Is AI Killing SEO? What Small Businesses Need to Know Now

In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra Corman sits down with SEO expert Kyle Bailey to explore how artificial intelligence is changing the search landscape—and what businesses should really focus on to stay visible online.

Kyle shares his journey from growing up around construction trades to building an SEO agency focused on helping home service businesses succeed online. Along the way, the conversation dives into the realities of modern SEO, the myths around AI replacing search, and why understanding your customer still matters more than any algorithm update.

The Evolution of SEO in the Age of AI

AI tools like ChatGPT are changing how people search for information—but they haven’t replaced traditional search engines.

Kyle explains:

• Why Google still has a major advantage because it can crawl and understand websites more effectively
• How AI platforms currently rely on signals like reviews and third-party sources (Yelp, Google Reviews, etc.)
• Why businesses need to expand their reputation across multiple platforms—not just Google
• The risks of “gaming the system” with SEO shortcuts that create short-term gains but long-term damage 
  
  

The takeaway? Solid SEO fundamentals still matter—and probably always will.

The Right Way to Approach SEO Strategy

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is chasing SEO “cheat codes.”

Kyle describes the smarter approach:

• 80% solid SEO fundamentals
• 20% experimentation with new tactics

This balance allows businesses to stay competitive without risking their entire marketing strategy on short-lived hacks. 

If you put all your effort into shortcuts, you may see quick wins—but you’ll likely lose everything when algorithms update.

Does Blogging Still Matter for SEO?

The answer, like many things in marketing, is: it depends.

Blogging isn’t just about stuffing keywords anymore. Instead, it should help customers make better decisions.

Effective blog content should:

• Address customers’ biggest fears about working with your business
• Explain how your process prevents common problems
• Educate buyers so they feel confident choosing you
• Demonstrate expertise through real-world examples

When content answers real questions, it improves both the customer experience and your search visibility.

Why Your Website Strategy Matters More Than Ever

Many businesses try to save money by piecing together website tools or building sites themselves using drag-and-drop builders.

Kyle explains why this can create problems:

• DIY website builders often lack advanced SEO capabilities
• Businesses may not truly own their domains or data
• Piecemeal marketing strategies lead to inconsistent results
• A holistic approach—website, content, reviews, and SEO—creates stronger long-term growth

In other words, your website shouldn’t just exist. It should function as the foundation of your entire marketing strategy.

The Most Important Marketing Lesson

At the end of the episode, Kyle shares a powerful question every business should ask:

“If you c

Looking to leverage AI? Want better results? Want to think about what you want to leverage?

Check and see how I am using it for FREE on YouTube.

From "Holy cow, it can do that?" to "Wait, how does this work again?" – I've got all your AI curiosities covered. It's the perfect after-podcast snack for your tech-hungry brain.

Watch here

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hi, I'm Kendra Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect scientist. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and today I'm really excited to be talking about some SEO, some AI, all the things with Kyle Bailey. Kyle, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Thank you so much, Kendra. I appreciate the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

All I know is that you started with home service businesses and SEO. How did you get here? What, what, what brought you here?

Kyle’s Path From Trades To SEO

SPEAKER_01 1:18

There's a great country song. I woke up Sunday morning, I woke up Monday morning with a hammer in my hand. And that's kind of how I started my life. You know, my earliest memories are with my dad in the cabinet shop. Uh, I got stung by a bee when I was like two years old uh in my dad's cabinet shop, but it's still a very vivid memory. But yeah, I've been around the construction trades literally all my life. And uh starting in about 2010 when I was running my agency, I actually started doing sales in SEO uh for a couple of other companies and doing some social media marketing. That was when it was just in its infancy because in 2010 is when Facebook kind of standardized their business pages. And so that's when we still thought that Facebook was gonna replace uh Google and nobody was gonna have websites because we were all gonna have business pages and it was all gonna be happy happily ever after. Then Facebook realized they couldn't uh monetize all this free traffic, and so they choked down business pages, and then uh that's when I uh moved back over into SEO. But I just have a real soft spot in my heart for home service, and I know you deal with coaches a lot, and all for all the coaches out there, I got a soft spot for you as well because I'm one of you. So I get all the hurting cats and the babysitting aspects of all that stuff. So yeah, that's how I got started.

Facebook’s Rise And The SEO Reset

SPEAKER_00 2:35

I love that story. Yeah, because yeah, a lot of us we grow up in with different things and different pieces that really do shape us and and where we head. And I do remember, I remember when I was the Jeep advertising manager that we had to grab somebody else on the floor that we were on at Chrysler. We had to, his daughter had a Facebook login and we could use her dot edu email address to um to check on our ads because we had no other way to do it. It was only open to.edu email addresses. Um, so yes, I've been here through the whole thing too. So let's jump in and let's talk about one of my favorite topics, which is AI. And then one of your favorite topics, which is SEO. And so how is it changing? How is AI changing SEO? Because I have seen a lot of crazy stuff. Like I people have been forwarding me stuff from people going, have an have a Google or an AI search party, and everybody's gonna start asking questions into Chat GPT about your business over this two-hour time frame, and then you're gonna rotate to another business the next month, and it's gonna make sure that you're listed. And I don't know.

AI Hype Vs Sustainable SEO

SPEAKER_01 3:46

It feels like frequency, because all those people suddenly showed interest. Interesting. There's been some gamification like that. There's a couple of, I won't name their names right now, but uh there's some big famous SEOs who have done stuff like that. And Google's found those signals and choked down on them. And uh, but uh, you know, lots of stuff works in the short term. But when you put all your eggs in that basket or you put all that effort in, I'm a I'm a member of a couple of uh kind of mastermind groups, and a lot of those guys, they they're always chasing that stuff, and they get big, they get big short-term gains. But what you have to be a master of in that world is you gotta be a I think of it as surfing, and as you're on the top of that wave, as that wave begins to come down, you gotta find the next one because all that momentum that you just built goes away. So the smart ones, what they do is they do probably an 80-20. 80% is just the solid, boring SEO, and then 20% is this ride the way. We found this little cheat code. But if you do the reverse, where you do 80-20 and put all of your eggs in the basket of the cheap, fast way, you're in for just a lot of heartache. Anyone who remembers um was it overstock.com, they're kind of the poster boy for failure on a massive scale because Google was signaling. This is back when they did the um the spam link update, and uh it killed, it literally killed their business and never come back. You can really get down a dark rabbit hole on that kind of cheat code stuff. The thing to find out is how are these platforms ranking businesses just how are they normally doing it? Here's what's fun they'll tell you. They'll tell you if you ask them, well, why did you return those people instead of these over here? And they'll they'll, you know, you know the the apology wave, you know, that AI has. It has, oh, you're right. I am so sorry. I totally missed that. That's a uh confirmation loop that doesn't really do you much good. But if you just ask how they return the the ones that they did return, they'll either tell you that how they did Chat GPT is pretty transparent. They say, Yeah, well, I referenced Yelp, I referenced this Google Reviews, I saw this. I tried to do the same thing with Microsoft uh co-pilot and it wouldn't tell me. It just said, we know it. Yeah, it just comes from the knowledge base. We know it.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

We know it.

How AI Sources Results And Limits

SPEAKER_01 6:12

I I think what that might mean is they're using Google best practices and they're just not telling you. The good thing is, if anybody out there is familiar with Search Engine Land, Search Engine uh Journal, those are two just really well-respected uh websites that that keep up with all the changes and tell you, hey, you need to adapt your strategy because Google's making this big change. Well, we really don't have that backlog of data yet, but it's starting to happen. We're starting to get it. And so the good thing is, is lots of smart people are out there studying this all the time. And so they're they're able to start telling you, do this, don't do that. One of the things that let me know that, you know, I always compare it to like in Star Wars when the the Death Star comes around behind the moon, you know, they're like, that's no moon, you know, it's AI, it's coming to destroy your lives. And that when my first moment of that shadow came when uh I've got a big uh remodeling company in the Dallas Metroplex, and we were number one across probably 200 keywords, we were just dominating the entire marketplace. I checked Chat GPT and we were nowhere to be found. And that blew me away. I was like, how is this even possible? Because if Chat GPT is this good, number one, they ought to be reading all these signals. Well, the simple fact is they don't read websites well, and so for a lot of people saying, well, Chat GT GPT is gonna beat Google, I don't think so. I think that's why they're freaking out. You know, uh Sam, I forgot Altman, is that his name? Yeah, he, you know, he's been sounding a lot of alarm bells saying that you know they've got a problem because uh Google's starting to catch up. And one of the reasons is if you can't crawl the website, how are you gonna return the best result? And at the end of the day, you can have all of these bells and whistles, you can have all this we're better than you, hoopla and marketing. But if Susie and Sam, homemaker, homeowner, can't get the solution they want, if they're standing in water in their basement and they need a plumber to come fix it, and they search Chat GPT and it gives them somebody five counties over because ChatGPT doesn't crawl websites very well, they're gonna bounce off that. And that's that that kind of thing is like a door slamming shut. They'll never look at Chat GPT as a good resource again because they were in their moment of need and it didn't get met, right? So it's all it's the same way for all of us where we have a certain need that needs to get met, and we found the one that solves it the best. And the bad news for everybody else is Google is catching up to everybody because they had such a big lead in all the other search categories. So it is changing, yes, but a lot of the groundwork, what I would say is the biggest adaptation that all, and that we're rolling this out for all of our customers, is you need to be able to propagate reviews on probably half a dozen other platforms other than Google. House, Yelp, uh, Facebook, Foursquare, believe it or not. This is resurrecting Foursquare. I'm seeing Foursquare reviews.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Uh and wow, it sounds like it sounds like what COVID did to the QR code.

Google’s Edge And User Need Moments

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Right, right. Or uh, you know, Peloton. Yeah, yeah. So that that that that's the the big change that's here. Um, and we're starting to see, okay, this is how you win. Does that answer your question? I kind of talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

It does. It's really interesting. Um, I like that perspective because I'm not I'm not a believer in the gaming system gaming the system. So even beyond the 80-20, I'm like more the like 90 10 um towards the traditional reliable piece of things because I believe in experimenting because marketing is not perfect, right? And so you definitely have to experiment to an extent, but it's like if you know it's a game, it's not gonna work long term. Like you know in advance it's not going to. And so, because I had I had a client last year that they didn't want words on their site, but they wanted to rank for their work those words. And I said, But that's not how this works. And then they said, Okay, well they said, Why don't we just put it on in white type on a white background? And I'm like, No, because that doesn't work either anymore.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Well, that'll get you that'll get you uh the blacklisted.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Exactly, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:27

And so is it not gonna work? You'll ruin your domain.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

Yeah, we're not doing that. Um so yeah, so it's like, well, it used to work. Yes, it did, and then the search engines got smart. So SEO is clearly not dead, not going anywhere anytime soon, especially not being replaced 100% by AI anytime soon. My question for you is like, we used to blog a lot, right? People still do. There's millions, maybe billions of blogs out there, right? And so, um, and a lot of that was for SEO, right? To show Google that you had recent content and to be able to rank for keywords, hub and spoke, and you know, all these other different, different ways you were we were doing it. Is that still happening then to to reinforce SEO?

SPEAKER_01 11:15

It's one of those wonderful uh SEO things that depends, uh, that gets that's the answer to everything at SEO.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

It is. That's the answer to everything everywhere.

Reviews Beyond Google Become Crucial

Blogging That Calms Fears And Proves Quality

SPEAKER_01 11:24

What I would recommend the the approach to that question is what are you trying to achieve? If you're trying to achieve getting your 10 blue links uh and getting traffic through that, it's an it's gonna be an abysmal failure. But if you're trying to make a good search experience for your customer, once they get on your website, that's a great thing to do. And so then what you want to be doing is figure out what is it that your customer wants to know? What are the top five fears they have about engaging in business with you? What are their top five dreams? What's their dream outcome, right? If you listen to Alex Ramosi, uh he talks about the dream outcome all the time. And I really love that as a North Star because every customer you have has a dream outcome in engaging with you. And then there's a horror scenario, and you need to to address that, you've got to be aware of those horror outcomes, and you need to tell them, hey, we're not one of those people. You know, so for remodeling, you've got the Chuck and a struck a truck horror stories. They came in, they tore my house up, and they left with the deposit. You've got the roofer horror stories. They came, they ripped my roof off, took the deposit, and left. You know, uh the blue tarp scenario, uh, if you ever heard about that, that somebody rips the roof off, or the shingles off, throws the blue tarp on it, says, we'll be back, our shingles are coming in tomorrow and you never see them again. And so, how do you convince somebody you're not that? Well, one way is you blog about that, you address it head on. So the customer, they know that you're you already have that in mind, and you're not one of those people. Here's how we're not. You know, we've been in this area for 25 years, we've been under this masthead, this name, we haven't changed our name. That is a really common thing. And it I'm in Texas, and so there's no license for most trades in Texas, and so it can be the Wild West. But when a customer knows that, hey, we've been at this address under this name for 25 years, you can't run from that, right? And so it's how you convince them of that. But then how do they make a good decision, an educated decision? Why do I want dimensional shingles over three tab shingles? You know, why do I want um the impervious uh synthetic underlayment uh versus black tar paper that everybody used to use? Why am I am I why uh is it important that we use ring cap nails instead of the old uh staple with um I forget what they call them, but they're little uh metal discs. And these are all little things. You know, we use five nails, six nails per shingle instead of four. What I used to do when I was uh helping out, uh I was consulting for a roofing company is I would video uh the shingles going on. You could hear the nail guns going one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And so that little thing right there, that's just a proof point that hey, we're not like the other guys. You know, we do this and that makes your warranty valid on your shingles. A lot of people don't know, but if the shingles are not installed properly, the 50-year warranty on them is void. So if you have damage, that company can come out, see there's only four nails in the shingles and say, hey, sorry, it wasn't installed right, void your warranty. So it's education pieces like that. You know, give me a blog post on that. Shingle installation, the five ways that a bad roofing company can void your warranty on this new$10,000 roof you just paid for. So you feel you can feel that as a homeowner, you can feel like pricking all those fear points. Because the last thing I want to do is pay$10,000 for a roof and then have the warranty voted, right? So, remodeling, you know, what are the basic fundamental things that have to be done for a remodel to be successful? And um, there's a guy, Jasmine Aleck. Um, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, but he's he's all over LinkedIn. And he's man, if you want to study hooks, that guy is the best. And one of his intros, I've totally ripped off. Uh, he said, these are my five non-negotiables for X. And I'm just like, that is great. I'm gonna start using that everywhere. So it's what are your non-negotiables for whatever it is, whether it's coaching, you know, roofing, remodeling, plumbing, here are non-negotiables. We will not do business in your home without these things in place because you're not gonna get a good result. I will not engage in coaching with you without these things in place because you're not gonna get a good result. Once you say that, that just sets you apart. You're not the guy or the woman who's gonna go in and take any deal, right? You'll only take the deal.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

I told a client that I wouldn't manage their faith, uh their um Google ads unless they had someone that would guarantee answer the phone because the receptionist was either always on the other line or away from her desk in the bathroom, like whatever, right? I'm like, we're throwing away money. I'm not gonna run, I'm not gonna do it. Like we we put on call tracking and found out nobody was picking it up. And I'm like, we're done. Unless you can prove to me someone's gonna get, oh, it's fixed. And I was like, if it's not, like I'm done and never doing Google Ads again with you.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

And they're like, okay, well, that's a great case study, like a blog post case study, what you just said. That's perfect. Put that in the blog post. Because the old days it was like get people to your site and then try to get them to the right place. Now it's like every time you get somebody on your site, you need to treat that like gold. It was that was kind of always true. But if something can be more true than it used to be, that's a thing that's more true now because AI is out there to take your leads, they're out there to take those eyeballs.

Education, Proof Points, And Warranty Risks

SPEAKER_00 16:46

So let me ask you a question. I am a huge WordPress fan and I run into people with SEO issues all of the time. And most of the time they're on one of these other sites, right? That has a builder and it just doesn't have the SEO tools built into the back end that allows them to do things to, I guess, improve it. Plus, they don't own their site, which I really struggle with, right? What are your thoughts on you know the builder and and what role that has a play in it?

Non‑Negotiables That Signal Trust

SPEAKER_01 17:19

It's another one of those questions where I think you back up one question behind that. Where's the business owner's mind? Like we used to do deals where we would go in, somebody else could build a WordPress site, and then we would, or the website, and then we would take over. But we've now done it where uh we only work on sites that we've built and manage. Uh, we make a few exceptions, but the majority of it, we're gonna go in, rebuild the site on our platform that we manage. Because I mean, I've got a customer right now, and he uh he set up a site a few years ago. Um, his partner uh unfortunately uh became ill, and nobody can find who bought that domain. And you know, we're trying to, I'm I'm spending all this time trying to run this down, and I'm only doing it because he's a buddy of mine. If it was anybody else, I said I'm I would say I'm sorry, we either need to alter the domain and put it on something else or uh, you know, something else, or just pause the project. But I think what I'm what I'm getting at to answer your question, uh, because you know, the do you mind me naming the names of the other builders? Feel free. Okay. Oh, yeah. So Squarespace, which is you know, Squarespace is really solid. I've had two cases come to me where the people were like, okay, we're ready to move up to WordPress. And I looked at their rankings and they were ranking, you know, top three across everything. And it was on a Squarespace site. You so it's not impossible, it's rather the approach. So our approach, like when you come to us, we're a holistic approach. We're gonna handle your website, we're gonna handle the content, we're gonna handle the strategy, the blogging and the content strategy, we're gonna handle the SEO output, we're gonna handle the local SEO output. But when you piecemeal things and you're always trying to save, you know, you don't want to pay somebody uh$5,000 to build a website, you want to go drag and drop and build it yourself. Okay, well, at some point, you're gonna have to move into the big leagues and just uh own it. Because somebody asked a question a long time ago that I really love, it helps me make decisions. Um, would you pay somebody$200 an hour to be average to low grade website builder? And the hopefully the answer is no. Well, that's what you're doing because your time needs to be worth at least$200 an hour, and you're out there trying to put together a website to save money. The other way to look at it is would you pay$30,000 a year for a medium grade marketer? Because that's probably what you're gonna get for$30,000,$15 an hour. You know, you're gonna get a okay, somebody who can post some stuff, somebody who can do a few things, not bad. Now, would you pay$30,000 a year for a top level? Well, the answer should be yes, it should be a no-brainer. Well, that's what you get when you engage with an agency, but somebody goes, well,$2,500 a month, I'm not paying that. Well, yes, you are. One way or another, you are. And so to go back to your question, anybody out there who's thinking about piecemealing things to save money, you're you're costing yourself way more money in the in the long. You need to get somebody who has a holistic strategy who has can give you a roadmap. Like we just took somebody, they've been in a market for 25 years. Actually, 35, though, they're 35 years. 35 years, had a website with three pages on it. And the area started growing. They started having competitors come in, and now that website is a is a boat anchor on them. It's really dragging them down because all these competitors are coming in with these nice, shiny websites, and they look, you know, second now to anybody comparing. And so, in just uh two and a half months now, we've taken them from that to we have about 27 pages uh indexed and ranking, and it's telling their story in a holistic way now. It's not about like how much money can I save on this website, it's how much is this gonna cost me in the next five years, the next 10 years, especially with AI. You've got to have somebody who can adapt to AI strategy.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

There's a time and a place for bootstrapping it, right? I mean, when a lot of us start out, you need that, you don't have that$5,000 because there's zero dollars coming in the door. I get it. Um, but at some point, yeah, you're right. You have to step up to the big leagues and ads, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Like you were talking about you can't run, you can't go to Google and say, hey, I'm gonna bootstrap this and I'm gonna know the ads cost what they cost.

Treat Every Visit Like Gold

SPEAKER_00 21:46

What I'm summaring I summarizing up for us is with SEO, it's important and everything depends. Uh but it's like but it's like with marketing, right? I mean, it everything does depend. It depends on your goals and your target and what's important and where things are at. There's a lot of depends. And I think that that's um that that's really important to note. And I appreciate you sharing that and saying that. It's been awesome to have you on, but before I let you go, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?

WordPress, Builders, And Ownership

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Well, probably. Not not far off of what we just talked about. It's like, you know, you're starting your business, you're hard scrabbling it. I'm actually going to start my podcast. It's going to be called Peach Pits and Gravel. Because the idea is all every lesson you need to learn is just on the other side of getting drugged face first through some gravel. It's like that. It's like when I finally committed, I had people tell me you need to commit to one idea, one vertical. And I'm like, no, because I'm losing business if I come out, you know. And so it's all about your ideal customer profile. I like to ask this question, so I'll own it. If you could have 1,000 customers and they're all identical, who would that be? Like the perfect customer for you, and you could clone them a thousand times and they're walking through your door every month laying down cash. Who is that? Now start talking to them. It really pulls, it really straightens everything out. If you've ever heard it's it's easier to pull a string than to push it, it's the same idea. Once you have a North Star that you're moving towards and everything you say goes to this person, now well, what platform are they on? This platform. Well, what blog post do they like? What uh questions do they want to answer? And when I finally obeyed that myself, instead of just preaching it, you know, uh, that really straightened things out for me.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

We all do that. It's like, do what I say, not as I do. Right. No, and I think, you know, and in the episode before this one, um, with Kay Miller, we definitely talked about your ideal customer profile a lot. Um, we talked about it with Rob, we talked about it with Michelle. So, I mean, out of the last like five episodes, it's all about your customer. And this is a theme that I think is really, really, really, really important. I can't say that enough because if you don't know your customer, again, what you're talking about, that North Star, you can't, you can't chart your course. You can't, nothing else you do is going to move the needle until you know that. I work with a coaching client who's like, oh my gosh, you're so helpful. And I'm like, you know, you know your customer, you know them inside and out, and you know exactly what they want to hear. And you know exact or not what they want to hear, but you know what the questions they have, and you answer those questions. I haven't worked with anybody that is that dialed into who their customer is without months of counseling to try and get them off the fear of like letting some business go, right? Um, you're not letting anything go, right? You're focusing in and end up with more than you could ever dream of. And I think that it's so important to remember that. And I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you to all of you for tuning in, whether you're listening or watching. If you learned something today, and I hope you did, it would be awesome if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're at. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.