Search Marketing for WordPress in the Age of AI @ WordCamp Canada 2025

0:09I think we're good. Welcome everybody. Hope everybody had a good lunch. Was that not a good lunch or what? Once again I'd like to thank our sponsors that are listed. Up next we have Alex Melen with Search and Marketing WordPress in the age of AI. A digital marketing veteran and co-founder of SmartSites. Alex will update your idea of SEO in the modern world marketing for WordPress in the age of AI. In a world where AI is changing the ways people find information and discover content, traditional SEO isn't enough. Alex's session will show you how to adapt your strategies to thrive in an AIdriven landscape without feeling overwhelmed by the journey. Alex, thank you for the introduction. That actually sounded really good. Did I write that? Who wrote that? I wrote that. That's I That sounded great. Thank you everyone for attending. So today we're going to be talking about SEO. We're going to be doing actually a little bit of go, which is the new SEO, and we're going to be talking about AI, paid ad stuff. Seems like there's a lot of familiar faces. How many of you guys were at my workshop yesterday? Quick show of hands. Just so Okay, so not everyone. So, we'll still unfortunately for those who raised their hands, we're going to cover some of the same content again, but for those that were here yesterday, I think this will give you an opportunity to ask

1:41Some questions because you've now digested this and you're seeing it for a second time. So, this deck compared to yesterday is a lot more condensed. So, there's a lot more opportunities for questions and to have discussion. So, please feel free to stop me as I go through this. For those that were not here yesterday, yesterday was a little bit more in-depth SEO workshop here. This will be a little bit, condensed, but we're covering some of the same topics. So, similarly for you guys, feel free to stop me, ask questions. I would love for this to be as interactive as possible. Is there an agenda slide? Agenda slide disappeared. This is our agenda for today. I'm going to give the same personal story of myself as I did yesterday. We're going to talk about rise of generative AI. That's also similar to yesterday. Then we're going to talk about ranking on AI search, paid ads, and AI results. That's completely new. And, I definitely want to have a more interactive Q&A yesterday even though we had more time. We got we got a little bit limited by time, just because the workshop was so long. So definitely stop me during the session and if you have any questions for after we'll have time for that as well. A little bit about myself that's me over there on the top left. My family immigrated to the U to the US from the USSR in 1991. So that's very early me. I've been fortunate

3:04Enough to have exposure to a computer and to the internet since the beginning of computers and inter not computers since the beginning of the internet. So I've been involved in the in the digital space for a very long time. I started my first company T35 hosting in 1997. So that was for those that have been around since then that was the time of GeoCities, Hyperart, Tripod, Angelfire. I don't know if any of those names ring a bell to you guys. Predates the starting of Google by a couple years. More recently, I co-founded SmartSites with my younger brother. That's a company we run now. SmartSites, you could you guys could fact check me and look it up. We are one of the fastest growing top rated digital marketing agencies. We have over 400 employees and we do SEO, paid search, and digital for thousands of clients. So that's my background where I'm coming from. To today I want to share a lot of the SEO stuff that we're doing on our end with you guys to give you guys inspiration, ideas and best practices of what we're doing both for ourselves, for our own company and for thousands of our clients. Same slide you some of you guys saw yesterday. I also have a bestselling book out. This is automotive themed. So I person well take a step back. So SmartSites we're industry agnostic. We're literally in every single industry. There's no industry that's more

4:30Than five or 10% of what we do. I personally do a lot in the automotive space like car dealership automotive advertising. So when I decided to write my first book, that was the no-brainer choice for me. I was going to do a bunch of these books for every industry. Later if after a session if anyone wants to chat about the challenges of book publishing I'm more than happy more than happy to discuss that I wrote this back in the day pread GPT so I wrote every word myself there was no AI there's no AI cheating going on in here but yeah the reason I bring this up is I cover a lot of the stuff I'm going to be covering my session today in the book so if you guys want more detail I also not I'm not here to sell the book. I will I can't physically give them away because it's very hard for me to get them to the speeches I attend, but I'll send you guys a copy. So at the end, I have my email address, so please reach out. I'll send you the slides. I'll send you a copy of the book. Those that asked yesterday, I already sent everyone a copy. So if you want a more indepth analysis of some of the SEO stuff we're going to be talking about today, it'll be in there. Just keeping in mind that I wrote this almost three years ago, so it won't have the GEO or some of the newer stuff, but like the SEO methodology, it's it'll have a lot of good stuff. SmartSites we covered already, but this is us. We have a

5:51Team of over 400 employees. Offices all over the world. We do tons and tons of this SEO, paid search stuff, and, it gives us the ability to really experiment with a lot of things and really see what's working and what's not. And that's what I hope to dis distill for you guys here in the next 354 minutes. All right. So we're going to take it from the top. Rise of generative AI. I like starting off very general at the top to create context. And again some of this slides will be familiar for those that were at the workshop yesterday. But it's still good to go through. This is the macro view world that we live in today. This is the percent of search that happens on AI chat. So this is the ChatGPT Perplexity. All the all the AI search engines. This is where we are today. We're at we're at 7.6% of all searches happening on AI, and I mentioned this yesterday, but for me in my world, living a lot on LinkedIn and seeing what people post on LinkedIn, I could swear that it's like 100%. Like all the stuff I see is like AI searches everything. No one's using Google anymore. Does anyone still use Google? So just to put in context, this is where we are. What's

7:14What's more interesting is this is this shows the AI search volume which is the white pieces of the bar chart compared to Google search volume. So a couple things here obviously Google search and this is just Google search. If you add in Bing and all the other search engines it'll be that the aqua color stack will be even taller. What's interesting is yes AI search is going up right the it's percent of share is forecasted to go up but what's interesting is overall Google search is also going up it's not that Google search is down like I would believe reading all the posts on LinkedIn the amount of search happening on traditional search engines actually going up for sure the way people search is changing more and more people are using multiple ways to search so they will do informational search with AI then I'll go back to Google and do a Google search to find actual the business to go to. So all of this is rapidly changing and evolving but just from the top level this is where we are and this is where we're forecasted to be in the next couple years. So again a lot of people may lead you to believe that the world will completely change next year that you're going to wake up January 1 and no one's going to be using Google anymore. The actual data does not support that yet. Obviously it could it could always happen. Things could always change, but this is pretty much where we're expected to be over the next couple years. All right, ranking on AI search. So, we're going to talk about ranking on AI search.

8:46So, this is the new word here. I have a slide for it. The new word for it is GEO. That's the one that's become the most popular. I think it's still debatable what the acronym is going to be. GEO is winning for now. And I from personal experience I've been for a very long time I've been invited to speak at conferences about SEO. So I always get invites you want to come talk about SEO talk about SEO. No one wants me to talk about SEO now. Everyone wants me to talk about GEO. So just based on the request to talk about JO I think that's going to be the winning acronym. But we're going to dive into a little bit into generative engine optimization. So that's GEO generative engine optimization. The other one that's vying for prominence is AEO answers engine optimization which people claim is a little bit different than GEO but I think overall it's going to be rolled into GEO. Cool this is at word camp last month. So for those that I was not there I was at another conference. But this is Danny Sullivan for those that don't know him. He's he was the Google search liaison. So he was a Google employee whose job was to communicate Google's policies to the SEO community. He literally and I've been saying by the way go and SEO is the same thing for I don't know I don't want to say years because

10:11This is also moving so quickly but at least 12 to 18 months and people always fight me about it. So it's very I put the slide in for that reason. So there's someone else out there saying it. So he was literally at word camp last month and he had a slide that said good SEO is good. So what he means by that is that doing correct SEO and the best practices of SEO is also important for GEO generative engine optimization. So, another way I put that is the strategies, the good strategies, not like the black hat stuff or the spammy stuff, but the strategies of correct SEO where you're focusing on creating unique content that'sformational for people to read is as important to generative engines as they are to Google. Another way to look at this is this is how generative engines work, This is how they get data. So what's interesting is at the bottom of the pyramid you see the SEO content right. So the language models even though they actually have reasoning they don't have they are not able to generate their own information right like something like a math equation they could do but something specific technical informations or questions it gets that information from the greater web which is SEO content. So literally the content you'd be creating for SEO is what's going to be picked up in GEO in generative

11:35Engines and CH ChatGPT. What's interesting is even though that content gets picked up, there's certain things you could be doing to get picked up more often. For example, if you want to be thinking about how generative engine prompts are made. So, as opposed to Google where someone, I don't know, could go and type I don't know, Honda car dealership near me, ChatGPT queries are much moreformational, question based. So, if you want more of your content to be coming up in ChatGPT and, generative engines, you want to focus on answering questions. So, you want your content to be like a question and then like answers to that question. That's what's gets picked up the most. It's still SEO content. It's still the same best practices. But that's what's being pulled into ChatGPT and other generative engines. Any We'll take a quick pause. Any questions with this so far? I know I go super quick. Yes. So the al the question is it able to rank the quality of the answer? So the algorithm for the generative engine stuff is even harder to deduce than for search and Google. So for search and Google, I'll walk in the next couple slides, I'll walk you through how we deduce the ranking signals for search. For generous stuff, it's still a bigger mystery

13:05Than the Google stuff that a lot more people have figured out. That being said, there's definitely parts of the algorithm that determine that and it's definitely a work in progress. I don't think I have the slides in this presentation, but yesterday I showed a couple where it gave you the wrong answer. That has now been fixed. There was a couple there were a couple ones of how do you make your how do you make your cheese better in your pizza? And it said to add glue to it. It said how many rocks should you eat a day? It said two to three rocks. But you should you should not eat more than three rocks a day. And then it recommended smoking two to three cigarettes a day while pregnant. That was also a recommendation which is now doesn't but screenshots I use are from last year. It fixed those things. So certainly it knows the quality because it's fixed those things. But how it determines that it's a little trickier. All right. So I'm going to go through the SEO ranking signals. The reason we go through this is as we just discussed with that question there's it's much harder to determine the actual algorithm for ChatGPT and generative engines but there's a lot of people that for a long time have really focused on figuring out the algorithm for Google right and if the if the things that you do for Google are also good for ChatGPT and generative AI this is a good starting point of things to concentrate on so how do what ranking signals are important

14:32For Google. So, there's a couple ways. We'll take it from the top left. I'll spin it all the way around. Number one, Yandex had their entire search algorithm leaked. You guys could go online, you could look it up. There's a lot of websites that summarize it really well. Literally rankings waiting of the rankings. There's a lot of interesting ones. There was one on capitalizations. If you capitalize the titles of your pages, like older words, it's bad. You get deducted. There's a lot of interesting stuff, but obviously Google's not Yandex. Google's always been a couple years three to four years ahead of Yandex. With all the war and everything else going on now, they're probably even more ahead, So, that's not something I would personally use, but it's public. You guys could go look it up. Lots of great information. And the leak was, this is all fairly recent. The index leak, I want to say was two and a half years ago, something like that. Next one. Year and a half ago, Google had their algorithm leaked. Every everything's leaking. So the Google algorithm leak was all over the news. It was all over at least at least in my in the world I live in. It felt like it was all over all over the news. I don't know if it was actually on your local on your local news at 10 p.m. But it's all over the news of a very a lot of prominent publications featured it made into a big deal. So the Google leak, what happened is through API, someone was able to get all the variables that

15:52Google uses for organic ranking, which sounds like it's huge news. We've cracked Google now. A lot of publications used a lot of that clickbait wording to get a lot of traffic on their articles. At the end of the day, what happened was even though that they leaked every single variable, we don't know the weighing of the variables, how important they are, we don't know which ones are active. So, it was 2,600 variables that were leaked. The SEO community tried to figure out the active ones. They actually were able to figure out that around 600 are active. And there's again lots of great public information. You could go look it up. There's places that let you search the variables that describe each one. The problem I have with all this is that no one has been able to figure out the weighing of the variables, how important each one is. So the analogy I like to use is it's like having a very complex soup recipe. So, so you have a soup recipe with 2,600 ingredients and now the ingredients, but you don't know how many of each you need or the order put them in. So, it's doesn't really help you much. It's interesting to look through, but I would not use it as a ranking signal. What I do use as a ranking signal is Darren Shaw maintains a local search ranking factor study. So, it's it changes every year, but it's a group of SEO professionals that report to themselves what's important and what they're seeing as a ranking signal on Google. So, it's not really meant to be a public facing

17:17Study. It's more of an internal one, but it's really good info. And starting they do it every couple years, so it's not that I have an old one. I think this is just the most recent one. Starting the end of 2023, which is the last time they did it. It was actually open-ended. So, all the SEO professionals literally in an open-ended fashion recorded each category of what's important to them. The way that looks, and for those that have their cameras out, this is a good slide. For those that don't, you can take your cameras out. The way it looks when you summarize everything is this is probably the best interpretation you're going to have of Google ranking signals. I think eventually we're going to have SEO professionals and GEO professionals put something like this together for, generative engines. I think we're a little bit a early in the process, b it's too fast moving. And it's super fast moving. So for those that have been involved in the GEO space, getting your content to rank on ChatGPT and such the last six months Reddit content was very prominent. Reddit was the number one cited source on ChatGPT and all other AI engines. And two weeks ago they completely took it out. And if you look it up, Reddit stock fell 17% within 10 minutes of that becoming public. So I think we will have stuff like this for the GEO world soon. But it's also moving so

18:41Quickly that I think it'll be it'll be very hard to have this data. So for now, I think this is our best our best interpretation of what's important to Google and I think in effect what's important to AI. I'll walk you through all the ranking signals. Again, this is specifically for Google, but I think a lot of this will translate to GEO. And I think if you're working on this, I think that's your best path to be SEO and go optimized because as we look search still traditional search, the old school search is still the biggest chunk, It's I think it's going to be a while till generative AI overtakes traditional search. So, I think this is for those focusing on SEO, GEO, I think this is where we go. I'm going to take it from the top. I talk quick, but ple I'm going to try to I'm going to do a pause in between the two sections for questions, but please, as I go, feel free to stop me as well for questions. Just raise your hand and I'll stop picking from the left. So, local pack is the SEO word in the in the for the general public, it's Google maps. So for there's a big distinction between ranking on Google maps and all the organic results below it. The ranking signals as you could see are completely different. Local map local pack or Google maps would

20:06Be important. If you have a physical location you have a physical location you want to focus on both of these. If you don't have a physical location and that physical location absolutely does not make sense to you'd want to focus more on the local organic. We'll start with a Yes. Question. Yes. Yes. Good question. Hold that thought for 30 seconds. So we'll take it from the left. So first one for maps is GBP signal. So that's literally makes sense to be to be rank well on Google maps. You need to have a Google business profile, Sounds like it makes sense, but it's you'd be surprised how many businesses have a poorly set up one. You don't have all the categories set up. You don't have your local location set up. There's a lot of industrywide best practices. So, for example, in automotive, you might want to have a separate one for your service business separate from sales and have it nested within the sales one. So, there's a lot of optimizations, best practices there. So, on page is interesting. I like combining on page into a single signal, but on page is the most complex out of all these ranking signals. So on page I would say is technical SEO. That's a schema that's to make sure that your website is optimized the best possible for

21:30Google to find your information in the easiest way possible. And then on page is also the quantity and quality of your content. What's interesting is it's a very high ranking signal for maps. So a lot of people don't realize it. Some there we have a lot we have some local businesses that just the website's not important to them. They do maybe social or whatever it is. But the your website affects your Google maps rankings. That answer your question. I'll do it again on the right side. If you have any followup, we'll do there. Yes. Question. Oh yes. So good question very similar to his question. So on page I would put technical SEO into it. Technical SEO the best way for me to describe it in a non-technical way is you want to make your website as discoverable by Google as easily discoverable as possible. And you want to make sure your important content is prioritized to Google. And that becomes important in a couple ways. First, yes, you want to have a website that's fast, that people have a good user experience, that goes on their behavioral signals. So, that in itself will affect your rankings. If your website's very slow or has lots of pop-ups, you'll rank worse because of behavioral signals, which is a little further down. The other part of it is Google only has a specific amount of crawl budget and it's usually on a domain basis.

22:56So, if your website's not easily crawled, first of all, they'll crawl less of it. Number two, they'll prioritize the content based on how they discover it. And even if they crawl your entire website, they'll probably not list all the content of your entire website in search. You have to help Google understand which content you want to come up. That's my non-technical way to describe technical SEO. For those that are more in do this on a more in-depth basis, there's literally technical SEO people that charge $1,000 an hour that go in and do very specific technical SEO to fix. It's usually like a fixing thing. And we have someone like that on our staff. Technical SEO people usually get called in when, big websites, enterprise clients start dropping organic traffic by like 50%. That's they're like they get called in like they're like the firefighters like to run in to put out the fire. But technical SEO is its own field. For most SMBs it's literally making sure your website is as easily discoverable as possible and that you make sure that you're showing Google the exact pages that are most important. Yes. Yeah. Go ahead. Yes. Just thoughts on part that's

24:31Like I'm wondering how important things like yes that's I think we're going to lose 999% of the No, it's good. I'll do it. I think we're going to lose 99% of the audience here. So in the SEO world, over the last 15 plus years, the community started standardizing first on a sitemap, although it's not the way search engines work anymore. We could probably lose the sitemaps and still be okay. But what a sitemap does is tell the search engines, it's not meant to be consumerf facing. It's literally for the search engines all your pages and you could even set how often they get indexed and things like that. The other component that the SEO community has developed has been robots.txt. So it's a file you put in the root domain that tells Google and other search engines what to index and not index. In the generative AI world we're now in the process of developing something similar. LLM.txt has been proposed. There's a very wide SEO community that's pushing cats.txt as the if you Google a lot of blank faces, but if you look it up, I promise I'm not making it up.

25:53I don't know of any generative engine that uses them and there's been a lot of recent studies that I've even participated in that shows they don't like doing AB tests. So I think there will be something but it is not yet. Design. Cool. On page so we touched on page. I'll come back to on page when we're doing the other side. Review signals is a very interesting one. U obviously most important for the maps part. So review signals are your Google My Business reviews. Google business profile. Now for me I hate when they change when they change acronyms on me. It's not even new acronyms. They go and change acron. So GMB Google My Business became GBP Google business profile. Reviews on there. So this interesting one that we touched upon yesterday a little bit. So there's three things that are important for reviews. Number one, the quantity of your reviews. You want a lot of reviews. The star ratings of your reviews. You want all five star reviews. So you want a lot of reviews. They're all five star. That one makes sense. That one usually everyone's on board with me for. The third one is actually the content of your reviews. So Google uses the content of your reviews as a ranking signal. So the example I always like to use is if you're a coffee shop and your name is literally coffee shop, nothing in your name that helps Google determine what coffee you make in any way. And you want to be known for Brazilian coffee. If a lot of your reviews mention Brazilian coffee and someone goes on Google Maps and types or even just Google and types Brazilian coffee shops or coffee shops with Brazilian coffee, you'll more likely come up based on the content of your reviews. So,

27:28It's one that a lot of people don't really don't usually realize and that's super powerful if you're a local business with a physical location that wants to be known for something specific and to come up for it. Obviously, harder to control. You can't really hold your customers at gunpoint and just tell them like to keyword stuff their reviews. Yes, question. Yes. Any business that has a Google business profile, it would be important for 100%. 100%. Even as a agency, if we have a lot of reviews that say they do amazing SEO and someone searches, agencies that do SEO will come up 100%. And the there's no this came up yesterday too. There's no maximum length of review where it gets bad. Like the more the better. The more content the better. Obviously hard to control. And another question. I'm going to preempt this question right away. Question that comes up. Responding to reviews. Yes, super important, but that doesn't help as a ranking signal. You can't keyword stuff your responses. That always gets asked and I see businesses do it also. That does not help your ranking in anywhere. Yes. Cloudflare has a setting that can discourage AI bots from scraping your website. Yes. You

28:54Recommend came out recently. Yeah. Active by default for new accounts. Very scary. Sorry. And I'm taking from this that they people should not be turning that on or like I have a client who is you has a certain subject matter expert. Yes. But she doesn't want AI giving answers that she should be giving. Very good question. I've been asked this a lot and this is also gets a very into technical like when I do much more technical conferences it comes up but a very good question. So the question was Cloudflare recently it was all over the news it was huge news. The headlines of course for the clickbait was Cloudflare blocks ChatGPT that was the headline. So Cloudflare for new accounts by default, I don't know if they've reverted this policy, by default started blocking AI bots from crawling your site. For those that already have Cloudflare, it's a option you have to dig through to find. So it wasn't as wasn't like Cloudflare blocks ChatGPT as the headline said. I would say for most businesses 99% I would not block it. I think the value of being indexed by AI outweighs the risk. There's a couple specific cases where that might be otherwise. For example, there's a couple book publishers that I had this discussion with that would not want that.

30:20And they wound up winning. Perplexity paid them, I forget, hundred million, something crazy. I think for 99% of the businesses, I would not discourage it for now until we see otherwise because I think the negative outweighs apply. I think you're better off having it indexed. And I think both AI both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT and Perplexity and everyone else is going to increase citations. Meaning, and we keep we've been seeing this all year. Meaning that instead of just giving a response, gives a response and gives a link to the website. I don't know if I have it in slides, but we get like a lot. Yeah, I do. It's coming. You're going to have to have to hold that thought for a couple minutes. By having our website crawl, we are actually getting like a thousand visitors a month from ChatGPT. Not even measuring AI overviews and everything else. By having it not crawled, you lose that. But if you're like a I don't know in particular book authors book authors that's tricky. There's you have to I would follow the litigation stuff. It seems like Perplexity is licensing it now and I think others will follow. So I think for those it would not be I think book publishers in general I it's almost like a union they

31:43They have the collective bargaining power. I think it'll be licensed. If you're I don't know, trying to become a nuclear physicist and publishing personal articles on that matter, maybe you wouldn't want it. But I think for book publishers, I would I that would be like a consult the publishing company or if you are the publishing company, then those are people that consult me. But I think they will I think it'll be a licensing deal. I think that would be very soon. Very soon. Off reviews link signals. So link signals is backlink backlinking backlink building was always a thing for a while right as many years as I've heard SEO is dead I hear link building is dead it is not I don't have the slide here because it's a condensed presentation but if you want the slides from yesterday for those that didn't attend I have historical ranking signals for the last 10 years so it's becoming a little bit less important but still very important behavioral signals are how people use your website citations are the Yelps of the world right they become less and less important, but they're still up there. Personalization is the smallest one. That's if someone's Spanish speaking and they have a Spanish computer and your website's in Spanish, you're more likely to come up. I'm going to speed up so we cover everything. The right side, same ranking signal, so I won't spend as much time on it, but I'll go through it really quick. So on page again is your technical SEO and then the quantity and quality of your content. Content is what gives you the opportunity to come up in search results. So if you're I always use car dealership examples, but if you're a car

33:18Dealership, if you made a page on your website comparing the Honda Accord to Toyota Camry, 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, nothing will ever rank. Your homepage won't rank for that. Honda.com won't rank for that. So each page gives you an opportunity to come up in search results. The technical SEO and the link building is what helps you come up higher. That's as simple as I can explain it. Both of those things you want to keep doing on an ongoing basis for both SEO and GEO. I hear I hear a plot over there. I still have time. I still have time. They just ended early. The other signals we went through these are a couple extra things that you want to do for GEO that's a little bit different from SEO, but again super similar. You want to write with promptability in mind, So what does that mean? A lot of people search informational style. They search questions. So you want to create almost FAQ schema is a thing. You could create schema on your page that's literally FAQ based. Your heading will have literally the question someone's asking. Under it, you're going to have a couple bullet points answering the question and a little bit further go into more detail, You write it in a way that increases the chances of generative AI picking it up. You want to prioritize entity clarity. AI is very big on authenticity. It's very clear on who's providing this

34:44Content because it doesn't want biased content. So for us as a SEO agency, if I made a blog post that we're the number one SEO agency and everyone else sucks, AI is not going to pick that up because it's biased information. So AI is very big into prioritizing clarity on who wrote this content and why it's authoritative. And you want to build topical authority. That's very big for AI. AI likes to quote things that are topical authority sources. For a while, Reddit was it for everything, but now I think more so going forward, it's going to it's going to focus on actual topical authority pages. This is how it works as a result. This is we do SEO for our own brand. This is for SmartSites. This is studies. You could get the link in the bottom from two months ago from search engine land. They did a study of 8,000 citations to determine what helps you rank. So, the SEO we've been doing for ourselves helped us rank here ahead of tons of other Fortune 500 companies. Very hard to see on the slide, but we're ahead of Four Seasons, Subaru, and a lot of household names in terms of how often AI sites us. And it's all from the SEO stuff that we just looked at. This is how the results look. This is straight from GA4. So, we're actually getting over a thousand visitors a month right now from ChatGPT and Perplexity, We're getting a ton more from AI overviews, which is not trackable yet, which Google promises will be trackable early next year, which is, I'm sure, a ton more, but it's actual visitors. And not only visitors, we had this question yesterday. We got conversions. So,

36:14Key events here are actually form submits. So, we're getting leads from ChatGPT recommending our business. Any questions? After this, we're gonna talk about paid ads really quick and then we're gonna do some Q&A and hopefully still be on time. Questions? Yes, question in the back. I would So, I don't like in general I don't like blogs as a way to organize content. Blogs is like very old school like you don't you don't go to like your dentist website and check out his blog anymore. That's like that was a thing. You guys laugh, but I'm sure 15 years ago as soon as you heard your dentist has a has a website, you went on his blog and saw what root canals he was blogging about. I don't like blogs to organize content. So, I would I think it should be category pages and I should I think that informational one should be FAQ schema and I think they should be categorized by what they're answering. Like you shouldn't just have one page that has a thousand of them especially and please don't have AI write 10,000 pages and stick it on one page. We're gonna talk about paid ads really quick and then we'll have a couple minutes for questions. So paid ads this moved so quickly that it probably shouldn't even be making slides anymore. This is so yesterday for those that were here yesterday

37:36Since it was not recorded by the conference I was saying a lot of things that's probably going to get me in trouble here. I'm trying to do a little less. Ads in AI results are coming. Not no, this should not be news to anyone in this room. Google and all these companies are not going to be able to do this for free forever. So we're already piloting, I think this says Q4, but we've been piloting it for a couple months. Ads and AI overviews, which is a little creepy because you ask you ask Google for what is the best mattress and Google says these are the best mattresses and one of those ads are paid. And right now they're testing a lot of different ways to indicate or not indicate that. So without getting myself into further trouble, there's some ads you might be seeing from AI overviews that are paid placements that you probably don't know are. But this is coming. This is going to be huge. ChatGPT just recently integrated with Etsy and Shopify. Yeah, it was Etsy and Shopify. They're on final negotiations of integrating with Walmart, which means two things. Number one, ChatGPT will be able to make purchases for you from the integrated stores. Number two, those integrated stores will pay to have placements of the ChatGPT and pay to have ChatGPT purchased from them. Very a lot to digest there, but this is

39:02All that's coming and this is going to this is not going to be big this year. I think it's going to be big next year. There's a lot of testing that's happening now with the Q4 season coming. Q4 is the e-commerce crazy shopping, We have Black Friday, Cyber Monday for I don't know if those are big in Canada, but big shopping holidays coming in the US. So, there's a lot of testing that's happening. I think a lot of this stuff's being pushed off a little bit. Public releases like this says Q4, but I don't think it's going to be a public release in Q4. But a lot of this a lot of this is coming and you want to be cognizant of it separate from SEO. For those that do paid advertising, I think this is going to be a huge deal. And there's already ways to have your ads if you're doing shopping, there's already ad ways to have your ads in Google ads appear in AI results. There's it's a little tricky to do it now and it's in and it gets that was a fivem minute warning in the back, but I'm good. I'm good. I have a I good at good at pacing. There's ways to do it. So if you're doing Google ads and want to learn about it, shoot me an email. But there's ways you could be doing it already. It's not it's all experimental, but this is coming. This is going to be huge. I think the next step in advertising is going to be advertising and AI. Closing thoughts. Same as yesterday, I had AI write this for me because it was an AI presentation. Why not put the deck into AI? Had it give me a summary. Actually, didn't even read this yet. So, we'll as I read it, as I read it,

40:32We'll see. We'll see if it messed up. And you could always tell it's AI puts the I did the icons for me. I didn't even imagine like I would have to pick out my own icons, like an icon of like a rocket. Number one, be prepared for the rise of LLM while still focusing on traditional search. Focus on the important Google AI ranking signals that we covered before. Again, I have it in my book for those that didn't get it yet. My next slide will have my email address so you could email me. I'll send you the slides. I'll send you the book. Like yesterday, I feel like every time I say that, I feel like I'm like o Oprah's show that I forget her show, but when she gets stuff out like you get a book, you get a book. You guys don't have it under your seats, but I will I will please email me. I'll send you the book. This is my only sales pitch. Partner with agencies who understand AI. I think I told I told ChatGPT to put in a sales pitch. Build your bra brand for success with SEO and AI results and early movers in tech and tactics always win big. So you always want to be on the cutting edge with this stuff. Like any new platform for those that did any advertising on Snapchat or Tik Tok when it came out huge ROIs in the beginning. People the first movers always do very well. That's all I have for you guys. I think I have like three minutes for Q&A. You could connect slashfollow me on LinkedIn. My email address on the left side and I'll open it for three minutes of questions.

42:01Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, good question. If you have a Google business profile without a website, you're less likely to come up in rankings. So the it's not a huge ranking signal, but having the website gives Google another data point of your authority. So it knows you're more authoritative in the space and it knows the content of your website to match it up to queries. So it gives Google another data point of the relevancy of your business to search query. Good question though. Yes. Any of the SEO tools you recommend on they're all very quickly moving. They're all adding AI capabilities at extremely expensive costs. I think I think this year maybe slightly starting last year was the year all the SEO tools the SAS tool like SAS like software as a service the platforms you pay monthly for fees went up like 10x and I think they know for AI tools that could even charge more but yeah nothing I could recommend off the bat because it's so quickly moving that by the time you get home after this conference it will already be something else. Ahrefs have been doing a good job with it. Semrush have been doing a good job with it. But it's all very expensive. It's all very quickly moving. I think there's going to be an opportunity for a lot of new tools because I think for a while it's been if you go back 15 years there's like a million different platforms and tools and consolidated. The last five to 10 years been the same. I think now is an opportunity for people to develop new tools. Good question though. Yes.

43:48Good question. No, trans I do transcripts. I'll tell you. So, anytime I do a podcast, they post it. I like I go on others. I don't I don't I can't do my It's very easy. I get invited to a lot. Same as speaking. I get by a lot. So I could just choose which ones I went and I went to and then I do them. So they post it themselves on YouTube whatever. I have my own site alexmelen.com that wants to know I try to keep up to date. So I post lit literally a link to the video to YouTube video and I asked them for transcripts and I posted with it and those pages have actually ranked because of those transcripts. So it's a lot of content like it's above probably what best practices but it's I don't think it would hurt you. Yeah. Yes. In the blog cluster content structure is important for go budget structure is a lot more important for go than SEO correct Google's found ways to index everything regardless of your structure just helps a little bit to prioritize the crawl budget on the SEO side for GEO it's super important yes perfect big hand for perfect thank you, up next, track one, we have the ultimate