Welcome back to the podcast. This is Rachel Lindteigen, your host. I'm so glad you're here. And I want to take a second before we jump into today's episode. To make sure you know, I'm teaching a live class today. The last session of this one is today. You can get registered at the link in the description or on my website. Go to the freebies tab, etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies, save your seat. I'm going to be teaching the three biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to their SEO. And they keep you from getting traffic and getting leads. and building your email list and having more sales and all of that. So I'm really going to explain what those three biggest mistakes are and then you will have a chance to learn what they are. You can ask questions if you have them and then hopefully you'll join me in simple SEO content where you can then put together the SEO strategy. for your website, for your business. So make sure you're signed up for that. If you're not, yeah, I don't want you to miss out. I know the last session is today, Tuesday, so do not miss out. All right. Now jumping into today's lesson, today's discussion, like I said a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to go through some of the most common questions that I get. Some of the things that people are just really kind of struggling with because it's out there and it's like, well. Is this real? Is this happening? So I keep getting asked, is SEO dead? Is this the end of search engine optimization? And I know people are concerned, especially with AI overviews and the fact that they're being expanded. And now Google has said they're going to add in the AI tab and then chat GPT and perplexity and all the different AI tools. Is this going to be the end of SEO as we know it? I don't think so. I really, truly don't. When it first came out, I wondered if it would be the end of it if I needed to adjust my niche and start teaching other things because was this really going to be the thing that killed SEO? Is SEO dead? I mean, that's been going around. Every time there's a change with Google, every time there's an algorithm update for the last 15 years, the rumors have swirled. This is it. This is what's going to kill SEO. But it's not, okay. As I got more advanced understanding of how it worked and I started to really see, what I realized is I think SEO is actually more important today than it was even a year ago. Because not only is the work we're doing for Google benefiting our websites from a Google perspective, it also works for Bing. And Bing, I know we haven't talked about much before, but Bing is going to be important. because Bing is what powers ChatGPT's search. The good news is what we do for Google generally works for Bing. We don't have to do separate Bing optimization. What we do for Google will work. But what I want you to understand is what we're seeing in the research studies is that in general the websites that are well optimized, they're easy to crawl, the content is easy to understand. All of that, those are the websites that are being used for answers in AI overviews, perplexity, chat GPT, et cetera. So if you want to know how do I show up in chat GPT? How do I get my website in AI overviews? How does Google decide who's showing up? It all comes back to your traditional SEO. It comes back to making sure that Site is easy for the search engine to crawl, meaning to go through and find the content and click from link to link to link. And the content itself is helpful and it provides value. And it's something that they would want to share. And when we talk about Google, it's optimized for the proper keywords. Now there is a little bit of difference in how Google and our AI chatbots work. The AI chatbots, because people search in a more conversational tone, they're not necessarily looking at the optimization elements for the keyword and looking at keyword, keyword, keyword, and like each time is another check that that's what this page is about. That's not how they work. They work based on predictive text, and they're looking for what they think the next concept or the next text should be, and people are asking longer queries, more conversational, so we do want to make sure that We're thinking about that when we're creating our copy so that we have a better chance of being included. So we want to be conversational. We don't just solely want to focus on one keyword. We do want to look more at long tail keywords, which we've talked about those a lot here. Long tail keywords are simply the keyword phrases. that are like three, four, five, six words all strung together in a phrase. So is SEO dead? That's the keyword I'm using for this particular blog post, podcast, etc. Because that should work on Google and it should work on chat GPT, search GPT, perplexity, etc. So when we are formatting our content to hopefully be included in the AI overviews, there are specific things we want to do from a formatting standpoint. We want to make sure that we're using headers, we have short paragraphs, we have easy to understand, clear, concise content. Does this sound really different from what I've been talking about? with you for the last two years now, it really isn't. It's very similar. I did add a lesson in Simple SEO content recently that goes into like, how do I show up in these things? How do I have this work so that my students understand exactly what they need to do from a formatting standpoint? But I really want you to understand that. SEO is not dead. It is not dying. In fact, I think it's more important now than it was a year or two ago because of the fact that now we're working on our more visibility. It's not just Google, or just Bing, or just one of those. It's now, where are people searching? Are they searching on Bing? Are they searching on Google? Are they searching ChatGPT? Are they searching Perplexity? We need to be visible in all of those places. And thank goodness, thank goodness that we don't have to do separate SEO for all of them. But we do have to do SEO if we want to show up in all these different places. Because like I said, what we're finding is the websites that rank high on Google. are usually SEO friendly. Somebody has put the time and effort into doing the search engine optimization on that site to make it easy to understand. They are also generally the sites that are being used by the AI chatbots for the information that they share, they're the sites they link to, all of that. I know that my site is getting traffic from chat GPT and perplexity because I can go into my Google Analytics. And I can take a look and I can see what traffic I'm getting under the referral sources. If you know how to look at your analytics, it's under referral, you'll have to apply a filter, et cetera, to see which engines are sending it. But I know that I'm getting traffic from them. I also know that I'm ranking in chat GPT search for blog posts, content, things like that, that are also ranking high on page one of Google. And a ranking in the Google AI overview section at the top of the page. So is SEO dead? No. Once again, SEO is changing. It's updating. It's adjusting. It's evolving. I think this is very similar to when we had Google Panda and Penguin come out in like 2011 then again, um, helpful content in 2023. Those were the three largest algorithm updates in the last decade. And Panda and Penguin were addressing poor quality content and spammy backlinks. And those are things that. We don't worry about today because they were resolved, you know, 2011 and 2012, you know, to create high quality content, to focus on your audience, to think about your keywords secondarily, like really focus right for your audience. And then optimize for Google second. That is what Google has been saying since 2011 and 2012. You also know not to buy links and to earn them. And to protect your link portfolio and your profile, and think of it like your neighborhood, and build links and earn them. Now, thanks to helpful content, You know that you need to make sure your content truly is helpful and helpful content. I know a lot of people have talked about it and kind of with disdain, especially within the blogging community, they hate it. They think it was a terrible thing. What I want you to understand within the SEO community, what we've seen and what Google has said is that what happened with helpful content was they went after websites that were a poor user experience. So even if that website had great content on it, they didn't want it to rank as high if it had lots of pop ups and lots of ads where it. It was an impediment to the user experience. If the person reading it would be bogged down with ads or would be annoyed by it, it's not a good search result. It's not a good user experience result. So because of that, that's why Google deprioritized a lot of the blogs. Because while the content is good and it truly does follow helpful guidelines. They were so focused on making money off their readers that their readers were a secondary thought. And so that's why helpful content was the way that it was. Those of us who blog don't have a lot of ads, like I have no ads on my site. Those of us who blog who do not run ads did not see the same damage from helpful content that others did. The other big algorithm update they've done. Most recent time that we heard SEO was dead was when we had the Google AI spam update last spring. And that one again, people were like, Oh, SEO is dead. It doesn't work. It's all my traffic is down. I lost 90 percent of my traffic. What that update did was remove AI generated content from the websites or from the web. Google removed, oh my gosh, I'm trying to remember, I was at a conference where we talked about it. I think it was about 50 or 60 percent of the AI spam. So when our AI tools came out, and we had ChatGPT, and suddenly you could create tons of content in almost no time. You could ask ChatGPT to write you a blog post, and you can do it today. If you ask ChatGPT to write you a blog post and you tell it what keyword to use, it will write you a blog post. It's not going to be good. It's not going to rank high on Google. It's not quality content, but it can do it really fast. And so we had people, once again, kind of trying to cheat the system. And so they were producing tons of content out of ChatGPT. So maybe they do 10 blog posts a day or 20 blog posts a day because they understood that the more often you blog, the more frequently you blog, the better chances you have of ranking, the more keywords you have ranking, the more traffic you should get to your site. Like they understood how it worked. What they weren't taking into consideration was that The AI generated content was not the quality that Google wanted to have indexed and it did work briefly. They did get those cheater tactics to work briefly with all their content that they created out of AI and they didn't edit and they just put it straight forward. But then the AI spam update came and it got rid of it and it said this is not what we want. So each time we've heard people say SEO is dead, SEO doesn't work anymore, SEO is dying, it's been In reality, cheater tactics no longer work. Lazy SEO no longer works. I don't want to put the effort into doing it the right way, so what I've been doing doesn't work. So Panda and Penguin, like I said, they were about content quality and backlinking. So at one point in time, We had all sorts of crazy stuff going on within the SEO world. So 15 years ago, we had even less than that. We had websites where companies did not want to have words. Okay. Can you believe this? Imagine this for a moment. They didn't want their beautiful websites to be ruined by words, except the only way Google knows what your page is about and what. What your content is about is to have words on it. So they started doing things like having a white background with white text so that only the search engine could read the words. It would not bother their consumers or their website visitors. Guys, that's a cheater tactic. That's I believe it's called cloaking. You can't do that. It's against Google's rules. But people were doing that. Or then they were ranking their websites because they were buying links to all sorts of websites and they had nothing to do with their business. But if you had the most links, then you ranked the highest. So those are tactics they've worked on getting rid of and they got rid of those about a decade ago. Now we saw people really kind of taking advantage of the number of ads that they had and the pop ups and it really the sites were bogged down. They took a long time to load because of the ads. People didn't enjoy them because of the ads. That's what helpful content addressed. Your content needs to be helpful. Then they added in EEAT, your experience, your expertise, your authority, and your trust. That's what your content is graded on today. And they added the second E because they wanted to combat the chat GPT content because you need to actually have done what you're talking about. You need to actually be an expert and have experience doing it. They really want to make sure that the people that they're ranking high that they're sending traffic to are really good search results. They really can help the person who's searching. We've talked about this before. Google is a business. Google is not here just to send traffic to you. Google is here to make money. The way they make money is by having ads that they can sell to people. And the only way they can continue to have enough audience to sell their ads to to keep making money is to have really great search results so that people keep using them. For their search now, you've probably heard, or maybe you've heard Google search volume is starting to drop and that may have you wondering again, is SEO dead? Do I even need to worry about Google? So yes, Google search volume has dropped slightly. It did drop in Q4, 2024 for the first time in 10 or 12 years, it dipped below 90%. Now, yes, it dipped below 90%. It's been hovering in that 88, 89 percent range. And you may have heard ChatGPT and the AI search engines are taking over and so that's why Google's search has dropped and they are picking up. ChatGPT is expected to have one percent market share by the end of 2025. So to put this into perspective, most recent study that I've read, for every one search on ChatGPT there are 373 searches on Google. So is SEO dead? Absolutely not. As long as people are searching for the information related to your niche on a search engine, you will continue to need to do SEO. And if you want to be future proofed, you want to be ready for where we're going with chat GPT search and perplexity and all the different AI things, Then you again need to do SEO because what we're seeing is those new AI bots and chat engines and search engines are all using the same type SEO. Like if you have a well optimized SEO friendly website, you have a better chance of being included in the search results there, being the one that they send people to. So SEO is not dead. I really don't think it's going to die. I do think every time. Something changes, people start swirling saying this is the thing that's going to kill SEO. People may start searching less often on Google. They may spread their searches out across Google and Bing and ChatGPT. We know that some of our younger consumers are more likely to search on social media channels than even on a traditional search engine. Like Gen Z is much more likely to go straight to TikTok, potentially Instagram, but usually TikTok to do their search. That's okay because we want to think about what we refer to, what's being referred to now as search everywhere optimization. Your consumer Um, may search in different places. What you want to do is make sure that you are the one who's showing up in those areas. So your first thing to do is make sure your website is well optimized. If you've not yet taken simple SEO content, please join me in that class. Let me help you with this. Do not try to Google and YouTube your way through this. There are too many simple mistakes that you can make, too many super common mistakes. Let me show you what to do. Let me guide you through this. And then let's get your website done so we know it's one that the search engines and the chatbots can understand. And then you can start getting that visibility across multiple platforms. This is no longer just Google. This is about getting you that visibility in other areas. So Simple SEO content is going to help you get visibility to your content. Whether you're talking about Google, chat GPT, perplexity, you're looking at social media, I have a bonus training in there on SEO for your social media. It's not a training on social media best practices. It's SEO for social media. What should you do from an SEO standpoint for your Pinterest, for your Instagram, for your YouTube, etc. And then let's make sure that you're using SEO because it's really important across all channels. We want to build your brand. We want people to have brand recognition and we want you to be the one that they find wherever they're searching. Search everywhere. Remember that. All right, that's it for today. I want to thank you for listening to this one. Make sure you're signed up. Join me in the free class. Like I said, it is today. The last session is today. Go to the freebies tab on the website, etchedmarketing. com forward slash freebies and I'll have information there for you so you can very quickly register and get joined. Um, into today's class, ask questions if you have them, and then let's do it. Join me in simple SEO content. Let me walk you through how you do this and we'll get it taken care of for you. Thanks for being here. Bye for now.