Hi, and welcome back to the simple SEO podcast. I'm Rachel Lindteigen and I am so glad that you're here with me today. Today. I want to talk about a new search engine. That's starting to take off and I want you to be aware of it and start thinking about it and making sure that we are optimizing for it as well. Now, this does not mean that Google is going away by no means. Does it mean Google's going away? Google's market share has started to drop slightly. We saw a drop in Q4 of 2024, where the market share dipped below 90% for the first time, since 2015 now it's feels like, well, it's still 87, 80 8%. It's still the vast majority of traffic, but. We are seeing some competitive shifts. In the marketplace. The newest search engine is chat. GPTs search GPT, and I've started getting some questions about it. And I thought, okay. It's time to do a podcast episode and a blog post all about. Search GPT and how we optimize for it. So the really good news is the way that it works is very similar to Google. And what we've been doing from a Google SEO standpoint will work for search GPT. Now search GPT is powered by being so they're pulling information from being for their searches. Being SEO and Google SEO. We're very similar. I personally haven't done anything as far as Bing SEO since about 2012, because Bing's market share. Is it 4%. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of the market. And they're generally considered to be the second largest search engine. From a traditional search engine standpoint now chat GPTs new search GPT launched in late 20, 24 and is already at a 1% market share. So while it's. Tiny at 1% market share it's growing fast. The thought is that it may very likely. Meet up or take over from Google in the future. If Google doesn't really figure things out and turn things around, and I know. There's been a lot of frustration and confusion the last couple of years between the helpful content update and the AI spam and all the different things. And I know some websites were hit really hard by it. Others benefited from it. What I want you to know is that the most important thing when it comes to SEO, Is that we are still creating great content and we're just optimizing that content for the search engine. So they understand it better. Your number one focus always, always, always needs to remain on creating great content. That's helpful for your audience. It doesn't matter which search engine we talk about. I have a feeling in the next couple of years, we're going to talk about more and more search engines. I just suspect we're going to see Google kind of. I mean, Google's having a little bit of a challenge right now. I still think Google is going to remain the main one, but I think search GPT looks like it may be adapted by more people, adopted by more people and start to take off. Bing is having a tiny bit of a resurgence. So we'll just kind of see. Wait and see and see what happens. But the good news is. We don't have to shift our SEO strategy. Just to keep up with these other search engines. So for search GPT, SEO. The good news is what we've been doing for Google works there as well. So search GPT works slightly different. Google looks for keywords. I searched GPT because it's based on chat GPT, which is a large language model. They look more for contextual clues. It looks more for the. Words that they would expect to see, to answer the query. So it works slightly different, but what we're seeing is the actual optimization best practices are the same. So what's going to be important. Here is the formatting of your content. Not that it wasn't important with Google because it was, but I don't think there's been as much focus on content formatting. So what we're really looking at is easy. Scanability for the AI. Bot. And the consumer or the reader. So, what we're going to want to do is continue creating fantastic content. That helps your ideal customer that anticipates their questions and provide some value and helpful information. Now the slight difference here is they want us to make sure that we're really thinking about what questions they might have and that we're being in depth. Now I've always said, anticipate the questions, answer them, all of that. It's the same type thing here, but what I want you to do when you're creating content is also think about, or incorporate the things that you might see in the people also ask section. Or on answer the public related to. Your topic. Make sure that you're using those in your headers. You're formatting it. You're using bullet points. You've got white space. You're using, uh, title tags to separate your content, all the things that we've been doing. Make sure you're doing that because it's going to make it easier for the AI engine to read it. But it's also going to make it easier for your potential visitor to read it. They're also saying, make sure that you have very descriptive titles for your blog posts. Don't get cutesy. Don't be funny. Don't do any of that. Just make sure that they're straightforward. They're descriptive. All of that, because that, again is something that the AI engine, the bot is going to look at to determine if your website has the information they're looking for. And remember. The way, the large language models work, which chat GPT is an LMM. They're going to look for like matching content. Or what they predict the next words would be. So that's why having those related. Uh, queries and having direct, simple to understand answers are a little more important here. The other thing that we want to talk about. So keywords are going to be the same. We are going to see more emphasis on long tail keywords, but the reality is. Your small business owner, you should be using long tail keywords now, anyway, because you're not going to rank for short tail or one to two word. Keywords. You're going to have a much better chance of ranking for longer keyword phrases that are less competitive. It's just the way it is. So you're going to be using the same thing and you're going to want to make sure that you're using those keywords in all of the places. That it makes sense to use them now from an SEO standpoint. That's going to be your meta-description your title tag, your header tags, your copy, your URL, your image, file names, your image alt text, et cetera. If you're not sure what those are or how to format them, what they look like in the search results. Be sure to request a copy of my beginner's guide to SEO. That is on the freebies tab on my website. And then from there, make sure the other thing that we're looking at are the tech tips. So the same as Google, we want to make sure that your website loads quickly. That you have your images. Compressed or minified, so that they're small. We want to make sure it looks good. On all different screens, meaning that your template is responsive. All of those things are going to be really important. Whether we're talking about search GPT, Bing, Yahoo, Google, any of them, they all want to make sure that they're giving the best possible. Answer the best possible website, the easiest to understand. To their visitor because they want the market share. They want people to keep coming back using their search engine. So if you've been hurt, hearing things about search GPT and you were wondering what it was and did you have to do things differently? You really don't. Just keep doing what you're doing and make sure that you are formatting your content with lots of white space and bullet points and lists and including images and all of that really focus on the readability of the content that you're creating along with your optimization. And you'll be fine. I'm also going to do. Um, blog posts and podcast episodes talking about our Google AI overview, inclusion and chat GPT SEO itself. So stay tuned. I'm going to have a couple more of those coming up for you because I know things are evolving. They're changing a bit and we're getting some new SEO. Even though it still follows all the same rules. All right. That's it for today. Hopefully you found that helpful. If you have any questions or you want to learn what more to do, just know that we are addressing all of this inside a simple SEO content. Come join me, take the class, and we'll make sure that you are ready for search GPT, chat, GBT, AI, overviews, inclusion, whatever comes next. We're going to figure it out together. All right. Thank you. And I will see you next week. Bye. For now.