142: Before You Pay Someone to Do Your SEO - Growing Your Business Without Social Media

In this final episode of the Grow Your Business Without Social Media series, Jules White tackles the question everyone's asking right now: does AI search change everything? Cutting through the "SEO is dead" noise, she explains why, when you dig underneath it, it's still SEO at the core - your website needs to be well set up, clearly written, and easy for both people and bots to understand.

But the real heart of this episode is a bigger, more reassuring message: you're probably a lot less behind than you think. Jules makes the honest case for doing this work yourself and keeping your marketing in-house - not to become an SEO expert, but to understand your own business well enough that you're never bamboozled by tech or paying an agency every month for something you can't check.

She's candid that there's work involved. SEO is front-loaded, and if your website has been a bit neglected, it takes time. But unlike social media, where a post is gone within a week, this work compounds - what you do now keeps paying you back for months and years to come.

Key Takeaways:

• It's still SEO underneath: Why so much of the AI search advice is 80% of what you'd be doing for SEO anyway, and why the scoreboard has changed more than the actual work.
• Do it yourself, own it: Why understanding your own strategy keeps you in control - and why, even if you outsource later, you'll know exactly what you're paying for.
• Front-loaded but worth it: How the effort you put in now becomes an asset for your business, unlike the dopamine hits of social media that never compound.
• Who this is really for: The three things that make this approach the right fit - readiness to do the strategy work, the capacity to implement it, and a genuine need for a steady stream of leads.

If you're ready to have less reliance on social media and want your website to become the reliable hub of your business, this episode will show you why the work you've been doing is exactly the right work.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 136: Growing Your Business Without Social Media - How I Do It - where this series began
• Episode 102: Social Media Is Optional - the most downloaded episode of the show
• Episode 105: Why Your Brain and Business Deserve a Break From Harmful Social Media
• Episode 108: Why Your Website Feels So Overwhelming
  And How to Make It Easier
• Episode 131: Why Blogging Might Be a Waste of Your Time and What to Do Instead
• The Website Clarity Map - map out your website strategy so your pages aren't competing with each other
• The Website Growth Club - do the strategy work yourself, with group support when you get stuck
• Book a discovery call - if you're not sure where you're stuck or where you're trying to get to

Don't forget - social media is optional.

Transcript

Welcome to the Website Success Show

Jules White: Hi, it's Jules here. Welcome back to the Website Success Show, where I teach local and online business owners simple strategies to help you get more traffic and make more sales through your existing website so you can keep control of your marketing, escape the social media overwhelm, and instead focus on doing what you love.

Recap: Growing a business without social media

Jules White: Now, over the last few episodes, we've been focusing on how to grow a business without social media. I kicked off this series back in episode 136 on growing your business without social media, how I do it and how you can do it as well.

And then explored over the last few episodes how networking has helped me grow my business without social media, and how collaborations can help you as well. I had the wonderful Judy C. Butler.

It's been lovely actually having some guests on over the last few episodes. I don't have many guests on the show, um, but it's like kind of all just come together, conversations I've been having that they all came together and I just wanted to bring in those different experts who could help you to understand the different ways you can grow your business without social media.

Because SEO is just part of that. And your website and your content that you own is just part of it really, but it's all part of that bigger picture of business owners who are just done with the social media grind and the social media overwhelm.

Since I've been talking about this more and more, I've had more and more conversations. I find that people are coming through discovery calls and that is the first thing that they're mentioning to me is I really like the sound of this Jules.

I love the sound of growing my business without social media or just having less reliance on it so that I'm just not having to go on there, not having to burn myself out, slogging away on social media and then just getting nothing back for it.

Social media is optional

Jules White: The most popular episode still of the podcast, the one that's had the most amount of downloads by a long shot, actually by a long way, is episode 102, which is social media is optional and how to grow a business without constant posting. I have been really talking about social media being optional and the problems with, so marketing your business with social media pretty much from the start of the podcast back in episode two even.

So it was, you know, literally actually that's the first proper episode. We've got the intro episode, which is four minutes long.

It's literally just a, hi, this is what this podcast is gonna be about. And the first ever episode was number two, which is why you don't need to keep feeding the algorithm, use your existing content potential to show up in search.

So this has been baked in from the start with the podcast and with how I have worked in my business over the last few years. But I think just having more of these real conversations, really embracing it.

And probably what I would say as well for me is since I broke up with social media at the end of January and I have to use it for my swimming community 'cause to find out if people are swimming. I'm a cold water swimmer and so I have to go on Facebook once a week to make sure there's a swim going on and make sure that there's gonna be people there 'cause we swim somewhere quite remote.

And if somebody sends me a message on social media, then I will answer that. Or if somebody tags me in something, then, then I will answer that.

So if I see a message when I log in, I will deal with that. I'm not ignoring that that's there, I'm not posting, I'm not checking it daily.

Yeah, I'm not using it to grow my business, but since I made that decision to step back and to not have that as a pressure in my business, just to make that conscious decision of not deliberately using social media for my business, things have changed. I have found that I've attracted more people who, who like the sound of that.

And it's very, very rare that I have a conversation with somebody and I happen to mention about, my philosophy on social media and that they say they love it. They say they really enjoy using social media.

Some people do. And what I often find is it's people who have a bigger follower following and people who are making money with it, which makes sense.

You know, if, if you, if people are using social media and it is making them money in their business, then you can understand why they would be a fan of it. But the majority of small business owners that I talk to hate it, hate the mental health implications of using social media.

And I talked about this back in episode 105, why your brain and business deserves a break from harmful social media. That was a part, a part of another little series I did, which was all about how the harmful effects of social media and the fact that it's built on the same kind of algorithms as gaming apps are and why it's designed to keep us there.

So if you have been exploring this, if you've been starting to think about why does social media affect me and why do I feel so crap when I use it, then go and have a listen to that episode and, um, send me a message. Let me know how you feel about it.

Does AI search change things?

Jules White: So today I wanted to explore because we are in a changing world at the moment, and I wanted to explore whether AI search changes things.

I've seen a couple of emails this week, one in particular that kind of, I found it a little bit like, mm, triggering I suppose really, because there's a lot of noise out there right now that SEO's dead or SEO's changed, or s and it has definitely, things have changed a little bit, but a lot of the things that people are teaching, when you dig a bit further and you dig a bit deeper into what they're actually telling you, it's still SEO underneath it all is still, your website needs to be optimised, that it's well set up for robots to be able to read through it and for people to be able to understand it and for them to take the action that you want to take.

And ultimately, it's about the words that you use on the, on your website. It's about where you put those words on your website and that hasn't really changed really.

So I think there's a lot of noise out there and I thought this would be a good podcast episode to wrap up this series and whether this is all still relevant, whether you still can grow your business without social media because of AI search. If you've been curious about whether you could get more leads coming into your business using organic search, whether that is searches on Google.

Whether you call it SEO, A-O-G-E-O, AI search, AI visibility, be basically having your website set up in a way that is searchable and findable and connects with people when they're searching for a business like yours. And people are out there searching for a business like yours.

Particularly if you're a local business, particularly if you're in a very niche business as well. Then people want to find businesses like yours.

They wanna come and buy from you. They want to solve their problem, and if you are that solution that solves their problem, then making sure your website is set up in a way that actually gets that information across to both the bots and to the people is really important.

How I work differently from SEO agencies

Jules White: I work very differently from SEO agencies, because when I first started getting into SEO, I talked to so many business owners who had been paying someone to do their SEO for months, maybe even years. They, they weren't seeing a difference.

They didn't feel that it made a difference in their business, and they were no further along into understanding why it hadn't made a difference to their business. I only work with business owners that are ready to do the strategy work.

So I think of myself like an SEO or website coach really. So someone to help them to understand what needs to happen on their website to get it showing up in search and connecting with the right people at the right moment, really.

If you have the capacity, so either the skills or the budget, once you've done the strategy work to actually implement that. For some businesses that is, that they want to do it themselves.

Some people have VAs or they have someone within their team that's able to do that for them. You do need something, you need a way for this, these changes and this strategy work that you are, that we've created, you need a way for that to actually get implemented on your website and on your Google Business Profile.

And also a genuine need for a steady stream of leads coming into your business. So if the way that you work with people means that you always need new people coming in an example is a physio where you help people get better or, laser tattoo removal studio where once people have had their tattoos removed and they might have lots of tattoos they need removing, but you always need new people coming in.

Whereas like I think back in my salon days once a therapist or a stylist was fully booked, then they didn't always need those new people coming in. Now what we did always need and what we always could have benefited from, and I think I wish I'd known back then, what I know now is we were a Clarins gold salon and if we could have done a lot more to optimise the website to show up for Clarins in the, the village that we were in, that could have made a massive difference because there was no cap on that.

We could have people coming into the shop all day long or placing orders on the website and that could have helped to increase the profit and the revenue of the business significantly. And so I think it's worth thinking about whether you do need that steady stream of leads coming into your business and that you always will, it's a fundamental part of your business that you always need new leads.

I think that doing this yourself and doing this SEO work within your own business and at least having a fundamental understanding of if you decide to outsource at a later date that you understand what it is you're outsourcing. So you're not then gonna get bamboozled by tech.

You're not gonna have somebody pulling the wool over your eyes and telling you things that are, that you know aren't true. You'll be able to actually check the work that people are doing as well.

I know a few people who have paid for SEO and when I point out some of the fundamental things that their SEO people haven't been doing and haven't done, then they can start to question, well actually, have they done anything? What have they done?

You know, they're sending me these reports that I don't understand every month, but what have they actually done? One of the SEO people that I listen to this week had a video where if you were setting up as an SEO agency, they were breaking down the costs involved of actually doing the work.

And, how many hours it was. And they, he kind of worked out that if you were spending less than a thousand dollars, which is about 850 quid a month on SEO, then realistically that's kind of what the, what an agency would need to charge to be able to do the work.

And that was with outsourcing abroad as well. So that was with using cheaper labour than if it was, um, like if it was UK based people, minimum wage, those kind of things.

Then I think that's a really good figure to actually think about. And I've said this for a long time, that actually, if you are spending, you know, 3, 4, 500 pound a month on SEO, it probably feels like you're spending quite a lot of money on that.

And it is, especially if it's not working, if it's not them bringing leads into your business, which realistically for that amount of money, you're not gonna be getting a lot of SEO work actually done for you. So that's why I absolutely love working with business owners who want to do this work themselves.

They want to understand this. They, they want to do the strategy themselves.

And I talked about this back in episode 108. I've talked, I've mentioned this episode a lot, that this is about the three brain modes you need for SEO.

As the business owner, you still need to be involved in that strategy, even if you've got a budget of 1,500 pounds that you're spending a month on SEO. And if your agency isn't involving you in the strategy, then how do they know what's going on in your business?

How do they know what the most important things you're focused on right now are, and how do they know how your business, how you want your business to show up and what you want to actually be happening with your website and your, and your leads coming into your business. So I think it's definitely worth thinking about that it's not for everybody.

If you don't have the capacity or the skills or the budget to actually be able to implement this yourself or pay somebody to do that for you, if you don't have the time or the inclination to do the strategy work yourself, you need to think about the way around that.

SEO is front-loaded but compounds

Jules White: So the one thing I would want you to remember from that is that it, this can work for your business if we think about what, what social media demands of us and the amount of posting we have to do and the amount of interaction we have to do to have that actually work for our business. If we compare that to SEO.

SEO does have a, a sort of front-loaded, it's front-heavy on the work really.

So you need to get your website set up properly and you need to, um, do the strategy work. And actually, you know, there's lots to do upfront, basically, but once you've done that, the results compound.

So it is not like you have to keep posting all the time like you do with social media. You can do the majority of the hard work in the beginning.

And then you would just be maybe creating a new page once a month, or not even that, just going back through those older pages of your website. Particularly if you are a local business and you offer various types of services, then actually you might not need to be blogging.

And I've, I talked about this back in episode 131, why blogging might be a waste of your time and what to do instead. Because not every business does need to do that, and for many local businesses it, it just isn't helpful, especially now.

So much of this is being answered in the AI answers and the AI overviews. Blogging isn't necessarily the right way to go.

We need to be thinking about how can we make this unique content that shows our real human lived experience and give something unique, give something that actually is valuable to the person reading that page. So yes, there is work to do upfront and it's not necessarily that this work is easy.

So some of the strategy work in particular and the work on your ideal client and the problems that you solve for people, how to get that into real clear language and connect that with what people are actually searching for or having conversations with AI agents, whether that's ChatGPT, Google's AI overviews, Claude, Gemini, whatever it is that people are using, or whichever one is the new one that's now that, we'll prob no doubt we'll be all be using something different in a year's time or whatever. Then wherever people are searching, making sure that we get that sort of information right, isn't always the easiest of things to do.

This was something that actually when I first started The Website Growth Club, I realised very quickly that I needed to add something in to help members to get clear on this because it's all right thinking about, okay, how do I optimise my, my website?

But if you're not really, really clear on what you do, how you make people's lives better, what you want to be known for, and how that relates to what people are actually looking for, if you're not clear on that part, it makes everything else way harder. So I added that in as an additional module at the start of the Website Growth Club.

So when somebody comes in, that's one of the first things that they look at is getting really clear on that. One of my members, Claire said, "I used the Clarity Wizard and it's already made a huge difference to how I'm thinking about my website and my content. Things that were all jumbled in my head now feel super clear and aligned, and I'm excited to get back to work on my homepage."

So that was really great to hear that. And that's exactly the kind of messages that members are sending me and letting me know how much clearer this feels.

But as I say this, this doesn't necessarily come easy, and sometimes there can be barriers there to actually getting through this work as well. So that's why I designed this with some wizards that can actually help you to do this work and make everything else clearer and easier.

And this is, this has a knock-on effect I think, throughout your business. So whether you are networking or whether you are writing emails or whatever you are doing, getting clear on that part first is really the first step.

Showing up in AI search

Jules White: So let's get back to talking about how you can grow your business showing up in AI searches. So Google is still over 90% of searches that, that are happening are still going through Google, but it would be good for our businesses to actually be showing up in AI search and getting recommended by AI search.

And we can start to see this in our analytics now. We can see this in Google Analytics where we can start seeing that we are actually getting recommended by AI engines, which is really great.

But whereas Google's bots used to go out and do a search of the internet and we'd get 10 blue links, 10 different websites that we, we could then scan through and decide which one we want to actually click on. Now people are asking longer questions and they're getting just one answer, which might contain different links, and might not contain any links at all.

But if we want our business to be the ones that are recommended in those links and are mentioned there, then we need to make sure that our website is set up in a way that the AI bots can show up. And the fundamentals of this is 80% of what you would be doing for your SEO anyway.

This week I got an email and it was an, um, talking about the, the SEO priorities that we need to rethink things because of AI.

And one of the things that it said was, "keyword by keyword, content planning needs to give way to topic ownership planning. Stop asking, what do we want to rank for? And start asking what topics do we want AI systems to associate with us?"

And when I was looking at that, I thought, well, actually that still is kind of the same question really, because we would still need the pages of our website to be set up in a way so the AI bots are reading through it and that our content is linked together and that we're going really deep on a topic. Even if we're not thinking, what do I specifically want this page to rank for?

You could maybe flip it and think about what question this page needs to answer or what the purpose of this page is. And this is something I have this in my Website Clarity Map, which is something I'll link to.

You can buy it as a standalone, digital product, or if you're a member of the Website Growth Club, this is where we actually map out the strategy of your website, so this is where you can make sure that your pages aren't competing against each other, and that is really important. Still, I think that still applies even with the way that AI bots crawl through websites.

I think it still is important not to have content that is doing the same job.

Certainly with Google, if there are two pages of your website that are doing exactly the same, and Google is trying to decide which one of those is most relevant for that search intent and that search that that person is doing, then your, your content is competing with itself.

Showing your expertise and authority

Jules White: Fundamentally with all of this, we need to show that we are an expert in what we do. So if you decide that you want to show up for a particular topic, and that can be that you want to show up for a service that you offer in your location, and you want to show that you're an expert on that topic in, in itself.

Then we need to show our in-depth knowledge on it. And that doesn't mean writing a hundred articles, but it does mean covering the topic well, covering different aspects of it, covering your own unique experience of it as well.

So if you've had incidences where you've worked with clients and things have gone wrong, or you've found stumbling blocks that people come up against, or problems that can happen, or, um, let's take for example, a physiotherapist who's maybe working with somebody with an injury, and they know that if you've had, like I, I would say back from when I used to do reflexology, if somebody had a hip injury, we could quite often feel that within their knee reflex and their shoulder reflex on the same side, and physios would have the same sort of thing. So they might help somebody with a particular type of problem and one of the things they understand from years of, of working with clients and helping people to solve this problem is that quite often there, there may be other problems that pop up once you've dealt with that initial problem and even just talking about things like that on your webpage.

And you could do it on your services page or you could actually then create a, a case study or something that can, they can be really powerful in actually showing that you have real lived experience is creating case study pages. But making sure that before you create those pages, that you understand what that page is trying to do for your business.

I'm all about creating content that has a purpose and not creating content for the sake of it is part of my social media is optional philosophy. That is that we create content that does a job for our business rather than just churning out content for the sake of it.

So making sure that we are actually thinking about that before we create those pages will help us to show that we are an authority in what we do, which then helps the AI bots reference our business and reference us as an expert in what we do. Now one of the other things that we need to do with this is also building up authority from other places online, and that doesn't necessarily mean social media as well.

One of the things that we hear a lot with the, with AI search is that we have to be shown everywhere that we know what we do. We have a consistent message, a consistent brand across the internet.

And that's true, definitely. And if you've already got social media channels, even if you're deciding to step back from them, and this is one of the jobs that I need to do, I've kind of been putting it off 'cause I just didn't really, don't really wanna go onto social media to actually do this, but I need to go on and do a post about why I've made this decision and what's happened since I've stepped away from social media and pointing to my success without socials community as well.

So I need to do that. But all that to say, what's really important if you have social media presence, even if you're not using it anymore, is that it's still consistent with your current business.

So even if you've not logged into Instagram for three years, then making sure that the things like your bio on your social media accounts that you've got something on there that actually shows the relevant version of your business and then leave it, and then don't worry about it until you think about, okay, things have massively changed in my business again, and probably I need to go in and update it or not. But actually just having that there is, is absolutely fine.

But if you don't have that, so for example, I'm not on TikTok, I'm not on X, you know, and that's okay. So if you've never been on there, then there's no reason to then go and create an account for the sake of having a presence in all the different places online.

And what's actually much more valuable in AI search is getting mentioned from places that are relevant for your industry, relevant for your location. Even if you work online, don't ignore that local presence because there will be people nearby who can become customers of yours.

And it's much easier to stand out locally. So if you're a member of your local chamber, or if you're a member of any local associations, or if you sponsor a local football team or something like that, then making sure that those places are linking back to you.

Particularly with something like a Chamber site, if they give opportunities for members to create guest articles or guest blogs or anything like that, or even just going and speaking and you can get a link coming back to your website from that higher authority website that shows you that you know what you're doing, then that can make a massive difference in AI search.

The Website Growth Club approach

Jules White: And that's one of the things that in the Website Growth Club, we think about. So first of all, we focus on those core pages, so your most important priority pages, getting those optimised first so that you are optimised online to show up for what you sell.

So those priority pages would be your homepage, maybe your about page, your most profitable products and services. And we start with the first most profitable one first and go from there.

Then you get to a point where you expand on that a little bit and you maybe create supporting pages around that, which might be additional services that you offer. It might be then you start creating some case study pages or something that just helps to support those core pages and helps to build that authority in what you do.

Maybe at that point you might need to create some blogs. As I say, not all businesses do and many businesses don't.

And if you do need to create some blogs, then you do it strategically. So you're not just creating something that is AI generated or could be generated by an AI bot, because that is not gonna be helping your business.

It's not gonna necessarily be helping you to show up. It might be something that could help your clients, you might think, actually I want to create that kind of article.

But even within that, think about those customers and think about what they want to hear. If they're reading this from you, they want to hear your own experience, they want to hear why this matters to them from your perspective.

And so that's the kind of stuff where actually if we, if we do include blogging in your strategy, then it needs to have a purpose. And for some businesses some of that information where you're thinking, okay, I need to write a blog, sometimes just adding that on one of your services pages is enough.

It's enough to have somewhere where you can direct people to go and read this particular part of this page, or it's enough for you to show up as the authority in what you do and get AI mentioning your business there as well. And then at that point, we would then think about, okay, where can we get some PR?

Where can you go and have somebody else mentioning your business? You can do this work even whilst you are working on your core pages of your website.

If you are out there doing podcast interviews or getting in the press or doing something great in your local area, organising events and those kind of things, then you can definitely capture that at that moment and make the most of it whilst you're doing the work on your core pages of your website as well. But what that then does is shows that it's not just you who's saying that you are the expert in what you do, which is really, really important now.

So people used to think that for their website they needed to create loads of content for people that were kind of top of the funnel. So people who didn't know what they did.

And that's quite often where SEO starts, creating blogs. You've gotta create blogs. And obviously I've talked about why we don't necessarily need to do that for all businesses.

But one of the fundamental things of this as well, is when we have those kind of articles, those information-based queries, quite often they will be things that could be answered in the AI overview, and they won't necessarily be bringing people in who are ready to buy. And that's why I always focus on those core pages first, so that you are showing up as the expert in what you do in your location or in your niche, or for the particular people who are looking for what you do.

So thinking about a therapist, somebody looking for a trauma-informed therapist in their locations, in their town, and then finding your website, there's so much further along that buyers journey than somebody who could be nowhere near where you are. They're never gonna become a client, but they're searching for, why am I waking up feeling anxious every day?

Something like that. They're very different, different types of searches, and if we focus on those commercial intent searches first, then it's much more likely to lead to a sale.

Front-loading the work

Jules White: Now it can feel quite overwhelming I think, when you're thinking about, okay, if I've gotta go deep on a topic and I've gotta become the expert on this particular topic, it can feel a bit overwhelming. But this is another example of where, you know, the work is kind of front loaded really.

So this is all stuff. If you are the expert in what you do, which you absolutely are, then this is all stuff that's there in your brain anyway.

And sometimes it's just a case of actually getting that out of your brain and getting it down on paper somewhere. So getting that into your infobase where you, you collect all of this kind of stuff around your business.

So you do the work and then you've got that to draw on every time you need to write an email, every time you want to make a tweak to your website, every time that you want to get some PR or you want to do something that's actually promoting your business. You've already done the work.

You've got that information there to draw upon and everything else becomes easier in the future. And as a small business owner, we have to be wearing many hats.

And often our websites end up being a bit neglected and our marketing can be focused in the areas that don't necessarily make a difference. And I think social media is one of those things where it feels like we're doing something.

We get those dopamine hits from posting and maybe getting some interaction or maybe not, but it's not compounding. It's not something that is then gonna continue to pay dividends for years to come.

And that's what I would say about SEO is the work you do right now on your website, whether it's working on your SEO or improving conversions, if you've already got traffic coming into your website or working on your Google Business Profile to help local people find you. The work that you do right now pays dividends in 3, 6, 9, 12 months and beyond.

And if you are working on your Google Business Profile and then tying that in with your website, that can have a lot faster results than three months from now, you know? But it's one of those things that I think if you know that you don't want to continue with the social media marketing, if you know that you want your business and you need your business to have a steady stream of leads coming into it at all times, then that's where doing this work right now, getting a bit uncomfortable with it and knowing that you need to dedicate some time to this is really critical for your future wellbeing, I think really as well.

And you probably are a lot less behind than you think as well. I think a lot of the time this feels very techie and it feels like it's a real stretch to even be able to start on this kind of stuff.

But the biggest thing is actually making that decision that, okay, I own my website, it's an asset for my business, and I want to invest in that. I want to invest the time and the energy for my website to be the hub of my business.

And everything else online. However people are searching a year from now, whether it is that I'm sending people to my website or they're finding me organically, that that place is the hub and that's where everything else goes.

And it does, as I say, it becomes that asset to your business. It becomes something that you can be proud to share and something that you know, where whatever question people are asking you, when you're meeting them face to face, when you are, when somebody is recommending you, that your website is the place that you send them because it will help people.

And it, and it won't get there overnight. It does take time.

And the first iteration of your website, you probably will find that actually it does evolve and change over time. I know mine definitely has, and even over the last few months, really as I've been doing, um, NatWest Accelerator this year and just getting really clear on my ideal clients and on the services that I'm offering, and the evolution of my business has been so much easier now to make some changes to my website.

And I'm, it's still evolving right now. I've still got pages that I need to go in and make some changes to, but it's making a massive difference really.

And doing this work yourself and understanding this yourself as well, whether it is the strategy that you're doing, that's kind of, that's non-negotiable. Unfortunately, for a small business owner, you need to be the one doing the strategy.

Whether you have someone doing that with you, if you work one-to-one with someone like myself, or if you are in the Growth Club and you're doing the work yourself with the group support, for if you get stuck. And then whether you implement it yourself or you pay someone to do that for you, then you're not beholden to pay an agency every single month to do this for you to keep it going.

And you understand that actually if you decide to outsource it at a later date, as I said, then you understand what you're outsourcing and you understand what you're asking people to do.

Maybe you can get somebody who's already within your business or a VA, as I say, to do that for you, but you are in a much better position of control to make strategic decisions and actually understand what's going on with your marketing and take control of your marketing, I think really. So all this to say, I think there's a big potential for businesses who are embracing AI search and embracing search in general.

Understanding that you can't unfortunately skip the SEO and just go to being recommended in ChatGPT. You've got to do that primary work on your website first.

You have to take charge of even understanding what's working and what's not. I talk to lots of business owners who are assuming that their website has been set up to be SEO friendly and I see so many where there's nothing there that's actually helping at all.

So even the basics aren't in place and it makes me really sad because that's something that you could very quickly and easily go in and fix that. So even thinking about what you wanna show up for and looking at your homepage and your most profitable product and service, looking at what you've got set for your page titles, page descriptions, and your headings on that page.

Doing something like that and understanding how to even find that information can make a massive, massive difference really.

Wrap-up and call to action

Jules White: So if you are ready to have less reliance on social media, check out my website, thewebsitesuccesshub.com, and explore the Website Growth Club, see if that feels like the right path for you. And if you're not sure, then book a discovery call.

We can have a chat about where you're stuck, where you're trying to get to, and if any of my products and services can help you get there a bit faster, we can have a chat about that as well. So thanks so much for listening.

And don't forget, social media is optional.