Mastering Modern WordPress SEO @ WordCamp Canada 2025

0:04Level of expertise from the room here. How many of you guys are actively doing SEO or have done SEO in the past? Everyone. Perfect. Perfect. Good start. I think I think that's good. I think that helps. All right, so let's get going. So today we're going to be this is actually this actually a combination of three different sessions that I do that are 45 minutes each that are combined together and we're going to do rapid fire hour and a half for you guys. So we're going to stop start with a little bit about me. We're going to talk about search trends and then SEO and then GEO and then some closing thoughts. If you guys are here tomorrow, I'm also doing a slight variation of the session even faster, even faster rapid fire. And that one has a little bit more GEO and actually advertising and AI which is something that's come out very recently. All right, a little bit about me. I've been involved in digital space for a very long time. In 1997, I started one of the first web hosting companies, T35 hosting for those that were around in the digital space back then. That was the years of GeoCities, Hypermart, Tripod. I don't know if any of those names ring any bells to you guys. All of them are obviously out of business at this point. T35 Hosting is actually still in business and still incorporated into a lot of stuff we do. And also predates the starting of Google,

1:27Which sounds crazy, but the point is I've been doing been doing this for a little while now. In 2011, I started SmartSites with my with my younger brother. That's a company I run now. So, SmartSites, I think I have a slide on SmartSites. Yeah, we'll cover in a slide down. We could cover it now. Why not? So SmartSites is one of the biggest, fastest growing, toprated digital marketing companies. So, we have over 400 employees, thousands of clients, thousands of reviews. We've grown by, minimum 35% every year since starting in 2011. And I think we are now, someone's going to have to fact check fact check this later, but if not the biggest, one of the biggest private digital marketing agencies. So, we do a ton of this marketing stuff, including the SEO stuff. So, just giving you my background where I'm coming from. So, you don't have to be "Why am I listening to this guy on stage? He doesn't know what he's talking about.", I also have a best-selling book. If anyone's interested, let me know later. I could send you a PDF copy of it. It's automotive themed, but as you guys know, SEO is SEO. SEO that you do for an for a car dealership is going to wind up being very similar to SEO you do for a dentist, There's certain industry intricacies, but generally speaking, SEO is SEO, and good SEO is good SEO. So, I actually I wrote this a couple I wrote this a couple years ago, which means I wrote this before generative AI. So, I wrote it the old-fashioned way, like on the keyboard, one stroke at a time, not a typewriter, but on a

2:58Keyboard. And I actually was going to do one for every industry, but the book publishing world, if anyone's ever published a book, hopefully had a better experience. But book publishing world is a very tough industry, and I got so frustrated with it that I held off. But I still plan to update it and come up with one for every industry because again digital marketing SEO is really applicable in every industry and that's why our company SmartSites we industry agnostic and are able to do it in every single industry. Again if you're interested let me know. It's on Amazon Barnes & Noble they promise me it's in the I don't know about Canada but in the US they promise me it's in every single Barnes & Noble store at least one I think literally one they hold. It's not dealer the dealership space is not a big industry. One I think is enough. But I did sell a thousand copies which I think is the market. I think I corner the market on automotive search marketing. We spoke about SmartSites a little bit. We have over 400 employees over 100 million revenue. If you could you could guys could fact check me later. Google around about SmartSites. We do a lot of really good stuff. And my hope today is that I could apply some of the stuff that we're doing, we're learning about that we're doing for ourselves, doing for our clients, and walk you guys through it to see if it aligns with what you guys are doing and hopefully give you some information that you could be doing for yourselves or for your clients. All right, it's only going to get faster from here. All right,

4:28Search trends. So that's an interesting one. A lot a couple of these slides I presented at one of the biggest e-commerce conferences in London a couple weeks ago and I borrowed a couple from there. These are going to be really interesting and yet I see phones coming out. I could send the slides after if anyone wants them. I don't know if you get from the conference. If not, I'm more than happy to send the slides. I'm also trying to record it with my phone back there. So if that works out, I could send you guys the recording. But feel free to take pictures as well. Some of these, especially this one, the one after really good. For me personally on my I'm a big social media person. I'm a big LinkedIn person. I don't know if who uses which social medias media platforms here. I'm a big LinkedIn person. For me on LinkedIn in the last couple months, it would seem that no one uses search anymore, All I see is ChatGPT generative AI. I see people saying who uses search anymore? I don't use search anymore. So it's important to take a step back and look at these macro trends that I'm going to show you. Yes, generative AI is super important. I do a separate session just on GEO, which is the new word for generative engine optimization. There's a couple competing words. So we don't even know if GEO is going to be the new SEO. There might be another acronym that comes around. So I have to be I'm very I try to be acronym agnostic and not use any of them because I put these slides together, I send it to a conference, I come present it three months later and that word doesn't exist anymore. So go is seems to be the winning word for the general engine optimization.

5:59But this is like the macro picture that we're looking at. So this is search trends overall. We're right now at 7.6% of all search is being done through generative AI. So this is the ChatGPT of the world. If we take another step out and look at even a bigger macro level, what's interesting is yes generative AI search is growing, We just saw it growing and the percent's growing, But what's interesting is the search on Google is not shrinking, And this is just Google. If you bake in Bing, which actually has been growing and other search engines, it looks even more so like this chart, It just reinforces the idea. So yes, generative AI is becoming more and more important. But at the same time, people are still using search, using tra traditional search despite what my LinkedIn feed would have me believe people are still using Google right are still using search. So a lot of the stuff I'm going to be covering today is SEO like old school old school SEO pre-ChatGPT SEO but we're also going to touch upon a little bit into the generative engine optimization go if it's still called GEO u next year. All right this is an interesting one. So this one I was actually not able to present at my at the conference I spoke at in London because this data set just came out. I try to source any data I use. So I have the sources on the bottom. So you guys know I'm not making it up. So what's interesting here is and I have these conversations. I get into I

7:29Don't want to say heated arguments but I get into some debates on LinkedIn with people who are like I haven't used Google in months. Who still uses Google? So those people who are not using Google and they're like I haven't used Google in months. Why are we even doing SEO or paid search? They represent this little yellow slither, so this is this is two data sets that were released and there was a lot of people posting about this. So if you guys search, I'm sure the popular SEO journals have written about this and picked this up already. But this is super recent. I think within the last two weeks so what this shows is that on top of Google search still growing, and ChatGPT is growing but Google search are growing but what's more interesting is people who are using ChatGPT are also using Google so our search behaviors are becoming even more complex I remember when Google came up with their micro moments which was super popular through co started a little bit before co I don't know if you guys have ever seen presentations about Google ads it was all about micro moments there's different moments in people's lives to target them and the whole idea is that the consumer search journey has become more complex and you want to target them differently in different parts of the journey. Now it's become maybe 10 times more complex. And if we dive even deeper and go into the younger generations, what ends up happening is people wind up doingformational searches on ChatGPT. Then they go on Tik Tok to look up some videos or on YouTube to look up

8:57Some videos about it. Then they'll go to Google to confirm what they found. And as of for now, they're coming back to Google to actually find companies and services. So for businesses, Google and search still super important even though more and more people are on generative AI and you also want to be on generative AI but to look at a macro picture I think search will continue to be very important but at the same time I think the consumer journey is going to become much more complex than it's ever been. You're going to literally have people have touch points with different mediums different parts in their journey. I think especially the younger generations are going to be coming up in the next 5 10 years right they're very Tik Tok Instagram YouTube heavy right so that becomes like Tik Tok in itself becomes a search experience right so I think it's all going to be become a little bit more complex than is now I think generative AI will play a part in it but I still think SEO is going to be continue to be very valuable that was that was a lot really quick in 10 minutes any questions with any of that before we go forward. All right, rapid fire style continues. Am I on time? 10 minutes. That was 10 minutes. All right. SEO. So, we're going to So, not to promote my book because I'll give it out for free anyway. If you want the book, let me know. I'll send to you. But I cover all the SEO stuff we're

10:22About to go through in a lot of detail in my book. So, if you want more information about any points, again, ask me. I'll send you the book. Or you could go Barnes & Noble and fight for the one copy that each store promised me they would have. Cool. Before I go into SEO, so I presented the next couple slides probably 100 times in the last three four years. So it's the it'll flow specifically for all knowledge levels. So if it feels like too fast, too slow, I'll it'll even out. So two parts of SEO. Obviously, everyone raised their hands in the room. So, most of you guys seem like you're familiar with it. Again, this is presented to all audiences. And surprisingly, the biggest disconnect I find for audiences that are not familiar with SEO is realizing there's two different parts of SEO, So, this is a two different parts of SEO. You have Google Maps in the SEO world. The SEO professionals like to call it the Google local pack. You have Google localized organic results. If you have a physical location or if you have a store, both are going to be important to you. If you do not have a physical location or store, the second one's probably going to be the most important to you. But what's interesting is we're seeing more and more that having a physical location impacts even the local results. And I'll show you the ranking signals a little couple slides down.

11:46So that means for you guys that don't have a physical location, it might be worth thinking about creating one, Like if you have a if you even if you're not a I don't know a customerf facing store, if you have like a physical office location, it might be worth setting up a Google business profile and everything on it. And I'll walk you through the ranking signals a couple slides off. Yes. So Google doesn't like that. But so what can I say? What can I say without getting trouble since I am recording this? Hold on. Just turn off turn off the mic for a couple minutes. What can I say? So, if you are, let's go generic. Let's say you're a web design company. You're a website design company that don't doesn't have a Google business profile right now and you just try to rank nationally for a lot of different things and you rank nationally. Okay. If you set up a Google business profile in Atlanta, your web design business will rank better in Atlanta. How you want to take advantage of that is the I guess the gray area. Preferably, you'd want to have some virtual physical some office. Google doesn't like obviously PO boxes and mail rooms and mail processing centers. They used to verify

13:11Only with a postcard. Now because there was some abuse that was happening now they do a lot of video verifications. So there how you want to go about it is a great question but having a Google business profile in Atlanta will help your web design business rank in Atlanta. Yes. As long as they're okay with their address being public on your Google business program. But yes. Yes. Let's say you have 10 employees all over the US and they're okay with using their addresses. You could set up these cool business. It won't make or break your rankings. Well, I'll show you the ranking signals in a little bit, but it helps. It helps and it'll help rank on maps because people do surprisingly people go on Google Maps and you can look at the data and look for things like web design agencies, which doesn't make sense to me. If I were was looking for a web design agency, I don't think I would look on maps assuming that like walk into one. I think we're past we're past a time where people take walk-ins for web design businesses, but people do search that way also. All right. Before we go into rankings, man, I summarize a lot of slides into this one slide. Before we go to rankings, whenever I talk about Google rankings, people always ask me, well, how do the Google rankings, Does Google tell you? Actually, surprisingly, Google does tell us some things,

14:41But not enough that we could take advantage of it. But we do have a as an agency, we do have a good relationship with Google. Google ranking factors, how do you determine what Google uses to rank websites? Question every SEO professional wants to know. A lot of people sell books saying they know this. A lot of SEO agencies sell mystery products saying we know this, We know we know how SEO works. That's where we're going to charge you more. So it's very good question. So a couple ways. So number one, we're going to go from the top left and we're going to go around. Number one, Yandex's search engine leaked fully completely fully everything. So all the variables, all the ranking, all the all the weighting / weightings, so how important each variable is and it was really interesting things there. It was like I don't know if you capitalize all the words in your title of your website, you'll rank worse. Like it was a lot of interesting things. This was I think two years ago, so fairly recently. And all of this is public information. I'm not sharing anything proprietary. You guys could go online. There's a lot of good SEO websites that summarize the entire Yandex leak. The problem with the Yandex leak is Yandex is not Google, Google has traditionally been three to four maybe three to five years ahead of Yandex, And ever since the war started, I think they're even further ahead. So, even though you could get all these ranking signals and try to assume that Google uses some of them similarly, it's not something I would personally do. Second way to know Google's

16:12Ranking signals, Google's algorithm leaked. Everything's leaking these days. And this is, by the way, before AI helped everyone become a hacker. So, I'd expect a lot more a lot more leaks in the in the near future. Google's algorithm leaked. I think I can't really see a data on there, but from memory it was maybe a year and a half ago. Also you could look it up. There's a lot of websites that summarize it really, really well, I believe. So it leaked with API. Someone who had API access was able to pull all the variables that Google uses for their for their ranking signals. There were 2,500 ranking, I wouldn't even call them signals, variables that were pulled. U, the SEO community determined that about 600 to 700 were probably active. Everyone made a huge deal about this. There was a lot of, there's a lot of publications that made a lot of money posting articles about this because this was like the we know Google's algorithm. But at the end day, I don't like it as a ranking signal. I mean, I don't like it as a way to determine ranking signals. The reason is even though all the variables leaked, we don't really know the weighting / weightings of the variables. So another way to look at it is you have this really complex soup recipe with 2,00 2,500 ingredients and now that 2,500 ingredients, but you don't know the quantities to put in. You don't know the order to put them in or what to do with them. So this is all public. You could look it up, good information

17:37In it, but it's not something I personally use as a ranking use to determine ranking signals. So what I like using is a local search ranking factor study. It's now run by Darren Shaw for the last many years. U and what this does and this is also public. You guys can look it up. What Darren does is he does a survey for most of the I think most of the SEO experts are represented in this group of people and this changes every year a little bit and it's not done every year. So the last one right now is end of 23. And it's SEO professionals reporting to each other what they see being effective and what they see Google using as a ranking signal. So, it's not even really meant to be a public facing or client-f facing survey. It's literally an internal survey that SEO professionals do. Starting 2023 became open-ended. So, before was like choices they would make. Now, it's fully open-ended where they put in the full they write in like full sentences. You could look it up. It's public and everywhere and I have a lot of that in my book as well where I go through how it's how it's actually put together. So, it's literally what the SEO professionals and these aren't like CEOs of companies. These are literally like technical SEO professionals, What they report to each other as ranking signals. So,

19:03We take all of their stuff that they report and I put it together into this nice little chart. So, this is the one you guys take a picture of while I drink some water with Diet Coke in this case. And I'll walk you through this right after. So, what I like about this is it's a good way, and again, just to preface a little bit, nothing's perfect, Google's not signing off on this. Google's not agreeing to this. Google is not providing any of this information. But this is probably the closest we can get to what the SEO profession and by the way, even if Google was reporting the information, I think this is going to be more accurate. As I don't know if you guys follow the antitrust cases that were happening, but there was a lot of stuff there's a lot of stuff that kept coming out that Google would publicly say it's doing and then in the antitrust case they' be "Nope, that's not what we're doing." like when they would publicly have to admit it in court there it was it was like a guys remember the daytime show like on Maury where they were like do the lie detector test right and be like Google said that this doesn't impact rankings we did the DNA test and determined it's a lie so I would trust this more than even if Google was publicly saying things but just to preface it this is not information Google's saying this is information that SEO professionals have determined

20:29And I'll walk you through the different signals and this is all summarized. You could look it up and get the full detail. You could get my book where I go through it a lot more. Taking it from the top. So, left side is local pack which is Google maps. Number one signal is your I always call Google my business. Now it's Google business profile. Obviously, your Google business profile. You have to have it completely filled in. Google's always new adding new categories and new best practices. So, you have to be really on top of it. You want to make sure you have pictures. You want to make sure your reviews itself is a signal actually. So that's that has become the most important signal and I'll show you historically over time it wasn't always the case. And if you guys even think about it yourself u 10 years ago it definitely wasn't as important. Not only was it not as important for SEO but it wasn't as important our day-to-day lives. Like 10 years ago if you're I don't know I just flew in 3 hours ago to Ottawa. All right. If I want to go to a restaurant, I'm going to take out my phone. I'm going to look up restaurants. 10 years ago, I'd probably be on Yelp looking up restaurants, and I'll show you the Google's ranking signals on sites like Yelp going down as the Google business profile has gone up.

21:58Jeez I think there were I don't remember reading anything clear but I they haven't Yelp has not won anything yet. The only what's interesting is they actually they did win they did one win one thing and it wasn't against Google. So Yelp and you could look this up, but it was very interesting case I was following. So I don't know if you have you guys you guys advertise on Yelp, use Yelp, but your business is on Yelp. Everyone hates Yelp. Perfect. So the way Yelp operates is people leave reviews on Yelp and it's was super important 5 10 years ago, now a little bit less important. You could also have paid listings and pay Yelp for they do there's a lot of marketing stuff that you could be doing with them. The minimum being like a paid listing. So, what Yelp would do is and I know no one raised their hands, but if you were concentrating on Yelp, I'm sure you have seen that Yelp hides a lot of reviews, especially positive reviews. They help they hide more positive reviews than negative reviews. And what's interesting is if you pay them for the paid profile listing or even do any advertising them, they magically unblock those hidden reviews. They literally I think it's if you scroll down any Y profile says so they got sued for it and it went through a long court case and again this is public information. You could you could look it up. Court said fine. So that one they won. Court said it's fine. It's their business. They could do whatever they want. They could decide to do that. So that one Yelp won. But against Google, they have not

23:29Yelp's been we have so many businesses that were so negatively impacted by and they would have so many reviews and Yelp would just hide all the positive ones they would hide and the negative ones they would anyway on page signal. So after the profile itself, the next one is on page. So on page is your technical SEO. So making sure your website's discoverable, things like that. And then it's a quantity and quality of your content. So I'll go through it a little bit more on the other side because it's a little bit more important. Number three is reviews. So reviews is a reviews is an interesting one that I get into a lot of debates about and I think the most one of the most misunderstood. So it's interesting with reviews and this is again if you have a physical location, if you have a business profile, if you don't, this is not relevant to you. But I would still suggest you somehow find a way to have a business profile. Reviews are important three different ways. So the amount of reviews, you want to have a lot of reviews. The stars, you want to have good reviews, you want to So those two are obvious. You want to have a lot of reviews, you want to have good reviews. What's interesting is that Google uses the content of the reviews. And a lot of people don't realize that. The way that works is, and you could look it up, and it's slightly debated in the SEO world, or I could say misunderstood, but it's for sure a

24:53Ranking signal. The way it works is if you're a coffee house and you're you sell coffee, you're literally like a Starbucks and your business name is literally just coffee house, nothing else, and you want to come up when people search Brazilian coffee, If a lot of your reviews mention Brazilian coffee, you will come up on Google Maps because of that. So, it's literally the content of the reviews. Very hard to control. You can't put a gun to your customer and be "Keep right." And the longer the reviews, the better, Can't be "Keep writing. Three more sentences or I'm not letting you leave the store.", you have to think about how to incentivize and control that. But the content super important. The follow-up question I always get does the response get used as a ranking signal? Response doesn't for obvious reasons cuz otherwise would everyone would be responding and keyword stuffing the responses like someone would be like five stars I like your coffee and the response would be like I hope you enjoyed my Brazilian coffee roasted fresh every Monday right everyone like keyword stuff the responses don't count but the content of review counts and it's with the reviews being 16% it actually counts a lot before we keep Sorry. How long? The longer the better. There's no maximum. Literally, the longer the better because it'll be more relevant content. If it's irrelevant, like if someone goes like and

26:19Copies like 10 pages from Shakespeare and paste it in the review, it won't help you. But the more relevant the better. For businesses that are service based or for example a barber house, they have specific people like care, Or a car dealership. I do a lot with automotive so you'll see I use a lot of automotive examples for car dealerships you have specific sales people right mentioning people by name also helps a lot yes question so that one's a tricky one Google's been very strict with reviews but at the same time their team that oversees all of that has been paired down to like a skeleton team at this point. So yes or no. So the there you want to be careful because the negative repercussions are pretty bad. Like you could get your whole Google business profile damned and then like it's not like you could call someone for help after that. It's on the phone or like screaming out the window and no one's going to help at that point. So you want to be careful. Another thing I see people run into problems with is businesses encourage customers to leave reviews while at

27:41The business often logged into the business Wi-Fi. So everyone's reviews come in from the same IP address and then Google thinks that's fraudulent and deletes all of them and that's very bad. So it does not, but they rank higher. Google local guides will rank higher. They're more likely to be seen first. And any pictures they post will be seen first. A lot of local guiding. Yes. And they saw all the companies I visited. And what's going around now is a lot of Google actually two days ago, 48 hours ago, 48 hours ago, posted what to do in case there's a lot of fraud going around. So there's two review frauds going around. So one is someone will leave you like 20 star reviews and then in one of them it'll be like please contact me to get them removed. You guys laugh, but in the last 30 days, we've dealt with like thousands of that. So, that's very popular. And the other one, which is so that one, Google now has guidelines and it help actually they're they'll help. It's not guaranteed, but I've seen them mostly address that. The other one is Google local guides whose pictures show up first,

29:09Posting really bad pictures of your business, like the worst angle of the car dealership. We have a car dealership where the guy drove and they sell Porsches, so like very high-end car dealership. The Google local guy drove up some like 1980s Honda Civic, parked there right in front of the store and took a picture of the Honda Civic facing the store and then first of all he can't do anything. They could report it but they're a local guy. The pictures won't get removed and then he contacted the business and he was and it's all the email is obviously evidence but they do it in such a way that Google won't do anything. So the approach is I put a lot of effort coming to your business and taking that picture so I could remove it but there's a cost to me that anyway. So those are the scams going around now. Not that it helps you guys with SEO but it's unfortunate. Correct. Although it the couple dealerships that we worked with, I think wound up paying the money. So, I know where everyone's going after this. Everyone's "Start some local businesses in downtown Ottawa." any other questions? Sorry, I feel like there were more questions that Yes. Yes.

30:33Or other sort. So for the Google maps, it's only Google reviews that will matter. For Bing and everyone else, it's a little different. So what's interesting is Bing has its own maps product. Everyone mostly ignored it. Until ChatGPT started using it for a lot of information and then it became more prominent. But now Microsoft and ChatGPT are breaking up. So I think it'll become not as prominent again. But there's a there's Google Maps, there's Bing Maps, and there's Apple Maps. So, there's three maps products each used in different ways. Apple seems like it's pretty much going to give up on any search. I think in the generative AI side as well. Bing would be very relevant if ChatGPT continued to use it. ChatGPT and Microsoft obviously are very interlin like Microsoft invest a ton of money in it and gave them data to use. But what's interesting is we're seeing ChatGPT use more and more Google stuff. At the same time again I have to make sure I don't say something I'm going to get in trouble for. Microsoft is move so Microsoft generative AI products Copilot which is ChatGPT based for a long time that was assumed that was always going to be

31:54A case Copilot is ChatGPT based Microsoft's moving away from it being ChatGPT based to eventually this information will be public so maybe I won't post the video until it's public they're moving away from it being ChatGPT based to their concept is that in the near future copi so Copilot itself will be a product so they're going to advertise Copilot as a product they don't want it to be linked to any generative AI engine they just want co you're using Copilot you shouldn't care what engines use behind the scenes what they're doing is they have their own AI model they're developing and they're going to have the Copilot use the best model for your query So for example, if you're doing like a math equation or something, they'll have a different engine that's actually faster and better than ChatGPT. So exactly. And I think part of that is a lot of the models a lot of the queries don't require ChatGPT type of models. So I have the breakdown from Microsoft. I don't know if I could share it, but I have the breakdown that I could probably share if you guys are interested, but in terms of what searches get done on it, but for example, like 8% are mathematical equations. There's no reason to waste like ChatGPT like energy on those. So that the

33:23Future Copilot model is to be LLM agnostic and use different models. The only reason I go through all of that is for a long time Bing was super important GPT. Now it seems like it's not. So, I probably wouldn't focus on I would still do Bing maps, but I don't think it's going to be as important for ChatGPT stuff. What is it? Sorry. Oh, I have no idea. I don't know what they're mean. I don't think so. This is this is their road map. This is their road map for Q1 Q2 26 that I don't think they're announcing yet. That I probably shouldn't be announcing either, but that's okay. The conference The conference is not recording this, I should say. I'm gonna have to like fact check myself on what I can and can't. I get in trouble with time, but the conference not recording this, so I feel a little bit more comfortable. It's just my recording. It's fine. So I was Yes. Yes. Verification, I just Yeah. Instead of the postcard because people were fake addressing people were creating fake addresses. Exactly. And I just I only have a home office. So, what should I do? Should I just like have a video of my business card and like or make a sign or like what should I really want to add? I think the signs of the street names and

34:50Show the house in the background and then they was a pain in the neck though. Beat them at their own game. Use the new video AI generators to generate you a beautiful office and then take a video of that video, play the video on your monitor and take a video. They actually do a lot of verifications live now to prevent that. Like literally they join you like you join a video call. That's very just because this is an hour and a half session and I have the leeway to do these tangents. I from back in the day, my web hosting company, everything. I'm I like to like build my own computer. Every two years I build a new computer. And mine wasn't really two years yet, but it was the volume plug stop working on it. And I was what? I'll check in. I'll check in with a case company that makes it like maybe they'll send me a replacement part. And they're well, we don't make this anymore. We'll send you a brand new case, but you have to prove you destroyed it. And it's like a giant metal like huge case. And I was how am I supposed to like I guess I get what they're trying to do. They don't want me like to have two cases in that. They want they don't want me reselling or whatever. But it's like huge. It's like it's the Tower 500 is the CA the case is called. And it is in fact like

36:11It's like the podium case. And it's all metal. Like you have to destroy. I'm like hit it with a hammer a couple times. They're like no it has to be completely destroyed. It makes it very good. They came out like a month ago very new but it I think it changed the field in image generation. There's a lot of companies AI companies that want to add business overnight when Google released this. Go you should play around. It's literally free on Gemini. You go in like in the drop down instead of doing a generative AI search, you press this little icon of a banana. So I uploaded the picture of my case and I'm like destroyed. Destroyed. I sent them and then I threw out the case anyway. But can you make a AI video of an office? Yes. I wouldn't push my luck with Google My Business, though. What I would do is I would print out some like some kind they like headings. Like just print out like or maybe like a FedEx or some like a poster board of like your company logo and literally hang it over your desk and take a picture of it. They mostly look for company headaches because the fraud they're trying to avoid is the same office trying to be

37:3630 businesses. And we have we had a dealership in New York City that we had that problem with surprisingly. And Google gave a lot of problems with that. But that's what I would do. You could also try doing the have Sora make the whole fake office for you. If you do that, let me know how it goes. I'd love I'd love I'd love to know if Google's able to take that because they the verifications are still done by people. It's not AI verified. So, where do we leave off review signals? Link signals. So, link signals I'll touch upon on the other side. Link signals are backlinks. So, every year that I hear SEO is dead, hear link building is dead. It has gone down. I'll show you over time ranking signals but it's still super important. It's also important for AI. Distinction for AI like the ChatGPT and GEO general engine optimization is AI gives a lot of weight to specific websites. So for SEO you want to get linked from a lot of authoritative relevant

39:01Websites. For generative engine opt optimization every industry there's like handpicked one that they don't disclose but there's handpicked the websites that are more valuable so in the B2B space where I live like for SmartSites it's like clutch G2 but it comes and goes so all this stuff is like very on the generative AI stuff very fluid but link building still super important for SEO for generative engine optimization it also is super important but the links I think it's going to be going up and down. Behavioral signals, those you can't control as much. Least controllable. Well, behavioral signals are how people use your website. So, let me take a step back. You can control it, It's not a huge ranking signal. You want people to stay on your website as long as possible, for a long time, this ranking signal was a mystery box. Like really, what is a behavior signal? And there was a couple events that I was on a panel on that it was very it was it was it was heated debates over what a behavioral signal is. And the ones where I had there were good speakers with good information. The big takeaway was that it's not as simple as a bounce rate or something like that and there was always mystery box. What's interesting is GA4 came out with the engagement rate which from what I'm seeing is very similar to a behavioral rate. So

40:27If you want to know the behavioral signal I would treat it very much like the engagement rate in GA4. Anything any analytics works. There's no benefit to having GA4 from what I've seen and I've seen a couple going from GA to GA4 was so painful for especially at the enterprise level that I saw a bunch of people for the first time ever switch away from GA Google Analytics. And I've never seen that. You guys know the background back in the day back in 1997 when I was running T35 hosting Google Analytics didn't exist right there were two major analytics platform one of them was Urchin I don't know if you guys that rings any bells for anyone urchin was $1,000 a month so if you want any website analytics un the other option would be like your server logs webalizer right there's a couple of like the more basic but like at the enterprise level you were like urchin I forget the other one and they were everyone was the enterprise ones were a thousand a month and even today if you look at something Google Analytics versus webalizer or some of the free ones it's obviously doesn't it almost measuring two different right like one is just a basic like hit counter like a hit like you have one's basic hit and GA gives you so much more Google bought urchin and made it free

41:53So ever since they did that which is I don't I don't know how many years anymore definitely over everything's been moving to Google Analytics. So, this move to GA4 was the first time I saw a fallout, but it does not affect your rankings which analytics software use. Next one, citations. So, citations are the Yelps of the world. So, they're still important for your Google Maps ranking. It's industry specific citations for Google Maps. And then personalization is the smallest, least controllable. I always say at least controllable, but everything's controllable. So personalization is if you have a Spanish language website and your visitor is on a Spanish computer, Spanish keyboard, you're more likely to rank. So that's the personalization component. So the right side is local organic ranking factor. So that's where you guys could make the biggest dent and increase your traffic the most. On the map side, in a lot of cases, you could do everything correctly and there's just you can't 10x your traffic, just so many there's just so many people searching for a coffee shop in Ottawa, You're you can't 10x it. On the organic side, u you can because it's all a factor of how much content as you could see by the ranking signals. Content and link signals are by far the highest. So a good way to think about it is content gives you an opportunity to show up in search results and that's why you can grow it so much. So for example, I'm going to do a lot of car dealership examples so I apologize in advance. For example, your car dealership, if you create a

43:25Page comparing the Honda Accord to Toyota Camry, and someone searches Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry, that page has an opportunity to come up in search results. If you did not create that page, your homepage for your car dealership will never rank for that search term. Yes, that's a going on. That's a couple slides after. But we could luckily I do some of these sessions in like 25 minutes and people ask me questions. I'm "Ask me later." But luckily we had with an hour and a half we could do all the tangents we won. I could I could keep getting myself in trouble all day long here. AI content. So when I wrote my book back in the day, I think it was three years ago now, almost three years ago this November. AI, ChatGPT did not exist yet, but it was on the horizon. So I put in a couple sentences somewhere I think somewhere towards the end where I said I see this open I see OpenAI coming out with a consumerf facing product soon that will allow a lot of content generation. My thought was that Google would highlight AI content. My prediction was that literally it would be like a label like a cuz with deep mind and all of Google resources for sure they know what contents

44:50AI generated. That's what I thought would happen. Surprisingly AI content comes out everyone creates tons of spam for Google and Google's like that's fine keep doing it. So Google's I'll fast forward a little bit and then we'll go back. This is Google's official stance on AI content. They've updated a little bit throughout the years, but it's still pretty much you could do it. We don't do it because I have a feeling eventually Google will change its mind just because so much crap content is being produced. They say that now. So, their take on it is content's okay. So, there from 2023 it says helpful content written by people for people in search results. That was their stance. They didn't specifically said we'll penalize AI content, but it seemed pretty obvious that's what they were doing, And then just last year they updated the land. This is all public. You could you could look it up under it's on the developers.Google. They updated to say helpful content created for people in search results. So they took out the word by people, so you could, and I'll go through some examples later if we get to it, but I would not. I would use AI to help you get ideas. I would not mass create spam content. Yes. Yes.

46:23Yeah. No, there's no good answer. There's a lot of people that have run tests with AI content and it still ranks. So there I don't think there's an answer. I think you could use AI content. Just risky. And it depends. It's like the riskreward ratio, for like for us with our own website, I would never do it because the chance no matter how small of Google blacklisting the site for spam content or considering because they could easily do at the domain level would be very high. If you're just using a new domain or you just bought a domain making a new website and new idea, new concept that you are okay with throwing out, I guess it's a little different. But there's been so much. So, the new term, I don't know if you guys have heard it, the new term is AI slop. That's a term for all this AI garbage that's coming out. And it's not just content, not just content. There's a couple of big advertising agencies, like public ones that started using AI creation for creative and even video. And some of it's like very bad. Like I keep seeing ads that have like misspellings and like typical a like there's a there's a I will I will I will still not name any names. There

47:51There's a purse advertisement that was just ran in a newspaper that the model in the picture if you look really closely has six fingers. So it's like that like AI slop. So you want to be careful. Like it's okay to use AI but you just want there's like you need extra QA. Like even if you use AI content with like a slight re like rewrite, I would like heavily cue. Where do we leave off? Oh yeah. So yeah, so content gives you an opportunity to come up search results. So literally content is a key for all of this, similar for generative AI. So generative AI can't doesn't come up with its own stuff, As you guys know, it's a very interesting dynamic. Literally, generative AI needs websites to keep doing SEO and creating content and literally doing what they've been doing in order for it to get the information, so, content super important for AI as well. You just I'll go through like tips for it. You just want to think about the content a little bit differently. Maybe think about answering questions because people go on generative AI to ask questions. So, you want to phrase your content you're creating in question format and do some schema stuff. But it's still very important to do content. This how it looks like over time. I actually

49:15The reason it looks like crap is because I've been compiling this myself and I put it in Excel and I haven't I'm still like using my 1990s Excel tables with gray and white. But yeah, I made this chart myself. This a good one to take a picture of. This is a good one for me once. So I'll look at these are ranking signals over time. I'll show you the one for actually local results. This is a Google maps. So what's interesting is you see a Google my business Google business profile beingcoming more and more important over time. If you look at it the green one is citations. So citations are the Yelps of the world obviously not just Yelp but a lot of other directories. They've become least important over time. What else is a good one? Reviews has continued to get more and more important. So that's orange you guys might have it's funny your colors are slightly different than mine but still orange. The orange one's reviews and the last one which I've gotten into a lot of debates about is social signals. So despite what some people I've heard say and I've heard some speakers at conferences say these things social is not a signal getting more followers on your Instagram will not help you rank on Google will not help you rank on generative engines. The only reason social was ever a signal is when Google had their own

50:41Social media platform. I don't know if you guys remember those days. When they had their own social media platform they actually added a little bit of weight for you having a presence on their social media profile. Platform. Once that went away, it's no longer a signal. This is the second picture for you guys to take. I think there's no more pictures after this. So, this is the actual content. So, this is not maps. This is literally ranking your actual content on Google over time. So a couple things on page which is a little bit of technical and then quantity and quality of your content and then links continue to dominate right if you do anything for SEO on an ongoing basis I would literally work on link building which a lot less and less people do these days. And I would work on creating content. Those are the two ongoing monthly pieces. Link building is tricky. You can't buy links. You can't trade links. People still buy links. I don't know if I encourage it. You want to do what I would call outbound link building. If you've never down done outbound link building, the first and easiest way to start is look up some competitors that rank very well on Google. There's a lot of free public tools that let you see what links they have like who links to them and then go through them and try to

52:05Get links from those websites. Should be very not very easy exercise but should be there's no proprietary information you could look up exactly the websites the link to every website right u we had a taxi company in New York City that their competitor was linked from JFK that's the airport in New York City it took us 3 months to get them to link to our client's website very manual process which is probably it's done a little less now. Often involves calling, mailing, faxing, sending like letters in the mail. With the JFK website, what's interesting is very quickly they said yes. They said we link to a couple taxi companies. We would love to link to your client's company as well. So it was we got someone on the phone. It was very quick that we have entire marketing team that does this. The problem there was no one knew who had access to their website. So, you got to get into some of those. We'd love to do it. We have no idea who accesses the and it's a JFK website. It's a big it's not like it's not like a like someone's like blog about their pet or something, No one had access to their website. So, it's a very manual effort. But building is still super important. Yes. So that's a tough one. So you can't you can't trade links. I know people start trading links again because they forgot they can't trade links. You can't trade links.

53:39You can't buy links. The value I think is and doesn't necessarily need to be value, So a couple things. Number one, there's a lot of directories online that you just submit to, They're just there. That those are those are no-brainers. Ones like JFK. I think it's more of a you do it to my competitor, we're even bigger than them that you're doing a disservice to your clients for not having obviously say nicer than that. I wouldn't I wouldn't start guilt tripping like a random like business owner. There's also a lot of local initiatives you could do if you're like a local small business or something, There's things like and people do these things anywhere but they don't realize the link building opportunities. So, we have a lot of businesses in town that sponsor like the softball team or like do stuff with the school, sponsor school play, So easy to just ask the school to link back to you, there's, there's a PR outbound link building approach too, You could you could do it in terms of getting news coverage doing something like even if you, I don't know, put together like a college fund scholarship, whatever, something like that, And then literally that college will link to you. They'll put on their website. There's a lot of outside of the box things that you could do outside. People still trade links and buy links, but I would not encourage it. Link building is to be fair has become slightly less important,

55:05But I it's still super important. And then again for generative engine optimization for GEO there's certain that are considered trustworthy more than others. The problem is most of them are paid placements like the G2, Clutch, Manifest, those places in the B2B space. If you guys do B2B, they're mostly pay-to-play. You're not buying links, but you're buying to be placed at the top of their list thing. So, it gets a little trickier. Yes. So you shouldn't you takes me back to a day where people would hide the keywords I don't know if you guys have been keyword stuff the footer of the page and make it the same color as the background thing. I would not do that because I think Google way for two three years it worked very well. I would not hide the links in the same color as the background omewhere in the bottom of the page. Does it matter where? I don't think where in the page matters. Obviously, if it's on a domain versus a like a third tier page, it's different weighting / weightings. But I think generally speaking, well, the in the SEO world, what we measure is the domain authority and then the page authority. So you would do it, you would use those two variables to determine, but where on the page itself, I think doesn't matter as

56:31Long as you're not doing keyword stuffing and making it a white font on white background, link building. Yeah. So, so the link building, there's a ton of public tools that'll give you backlink profiles and you can monitor who links to you, the increases, drop offs, things like that. Content, you could probably measure yourself. But in terms of measurement over time, I think your organic traffic, whether you're measuring the actual traffic on your website, Google Analytics, or you're measuring impressions and clicks through Google Search Console, I think that would be your metric. If you're do if you're actively doing SEO, your organic traffic should and will increase over time. That would be the success metric. So that's going out of favor. The current best practice is 300 to 500 words for a regular page and up to 2500 words for a technical article.

57:57That's the I think the guidelines of what the Google AI everyone uses if you have a very let's include the whole page. Yeah, it reads through Yeah, it reads through the accordion thing now. Yes. Yeah, good question. So you want to you for sure want to do strateg strategic interlinking. It's become a little bit less important but the to give everyone else the example what you're talking about. So the example I gave a Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry. So you're a Honda dealership. You have this page that you just built comparing the Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry. Somewhere in that page you would say view all my Honda Accords. And that would link to your page that links all your Honda Accords. So by doing that you'll help your it's what's called link juice passes through and you'll help that Honda Accord / Honda Accords page rank like your listing of all your Honda Accord / Honda Accords has become a little bit less relevant. It used to be more relevant when Google didn't index as many things. But I would still be strategic about it anyway. And it's interesting. You want to think about which pages you want to help rank. So literally think about it as link juice. Passing off link juice to your to a page you're interlinking to help it. At the same time, you want to be cognizant of like the UI, UX, customer experience, if that makes sense. So, if your article is Honda Accord versus Toyota to your Camry and then you decide to

59:30Link to your Honda Civics because you really want to sell your Honda Civics, that might help your Honda Civics page, but it'll be a terrible experience for your consumers. Yes. Yeah, good question. I combine those all together because it's hard to separate it out because it does overlap a lot. So, technical SEO, the way the way I found to describe it and is the easiest to understand is technical SEO helps Google discover all your content the best way possible. What I mean by that is Google will eventually find all your content anyway, but Google has a very limited crawl budget they use on each domain. If you make your content hard to discover, even if it does discover it, it's not going to index all of it. So your idea is to get Google to index all of your content, as much of your content as possible in the best way possible. That's why I would call that defines technical SEO. It's a whole industry. There's I there's people and we have one on our staff. Literally their only job is technical SEO. A lot of times these technical SEO people

1:00:51Get called in when all of a sudden websit's traffic drops like 80%. But that's a it's a big part of that job is literally dealing with what did we just [ __ ] up, It's a lot of like we just moved website platforms or things like that. But I think at the end of the day, if you're making sure your content is discoverable to Google and following all best practices, I think you'll be okay. I think in most cases, unless there's always fringe scenarios, but most cases, I think your ongoing tasks are really content building. I think the technical SEO, you really want to it's like frontloaded task. I would not work on technical SEO on a monthly basis unless you're enterprise level or have a specific issue you're trying to resolve. All right. I don't know if I even want to go. So, I'll do this even rapid fire. This does not get me in trouble. I know people are like he's in trouble. This won't get me in trouble, but I think this some of this stuff might be a little bit basic for you guys. But I'll do I'll do rapid fire. I almost finished my next my next dose of caffeine. So, I'm ready for the for the next 30 minutes. All right. So, this slide these I presented this for dealerships for the last two or three years. So, it's been a little while. I'm going to introduce the idea and then I'm going to go rapid fire through them. This is how you could be using ChatGPT to

1:02:17Help you with SEO. So, a little bit different than what we just looked at. It's not ranking signals. It's not how to rank on generative AI. It's literally how to use generative AI to help you with SEO. We're going to take it from the top and this is on my screen at least super small but I'll try to read it anyway. And this is all dealership ccentric but applies to every single industry. So number one site page ideas, you could go to ChatGPT and say what website pages should an independent car dealership have? And these are literally prompts and responses I've used. This is probably a year or two old at this point, but it's literally it seems so basic, but a lot of people don't do this. So, we have a we have a lot of car dealership clients when I do this presentation that surprisingly didn't have some of the not these top five pages, but for example, one of the pages it recommends is a trade-in page. If you go look around, surprisingly, a lot of dealerships didn't even man of course people look for tradeins, but they don't have that page on their website. So all again this might seem super basic but I think good exercise for most people do to just work through with ChatGPT of what pages you should have to see if you're missing anything. So what website pages should you have? It tells you which ones and describes each one. Content ideas generate a list of blog post ideas for independent car dealership in the in Indianapolis. Right. It literally before a lot of companies would like hire entire content teams very popular to hire interns in the summer to literally work on

1:03:44Ideas of blog posts and articles. Now you could of course you have to work on your prompting a little bit right you could say now it's a summer give me ideas for a summer right you can't just be like so vanilla as I am here but it's very powerful for content ideas and this is a little bit different than creating content creation we covered this a little bit I my team does not do it right originally when all this came about and Google's like we're not going to penalize for it we took out the word human you don't have to have a human create the content we have a team of 70 content writers Right. So, we're "Wow, now we're going to be so much more efficient. We're going to we're going to be able to create 10 times more content and charge 10 times less for it, and everyone's going to be 10 times happier.", at the end of the day, we're using AI a ton for content. But the efficiencies haven't been great. I think the biggest efficiencies we got is we're creating better content. Content's ranking better because it's more quality. The ideas are more outside of the box because before you assign the same team to write content for a same client and weren't creating I don't know 20 pages of content every month and we're now in year seven really start running out of ideas right like start scraping the barrel with generative AI it's really good at generating ideas so it creates a lot of efficiencies but I despite what Google says I wouldn't just start taking content but having said that it does work really well and does a really good job What's funny is I've used this example to present I think in total I've presented this to maybe a thousand car dealerships and what's funny

1:05:18Is if you search around the internet a lot of people straight up took this example right so this is just an idea and if you do take it's going to not work well because a thousand other people have already done it but literally so write a 250word blog post on the history of their Mercedes GLS how cool is that and literally in 3 seconds it does this for you right like three years ago you'd have hire an intern and this would take them maybe like what four hours to do, five hours, the whole day, the whole week, right, for one model. And it's all well, they need to QA it. Sometimes it goes a little wonky, but it's it writes it really well and it's actually literally gives you the history of the model, so it is really good at this. I would not copy paste what it takes and I promise you a lot of people already copy past even though I say that every single time. If you search this on the internet, a lot of people stole this and did it. What's interesting, and you guys already know this, we're 3 years into generative AI, you could ask it to write with the style of different people. So, if you are going to steal these examples and have ChatGPT do it for you, please at least do something funny and interesting. So, write a 250word blog post and the history of the Mercedes GLS in the style Shakespeare. So, this is a super small font for me, but I'm going I'm going to try my best. Park and noble reader to the tale of the mighty chariot known as the Mercedes GLS, a vehicle of grander fit for king and queens. So it does really well with people's styles, That's how gener works. It

1:06:46Could have on the fly value and use other people's styles. So if you do wind up using it for writing things, please don't just do vanilla prompts of write me this, Add a lot of context, add a lot of style, tell them who the audience is, You could literally That's another one that I might get in trouble for, but today is just not a good day with all this stuff. If I'm going to get in trouble, I'm just going to go all in at this point. I have two kids. I have two daughters who are in competitive cheerleading and we're always traveling. It's always busy. One of my daughters had a book report to do that we couldn't do because of a cheer schedule conflict. I will get in trouble for it, but that's fine. I went I literally went on ChatGPT and I said please write me a summary and we showed it to her. She understood it but the reason I bring that up this is example is I literally said write it in the style of a fifth grader right where you could define your audience write this my audience is of like this age with this experience level. So you really want to give as much detail as possible on your prompts link building. So link building obviously you can't go on ChatGPT and say ChatGPT go do my link building for me. So you can't do link building ChatGPT, but it could give you a lot of ideas and inspiration. So here I wrote, "Where are the most popular local websites in Indianapolis that list automotive businesses in the area, exclude national websites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and exclude car dealerships." As you

1:08:12Guys could see, I was super detailed in my prompt. If you do the same prompt and remove that detail, all it's going to give you is Yelp and Yellow Pages and other car dealers. But literally saying to exclude it, these are actually good local directories. And your question before is why would these people do it? These are literally businesses that list local businesses. So it's like a no-brainer for them. Reputation management. So AI can't force your customers to leave your reviews, but it could help you respond to reviews. It does a really good job responding to reviews both publicly and over email. You want to be careful publicly that doesn't come off as a robot. So, please QA it and add some humanity to it. Same with emails, but it's been super powerful for on the car dealership level. Implementing generative AI to help respond to clients has been a gamecher for a lot of dealerships because as you can imagine, there's always someone upset, especially in the service part of the dealership. Something I came in and my car is now broken and this broke and that broke. There's always a lot of emotions involved. Obviously generative AI doesn't have any emotions, doesn't take things personally, will not start cursing off the clients. So really powerful.

1:09:33How are we pacing on time? Generative AI. We're getting to tips. Being good at AI is super valuable. I've used this example for a while, but now if you look, there's actually I just posted this on LinkedIn. There's 8,000 prompt engineer jobs in the US right now. Openings on Indeed. 8,000 openings. Please, I did this one time and then someone reached out to me after and said they quit their job and they start applying to be a prompt engineer. Please don't quit your job. I don't think this is going to be a permanent thing but right now literally prompt engineers are paying 300 grand plus because how valuable this stuff is right so you want to be you want to be able to use this resource again please don't quit your job I think this will go away when typewriters went to computers there were actually three big companies that did a ton of this stuff they went around and taught people to use computers obviously those companies don't exist today I think 3 to 5 years from now I think we'll all be proficient prompt engineers just like we are with using computers. People who refuse to do it and just will not do it will eventually lose their job. People who do it will become more efficient at it. But it's crazy how valuable it is that thousands of companies are now hiring literally prompt engineers. Some of these jobs are funny too if you if you go and look around. Some of them are like 10 years experience required

1:10:57And like all these crazy things. And it's like big companies that post this stuff too. AI loves spreadsheets. So, you could put spreadsheets in if you don't already do it. You could literally import your spreadsheets, have it work with your data. Copilot's now built into Excel and Google rolled out their AI into Google spreadsheet, Google Sheets. So, now you don't even have to do this. You can literally use it within your sheets. This is this is just like general generative AI tips. Just a reminder that AI likes to hallucinate. I know we've heard this all before. It's getting a lot better at it but still does this a lot. Some examples I used to present that it actually fixed. One I used to present was I would go on ChatGPT and I would say are there any countries that start with the letter V? You would say there are not. Obviously Vietnam is but to ChatGPT Vietnam is the socialist republic of Vietnam, So socialist democratic republic of Vietnam. So there's things like that. Some things I just have no idea why I hallucinate. So for a long time when I would ask who started SmartSites, it would say it would say me, Alex. It would say my brother Michael. And then it would say it added a third sister. And I don't have we don't have any other siblings. I promised I asked

1:12:19My parents. I checked the family tree. I'm on 23 and me. So I checked genetically if I could find any longlost siblings. And there's that information for that. I forget the name it used. Didn't exist anywhere on the internet. I searched everywhere. So, sometimes you don't even know how it hallucinates or why it hallucinates. You have a lot of stuff like this that's gotten better at. This is when Google just rolled out their AI, which was a [ __ ] show. I'm sure you guys have seen a lot of these. I'll take it from left to right. How many rocks should I eat? A AI tells you she at least one small rock per day. The reason I bring this all up, especially for some of you that might be thinking about using AI content, make sure you're not publishing things like that. We have some very big clients that once published an AI written article that was factually incorrect. I forget what company, but it was in the news. And the only reason they found out is when someone started digging through it, it cited studies that didn't exist. They never happen like as seen in this study and that study didn't exist. So, please be careful with it. Next one in the middle is how can you make cheese better? It says just add some glue to it. Very good recommendation. Please don't

1:13:38Add glue to your to your pizza. And then yeah, I think some of you guys have started doing this. I don't know. And then smoking while pregnant. Of course, you should do two or three cigarettes per day during pregnancy. Doctors recommend this. I've actually what's interesting is I track I after I've posted all of these before, but I actually went and tried to track down where I got this information because sometimes it hallucinates, but sometimes it's actually So, you've been telling this to your clients all along. I'm glad it's now been validated by AI. Three cigarettes a day. No, no, no less. I did find some of them. So, it's interesting. So, a couple of them were from Reddit. So AI is known to love Reddit which actually devalued. So a lot of people a lot of people were gaming the system by creating tons of stuff on Reddit because it was very cited. Two weeks ago both Google ChatGPT everyone at the same time devalued Reddit. Reddit stock fell 17% on the news that it's no longer as important for AI which is crazy that things like algorithm changes can move a public company price stock like that. So a couple of them on Reddit. The PE the cheese one was a onion article which is which is I don't even know how to describe it but it decided was a trustworthy source right it has

1:15:00A high domain authority so be careful what you do with AI I've used this example for a lot too not as applicable to you guys more applicable when I speak to Fortune 500 companies and people do proprietary stuff but for this example Samsung engineer here was working on a bug in their code and they couldn't figure it out. They were working on it for like a couple weeks. So they're what, we'll have ChatGPT fix it. So they uploaded their entire repository for the operating system, for the mobile operating system they use on old Samsung mobile devices. ChatGPT instantly fixed the bug and they moved on. Everything was fine. Then they notice a couple of their competitors start copying the feature set of their u AI their mobile operating system and they track things back and it turned out that their competitors were using their exact code because generative AI learns and took the code and then was using that code to help their competitors create those features instantly. This happened like in 24 hours. Samsung tried to sue OpenAI said please remove our repository from your servers. OpenAI said it doesn't work that way. Once it learns from it, it can't we can remove it. It actually went to a court case. OpenAI said there's absolutely no like no back seas like we have your code now. So, be careful what you give to it. Obviously, not super applicable to you guys, but always want to keep it in mind.

1:16:29Would consider a proprietary contract that they would do for real estate closings, just like when you buy a house, But they had their own template they've been using for 20 years. Very specific language that they've worked out over 20 years. They had ChatGPT like polish off like a couple sentences and then their competitors started using the same template and they tried to sue their competitors and they courts the judge said that's now open information. It's on ChatGPT. So just want to keep that in mind. Sorry I said no more pictures. You need more pictures. But this is a good picture. This slide is now a year old. So half of these companies might be out of business. But for those that have been around in the '9s when there were like websites popping up left and right, that's how AI is today. Million of these services and websites popping up all over the place that are amazing and a lot of them are free. I've never seen so much free stuff since the internet just came around. At the same time, a lot of these go out of business literally overnight. So, I was asked to be on a board for a company that literally their business model was AI image generation and they were really good at it. So Google came out with the same thing but free. That's it. Right. So really reminds me of the internet in

1:17:56The late 90s where things were coming up left and right, everything was free and then like randomly going out of business. You have geocities that if you guys remember it like little homes you build tripod all that all those all those services. We don't have a ton of time but I'm going to try to speak even quicker and go through some of the GEO stuff really quick. So in a lot of cases GEO is SEO. This is from Word Camp US which was just a month ago. I was in there but someone sent me this picture because for the last year I've been saying GEO is SEO. So I'm glad that Danny Sullivan was there to say it. I even Danny Sullivan Gez I could I didn't even cite him. That's terrible. He used to be a Google search leaison. He was a Google employee whose job was to communicate Google's SEO stuff to the community. Literally, he was at Word Camp US saying good SEO is good GEO. What that really means is SEO content is then used is used by the generative engines like they can't come up with the information themselves. So SEO content is super important and that's why SEO is still is GEO. Things that are good for SEO are good for GEO, like creating content, G getting authoritative websites to link

1:19:17To you, things like that. And maybe another good picture one. Sorry, I'm going to might as well keep your phones out at this point. We're almost done. Just keep put in record. A AI chatbots by market share. This is an interesting one. Obviously ChatGPT dominates all of them. But Perplexity and a couple of ones have been growing recently. Interesting to see seasonality. I don't know if you guys have seen posts about this, but in the summer AI usage drops like a rock because all the college students aren't using it. So AI is still very heavily used in education. I don't I don't want to say to help people cheat, but help them to be more efficient with their school work. So that's something interest I try to stay out of trouble the way I say things, especially being at a university. I don't want to get kicked out. I have to come back here and do another speech tomorrow. So it's interesting to watch the seasonality. When I say good GEO is good SEO and I have a whole deck I presented on this stuff separately. It's almost the same, but you want to write with promptability in mind, You want to structure your content in a way people are searching for. So, usually in question form, things like that. Use clear question base headers and direct answers. FAQ schema for a long time was very helpful to rank in generative AI. Couple studies now are saying it's not as

1:20:39Important but I still see it being effective. Prioritize entity clarity. You wanted to be super clear who you are, who you represent because AI uses a lot of that to decide what it sites. Like it's not going to site like we're a digital marketing company. If I create content saying we're the best digital marketing company, AI is not going to use that to site it, Because conflict of interest. So, you want to be very clear in who's writing your content. You could even put authors on it. And build topical authority. So, the best thing you could do for generative engine optimization is become a topical authority. You don't want to be there's some exceptions, Forbes licenses out their name to be everything to everyone. But generally speaking, you want to be a topical authority in a single topic. The result looks like this. We do this is a big study. I have it cited on the bottom from search engine land. You could search it. It's how to get cited by AI SEO. It just came out. Search engine land. Research over 8,000 AI citations to determine what helps you get cited. The SEO we do for ourselves helped us get on the list. I don't know if you could see it very well, but we actually wound up being ranked ahead of Four Seasons and a lot of Fortune 500 company in terms of how often we get cited. The end result something like this. This is our GA traffic for our own

1:22:05Site for SmartSites. I should probably update it for September, but the summer drop is from the from the I guess the students. But we're now getting thousands of visitors per month from ChatGPT. You could see from where I was going to say just ChatGPT, but ChatGPT, Gemini Perplexity, and this doesn't even count AI overviews, which drives a ton of traffic. Also, for AI overviews, Google's promising they'll give us more visibility in Google Search Console. They promised it and they wrote something out that wound up giving less visibility. So take it for what it is but I think we will get some visibility in Q1 Q2 for that as well. Yes. Yes. Actually converts we measure we measure conversions here. So key events are form submits. So we actually are getting form submissions from the traffic. It is it is lower from AI than from organic but it is there. It is there. What we've noticed is the traffic we get from AI is more often topfunnel traffic and that for bottomfunnel traffic people still go to Google. This is doing absolutely nothing. This is doing correct. We do for ourselves we actually

1:23:28Done absolutely nothing different for GEO. For some clients we do for ourselves we have not. And the numbers are big. It's thousand visitors a month. It's not it's big numbers. I have closing thoughts. Closing thoughts. It's funny. I thought after talking about AI for an hour and a half that I would have AI write my closing thoughts. I actually didn't even write this. This was written by ChatGPT. I gave it I g just another inspiration of how to use it. Right. I gave it my deck. I said, "Write me my closing thoughts." That's why you see the icons. That's how you could always see by the way the AI posts on LinkedIn. They're using the icons and the dashes. You have like question dashbased right it's they ChatGPT loves the dashes I use Copilot but obviously co ChatGPT powered search is evolving market share 7.6 six, but traditional search still dominates. Use AI for content idea, draft creation, link building, reputation management. Google continues to reward high quality content. Prepare for GEO, good SEO is good generative engine optimization. Optimize for AI using clear questionbased headers, building topical authority, all the stuff we just spoke about. Always be adapting. I think that's the one thing I could tell everyone. And I've said that to everyone from like roofers, plumbers to Fortune 500 companies. I think the next 12 months, next 12 to 24 months,

1:24:54Agility is probably going to be the most important differentiating factor. I think things will move super quickly. And those that try to cut corners or are not agile enough are going to get left behind. And a perfect example is I know a lot of SEO agencies and even clients. We had clients who cancelled with us and went with other SEO agencies to follow the Reddit spam tactic. You spam Reddit, you get ranked everywhere and you do very well until two weeks ago and when you don't. So you want to be agile, but at the same time you want to also not shortcuts never work out from me doing this for 20 more years than I want to count. More than 25 a lot of years shortcuts never work out. That's it. That's my LinkedIn if you scanner. You could look for me on LinkedIn. My email on the left side. Covered a lot. I don't know if you guys have any energy left for questions, but I'll take some more questions if you guys have them. And I'm always available at chat and I'll be back here tomorrow 1 pm doing a similar session, but we'll do a little bit more AI paid search in that. Email me. Okay. Correct or