Hi there, welcome back to the Simple SEO Podcast. I am Rachel Lindteigen and I'm so glad that you are here with me today. I want to talk about something really important. The next three episodes are all going to be questions that I'm hearing on a regular basis concerning SEO and the state of SEO right now. You may or may not be aware, things are changing. Things are evolving very rapidly within the industry, which is interesting because generally SEO is a pretty steady industry. Things don't usually change a whole lot. I mean, we had massive changes. I hate the word massive now with AI because it uses it too much, but we had really big changes. 2011 2012 time frame with Google Panda and Penguin. Those were some of the biggest ones we had where Um, one went after low quality content or very thin content on websites. The other one went after unnatural link building that were kind of cheater tactics. They were things that people were doing in the early days of SEO, kind of the wild, wild west of SEO, where you could rank a website just backlinks. Didn't matter who they were from, what they were, you could have, um, almost no content on a page. Still have it rank well, the, so really for the last decade, we've been focused on creating great content and making sure that it's optimized for Google, but it's always people first content, meaning that it is created for the reader, not for the search engine. It is not just SEO content itself. I teach that to my students. Like we always stay focused on our audience, our listener, our reader, um, our potential customer. We want to make sure that we're providing value. The other, um, the other big algorithm update that hit a lot of people was the helpful content algorithm in 2023. Helpful content ran independently a couple of times and it's now been kind of brought in under the overall Google core algorithm. So that now includes Panda, it includes Penguin, it includes helpful content. Helpful content was really hard on publishers. It was really hard on bloggers. It was hard on bloggers who ran a ton of ads and had lots of pop ups on their website. What we saw from a Google perspective, what they've talked about, is they were really trying to remove the sites that were not a good user experience. And you, I'm sure, just like me, have been on those websites where You go and you click and you're hoping you're going to get information and you realize like there are so many ads that it's almost hard to read the story or there's so many pop ups or it's just it's really annoying. That was what Google really focused on initially with helpful content was just to deprioritize some of those sites that were not a good user experience. So they did do that. If people have cleaned up the sites, they've really worked on removing some of the ads, they've made it a better user experience, they're recovering from helpful content. So if you hear people saying, I never recovered from it, they probably have a user experience issue at this point in time. So now, people are asking, like, Is SEO even worth it? Does it still work? SEO still works today, even with AI. I know that's the next question is like, but what about AI overviews? AI overviews are very similar to direct answers. And direct answers came out, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember now, like a 2011 timeframe. It's been a long, long time. Direct answers, maybe that one was 2018. I don't remember my exact numbers, but it's been a long time. Direct answers. Give us information that Google figures we don't really want to go and read a blog post on. We don't really need to go read content. Something like, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? Well, there's three teaspoons in a tablespoon. If I'm making a batch of cookies, I don't need to read a blog post, especially not a recipe blog post that goes on for, you know, 4, 000 words and tells me where the person bought the bowl. I don't care where they bought the bowl, just give me the recipe. I don't need to read that in order to find out that there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon. I just need it told to me at the top of the page. And that works great. And that's a direct answer. Google's AI overviews are very similar. They are not in every query. They're in a lot of them. But they're more the informational, the transactional, like the upper top of the funnel, like people who are just starting their research process. They're not usually in super detailed queries. And so I personally find myself reading the AI overviews versus going to websites sometimes. Now, if I see something and I want more information, it's more than just that direct answer, it's more than just how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and I'm looking at the AI query, I'm going to be like other consumers, and I'm going to click, and I'm going to go through, and I'm going to go to the website that they're pulling that information from. So, SEO still works and the reason SEO still works, let's talk about it. If you want to show up in AI overviews, you want to show up in chat GPT, perplexity, you want to show up in search GPT, chat GPT search engine, you need to be doing SEO on your website because what we're seeing is the websites that they're pulling that information from you. Okay. are the ones that they like, they know, they trust. They're the ones that have built their authority. They're the ones that have great content. They're the ones that are optimized for Google. So it's really important that you understand. Absolutely. SEO is still working today. It is evolving. It's not dead. We're going to talk about that in a future podcast episode as well. SEO has been dying for 15 years. Every time something changes, SEO is dead. I like. I could be a billionaire if I had money for every time somebody said SEO was dead. It's not, but it's changing. Google is continuing to test and change and grow. And yes, the AI search engines are picking up. The chatbots are picking up. They are getting more search. However, ChatGPT is on track to have 1 percent of the searches in 2025. 1%. Google, while they have taken a slight dip, they're still at like 88 to 89 percent of the search share, so there's still a huge amount of traffic going through Google. The other thing in the most recent article that I saw, we actually had a 373x, like 373 times the number of searches go through Google that go through ChatGPT in a day. So yes, SEO still is very important. As long as people are searching for information related to your business, as long as there is search activity, you will need to do SEO. SEO will still work because if you want to rank, you want to show up high on Google, you want to get traffic to your website, you want to have people join your email list and all of that, then you need to do SEO on your website. This, I think, is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making right now, or, and they've been making it as long as I've been in the industry, is they don't prioritize it. They don't really understand how critical it is. They think that SEO is an extra. It's something you do after the fact. I'm going to build my website and then I'll do it. You actually need to build your website with SEO in mind. If you are doing that, you're going to realize, once you understand, you're going to see that SEO keywords come into play in your navigation, your site structure, your content on your pages, your blog categories, everything can be tied back to SEO. You can be so strategic in what you do if you understand it. And if you understand it, you have a well optimized site, you're targeting keywords that you have a really good chance of ranking for. You, my friend, can rank very high in the Google search results. You can get more traffic. You can build your email list. Doing that is going to help you start to have that passive income funnel that so many of us want because now we've got traffic coming to our website and we have a way to capture that traffic. And then hopefully they're going to convert and turn into a lead or a sale or they're going to book a consult call like SEO can be the foundation. of your content strategy, your optimization, your visibility, and it can be what fuels your passive income funnel. So does it still work in 2025? One hundred percent. It is not too late. You did not miss the boat. You do not need to worry about, you know, doing something else instead. The AI chatbots are not taking over completely. Just know that this is really important. The time to get started. It still works. If you've tried it in the past and you didn't get results, you probably made one of a couple of really super common mistakes. The really great news about SEO is that we can fix those mistakes. You can come in, you can learn, you can find out, and you can fix those mistakes. You can address them and turn things around. So if you've tried and you've not gotten results before or you've been kind of waiting to see, You know, my, I talked to my business coach. I need to wait. I shouldn't do this yet. I should do that. Or I'm still working on this other course. I want you to understand, this is something you need to stop putting off. Because until you do it, You're going to continue to struggle with what I had one student refer to as pathetic search traffic. I have to do this and start working on this course because I have pathetic website traffic and I know this is going to help me and it will help you. You just have to do the work. So yes, SEO still works if you do it. If you're ready, join me in Simple SEO content. It is the easiest way. I will walk you through what to do, how to do it. I'll also teach you how to be part of the AI overviews and chat GPT and perplexity and how to look in analytics to find out where you're getting traffic from all of those things because it's all in there if you know where to look and that's what I'm going to do is teach you. So does SEO still work in 25, 2025? It sure does. Should you be prioritizing it? Absolutely. Is it more than just a little something extra you do to your website? Yeah, my friend, it actually should be the core strategy. You should be using keywords in everything that you're creating. And if you understand, like once you understand it, it's easier to do things like launch a podcast. Podcast SEO is amazing. Works really well. I'm just saying I have one of the top 100 marketing podcasts in the entire world. So thank you for listening. Do truly appreciate it. It was not always that way. When I first launched this podcast two years ago, my very first month, I had 121 downloads. Not good, not bad, kind of middle of the road, kind of average, but also not going to be life changing from a business perspective. 121 downloads is not a lot for the course of a month, but Podcast SEO has helped me get to the point that I get more downloads than I used to get in a month in a matter of a couple of hours when I release a new episode. So, SEO is incredibly powerful, whether it's for your website, your blog, your podcast. If you are creating content in 2025 and the future, my friend, you need to be optimizing your content. You really do. Let me show you how. I've got several classes. I have simple SEO content that's going to help you optimize the content for your website and your blog. And then I have simple podcast SEO that's going to help you optimize your podcast. Whether you have a podcast today or you want to launch a podcast, that course is going to walk you through everything you need to know to launch and succeed. Or if you have a podcast that's not growing, it's going to show you why it's not growing and it's going to help you. So be sure and Check those out. I've got the information in the show notes so that you can find that. And then make sure you get registered. I'm teaching a free class the 28th and 29th, so in two weeks, all about the most common mistakes that people make when they are trying to do SEO. And I'm going to help you understand what those mistakes are so that you can start to turn things around. And then I do, honestly, between you and I, I do hope you will join me in Simple SEO content because that allows me to work closer with you. It allows me to answer your questions and to help guide you and to speed this process up for you because SEO is still a very, very powerful marketing channel. It can change things for your business if you know what to do, and I'd love to be the one to teach you how to do it. All right, that's it for today. Bye for now. I will see you back here next week.