just slight variations in the content and multiplying it across those pages is. Is made very efficient by AI.

Speaker C: Yeah. And, um, it's almost like the page template for the design becomes part of the prompting.

Speaker B: Then, uh, well, I hope John is listening to the podcast and he'll have an opportunity to call us about his plumbing services. Um, do you think there are some common mistakes that are being made within AI as it pertains to search engine optimization?

Speaker A: Yeah, probably more mistakes than not mistakes would be my guess.

Speaker B: Are there any specifics that you'd, uh, like to call attention to?

Speaker A: Flagrant developing of hundreds of thousands of pages with no oversight, just because you can.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, you know, who's the thought leader then? Right?

Speaker B: When AI becomes the thought leader, then we're all in trouble, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think there was a stat that I read, maybe it was a year or 2 After ChatGPT had come out, where they predicted that the volume of the Internet was going to increase by 40% in five years because of the AI's ability to just regurgitate content. There's a big. The big study, well, the big heist from last year, or Maybe it was 2023, where this one company utilized AI to analyze and crawl its competitor's website and basically mimic the entire website, just unique to their own brand, outrank the original website and steal their millions of millions of views from Google because it ranked. But then Google was like, hey, all this content is total garbage. You generated like 40,000 pages in two months. It's all terrible. And then yanked all those pages because they were terrible. And then everything came crashing.

Speaker B: Has Google's helpful content updates caught up to those AI misuses?

Speaker A: That's a great question. And it's a big debate in the space still, because, I mean, even today, I still get chats in some of the Facebook groups, like, does Google penalize AI content? It's like, well, yes and no more.

Speaker C: So it penalizes bad content.

Speaker A: Right. It's bad content. So whether you're a human writing bad content or an AI writing bad content, Google's gonna try and nail you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Some, um, of the warnings, though, I would say is a problem and a common mistake that companies make. It's like they're too scared to use AI. Um, and so then they're almost not taking advantage of the opportunity that's there until it's too late. You know what I mean? And so there's certainly a balance that needs to happen. But if you're still considering whether or not you should have any AI content whatsoever on your website, then I would, I would say you should have a conversation with your content writer or something like that because they probably already put AI on your website. And most websites I think at this point have some AI, unless they haven't been updated in a while. And so I think it's expected to have AI content. And Google has changed their policy to say that, you know, human edited AI generated content that's scaled reasonably, um, is certainly a okay with Google. Right. Whether or not that means that it will rank better or not I think depends on the quality of the content and how many problems it solves, uh, for the user's query and the related user intent of the search.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think, uh, one kind of pitfall that's a little bit more nuanced to SEO specifically because AI content is the big topic. But there's this whole other side of AI that's like efficiency research. I mean the speed at which I can learn about a client is crazy because I can say, you know, my client is a surgical supply company, tell me about it, I want to learn about this thing. And I can literally just have a conversation with, you know, chat buddy and learn faster than it would take me to perform this search. Oh, I didn't really like the results. Okay, go back, perform that search. Oh, I didn't really like the results. And so I think like one of the, one of the big things from a nuanced SEO perspective that some SEOs are using is um, like research and keyword research. Specifically Chachi PT doesn't have access to the same like volume tools that some of the SEO tools in the industry do like Ahrefs Semrush the gamut. You know, they can tell you, you know, in estimate how often a particular phrase is searched. While ChatGPT would be great for iterating through different phrase ideas, it's not going to give you an accurate like competitor density or um, search volume. And I realize, you know, for anyone that has spent any time in SEO, well, the other tools are kind of just an estimation too. But you know, Chat GPT is just a wild guess.

Speaker B: The right tool for the right job.

Speaker A: Yeah. So if you know that you want to do keyword research, you know, maybe use Chat GPT to get all your keyword ideas, but then go take those keyword ideas into an actual SEO tool like Ahrefs Semrush, um Moz and get the actual data to back it and

Speaker C: you can give the actual keyword data to ChatGPT and then that can you know, be part of your prompt and help inform quality content creation and that sort of thing. But it's a bad idea and a common pitfall to just use regular chatgpt to just start generating content without training it in some way. Starting a branded chat for that company and making sure it knows all about that company and the keywords to focus on and the topic, and you give it structure and a template and examples, then it'll produce better content. Um, but if you're just doing a chat and you're not prompting it effectively and training it effectively, then it's not going to do very well.

Speaker B: Overall, those are great insights on, well, like I said, using the right tool for the right job. And that leaves me thinking, well, a lot of people are jumping into utilizing those AI tools first and foremost across the board. Are there any other risks to being overly dependent on AI when it comes to search engine optimization?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's definitely going to dilute the artistic quality of the Internet and probably already has as a whole, as ChatGPT is trained on, um, more and more ChatGPT generated stuff.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: It will eventually and slowly become worse and worse and worse.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think there's a, you know, one of the things that I think about is Google is still in control of the search market. And if Google decides tomorrow that all of a sudden, nope, we're pivoting. We don't like AI content. It's all about human writers and they decide anytime we see something as AI, it's gone. Well, if your entire process and everything you do is built around AI and AI content and AI this and that, well, now you have a huge problem on your hands. You know, a lot of people will say, well, Google doesn't get it right half the time. Or even, you know, some of the AI content detectors don't get it right half the time. Well, that's just even more emphasis for you to have a great writer, have great research, have great quality content, have, have a great quality experience on your website that AI just can't quite match, um, without significant oversight. Um, and until, until Google's no longer, you know, the thousand pound gorilla in the room when it comes to, to web traffic. Like what they say pretty much goes, um, you know, and we've, and we've seen, you know, even just this, just this last winter with the spam updates knocking out millions of dollars in revenue from companies like Forbes and um, you know, some of these big, big sites running the affiliate marketing stuff. Google just decided one day, if you're not writing your own content. Sorry. Bye. And then you know, I mean even my wife's company was, their massive portion of their business was built on that and they had to let go almost 60% of their staff because Google made a decision. And so uh, the risk is if you go too far in one direction and Google just makes a decision, it could be catastrophic for you.

Speaker C: I will say that AI content is out there so much that that risk isn't as high.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: But you know, affiliate marketing was very popular and they went after affiliate marketers. Um, and so, well, we talked a

Speaker B: lot about that balance of maximizing the efficiencies and capabilities of AI. Um, but that balance includes that human quality and the real brand experience and thought leadership that individual businesses bring to the communities that they serve. Uh, in working with the clients that you work with day to day, are there specific types of content that you recommend as that balance? Whether they be case studies or um.

Speaker C: You're spot on, Rex. Honestly, it's so important now to have those types of brand and community engagements like local events, charitable work, team building and publishing, that being social, being genuine, recording a short video and publishing it on social media. These things are really what builds brands in many ways. And it's just crucial.

Speaker A: Um, well, I mean that in a world where you know, your article is copy and pasted from 17,000 articles like it just under the guise of AI, what makes you any different? Well, it's what effort are you putting into building your brand? And that's, that's where we're seeing, you know, if you want to rank in the Google AI overviews or you want to show up on chat, GPT search, You know, a lot of these systems, they're not crawling websites in the traditional way. They're using brand, brand signals. You know how many thousands of people are just, are searching for your brand? Well if it's none, none, thousands, then when somebody searches for, you know, best automotive booth company, uh, for trade shows, you know, if, if you're not being constantly searched for in that regard or you're not being referenced on social media, well then those systems aren't going to pick up your signals.

Speaker B: So consistent brand voice and personality on your social channels, that is getting engagement, uh, is part of that balance, uh, with AI, uh and your website, then

Speaker A: to do something genuine, do something that earns you publicity, you know, and, and that's going to, that's going to do wonders for your brand. We've seen some, some huge brands with terrible websites and they don't know why they need SEO because they still have 5 million people coming to their website every year. Well, is because you've spent all of your time and effort building a, uh, killer brand and your website was kind of just, meh. But if we then optimize your website to be as strong as all the effort you've put into building your brand, then you have a weapon for business growth.

Speaker B: So, Kevin, if you had your, uh, crystal ball out on the table, where do you see AI going in the next maybe one to five years? Uh, as it relates to search engine

Speaker C: optimization with AI, it's going to enable anybody to do almost anything in the future. And so we, uh, should be able to feasibly devise and create our own application or our own website based on templates and other things like that, uh, in the near future. And there's already, um, platforms that are doing that, uh, to generate new web pages or a whole website based upon instructions. Right. You need to be the idea person and then you're going to be enabled to make that idea come to life even more easily.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally agree. Nothing to add there.

Speaker B: Well, thank you both for being here today on Modern Marketing Messages. It's certainly going to be an interesting journey ahead with, uh, artificial intelligence and, uh, the ways that we can maximize it in our search engine optimization efforts for our clients and, uh, uh, within our digital presence.

Speaker C: Thanks, Greg.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to Modern Marketing messages. Check out the show description for more information about this episode and americaneagle.com's digital marketing services. This podcast is brought to you by americaneagle.com studios. I'm, um, Rex Paisley and we'll be back soon with another episode of Modern Marketing Messages.