Meredith's husband: 0:24

I'm going to talk about a question that I get, or have gotten, or will be getting, am getting and will be answering. I How is AI changing SEO? How will AI see Buster as something? You're saying, oh, these are the questions you're getting. These are kind of variations of the same question. What should I do with my website to optimize for AI is essentially the question that I'm getting Buster's excited.

Meredith's husband: 0:50

Yeah, marcel Marcel's playing with his squeaky ball. Yeah, buster doesn't understand SEO much. Buster barely understands anything, and it's a good question. I've been getting this for quite a while, at first from my kind of I would call them forward-thinking clients, but I've been getting it more and more. That's a good question.

Meredith's husband: 1:12

The answer, kind of unfortunately, is that nobody really knows. No, because it changes every day it changes and the big thing, like one of the things that kind of it's surprising to me about AI is nobody understands how it works. About AI is nobody understands how it works, like even the people who create it, like the engineers at OpenAI and the engineers at Google in control of Gemini. If you ask them, how does it work, like, how does AI work? They can't really explain it. They don't really know themselves. They kind of from. What I do understand is they create a network of what they call nodes, and information is just passed through those nodes, nodes, nodes. They know I don't know, nodes know, but it's very confusing, so nobody really understands exactly how AI works. That's reassuring, and so nobody really knows exactly, isn't it? Yeah, nobody really knows exactly how it's going to affect the world and, within that, seo and Google search results, things like that.

Meredith's husband: 2:13

However, a couple of things are pretty obvious at this point. Yes, I'm going to talk about them today. Oh, fantastic, one of which we've already mentioned a little bit, which I'll go into, and another has to do more specifically with keywords. Oh, and how you can approach keywords. Hey, that's hands-on information. It is I hope it is Things we can do.

Meredith's husband: 2:36

The first, which I had mentioned a few episodes ago, is that content creators, in a lot of cases, are going to get less traffic to their site because there's more and more information that's going to be displayed right in Google. The AI summaries, things like this, are going to be presented to people in Google. You don't actually have to go to websites to get a lot of information, right, but isn't anybody who has a website, technically a content creator. Well, yes, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, what I mean by content creator is the people who create affiliates, influencer are content creators. But what I'm thinking of in this case I'm talking about affiliates, affiliate websites, affiliate blogs and within there. Yes, they might also create content for things like YouTube, instagram, tiktok, facebook, et cetera. Those kind of sit outside of SEO Like TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, are kind of outside of SEO because they don't have a lot to do with Google in this case and what we're talking about. So those sorts of influence who knows how or when they will be affected by this? But for people or companies creating, let's say, blog content, they may very well see a decline in traffic to their website, and Google has already acknowledged this. Google has even the CEO of Google during a talk at some point, said he empathizes with people who have lost traffic and he kind of sort of apologized.

Meredith's husband: 4:01

But we talked about this, remember, in reference to the number of affiliate sites, and I have been frustrated with Google results for a long time because they are just littered with affiliate sites. If you do a search, it's just website after website, website, and there's all affiliates. They're all recommending the same stuff. Now, some of those sites are great Like. Some of them are really good and useful, like I like the website called pack hacker. It's an Pack, but it's I love it. It reviews travel accessories. Oh yeah, that's a nice niche. It's great. I mean, yes, I love it. I love their YouTube channel. Their YouTube channel links into their blog. They do all kinds of really in-depth reviews about bags. Anytime I need any sort of travel accessory, especially a bag Pack P-A-C-K Pack Hacker. Okay, that's an example of an affiliate site that I really like.

Meredith's husband: 4:51

There's also lots of affiliate sites that are just pumping out the bare minimum to try to get SEO traffic and they're only recommending things because they get a commission on them and I think the website is really overcrowded with that type of information AI. One impact that it's again already having is it's going to be sending less traffic to those sites. So those companies, those people, they're going to need to adjust, right, but that's fine with me. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, those people, they're fucked, but they'll find a way. They have their own podcast. Another way that I think this is going to influence SEO and this is not a new trend going to influence SEO and this is not a new trend. This trend has been happening, but I think AI is greatly going to expedite.

Meredith's husband: 5:36

It is the focus on specific keywords. Now, this is kind of a double-edged sword, this topic, because keywords are still important, because people use words. When they go to Google and they do a search, right, they type words into that's their query. Yeah, actually, google does not call them keywords anymore, they call them queries, because they're often longer questions or are spoken into people's phones or whatever. It's no longer the types of searches that we used to do, like putting a string of two words together and if that doesn't get the results we want, putting another word on the end. It's yeah, search has well past that. So the point is that AI is going to understand language a whole lot better and you don't need to worry quite so much about the exact specific keyword you use, because that's a question I get often also especially from small business owners. It's like, well, what words should I use? Right, right, right, right, and that's that is important.

Meredith's husband: 6:33

But remember the example we talked about, I don't know a few episodes ago, if you came across a page and you open up the page and there were headings like best man, rehearsal dinner, groomsmen, first dance. You're going to know that page is about weddings, but I never used the term weddings, right? You know, like Google is the same way. Again, this is not a new trend, but AI is really going to take that to the next level, so you don't need to approach keywords with such a specific focus. Now, I say that's a double edged sword, because you still want to do keyword research, right? But I think the biggest reason to do keyword research is to figure out what are people looking for, what are the topics, what are what do people want to know, so that you can create something to answer those questions, not exactly to put those specific keywords on your pages. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, so you kind of want to get.

Meredith's husband: 7:25

So, let's say, you're doing a blog and you want to figure out how people are searching for a topic and there's a couple of popular ways that people phrase a question, okay, and they're a little different. So you're thinking to yourself, well, which one should I use? Well, which keyword shall I use? Yeah, which phrasing should I use? Exactly? Which phrasing is going to get me more traffic? So AI is going to take this, it's going to understand the question. So, even if you're answering the question, even if you don't use the exact phrasing of either one of those questions, it's going to understand what you're talking about. Wow, so my point? Yeah, what is my point? I don't know what your point is. So my point is that you don't want to put quite so much energy on picking and choosing the exact keywords for your site. You do want to figure out what people are searching for, right? The exact phrasing is probably less important than you think. So here's kind of how I would go about it.

Meredith's husband: 8:26

If you're trying to write a, if you want to optimize your page for children's photography, that's when you want to come up. Let's just say and you sit down and you write all about children's photography. You never actually probably need to use the term children's photography for Google to understand what that page is about. It's going to understand. The reason you want to use the term children's photography mainly is because that's what the person typed in, right? That's what I would think. Boom, here's what you just searched. It's right here, I've got the answer. It's not necessarily because Google needs to see the words children's photography over and over and over on your page, right? So are you saying? So what are you saying?

Meredith's husband: 9:05

What I'm saying is that when you go to put your keywords on your pages, yeah, yeah, you're not doing it for Google, you're doing it for the user. You're doing it for the person who searched for children's photography. You want it to be super obvious in your like, for example, in your title tag, before they click on your site Children's photography. That's where your keyword goes. It's for the user, it's not necessarily for Google. When somebody gets to your page, a great SEO heading for that page would be children's photography. Again, you're telling the user, you're reinforcing the user very, very quickly, that they're in the right place, that this is what they were looking for, right? It's not. You're not doing this for Google. That's a big misconception, right? Is that? People are what do I need to do for Google? Google gets it. Yes, so yeah, and, like I said, this trend has been happening. You don't? We haven't really needed to focus that heavily on the exact keywords for a while, but AI has taken us to a whole another level very quickly, right, because they know the language surrounding it. Yeah, anyway, but I think right now, that's for most small business owners. That's kind of the big Takeaway, the big takeaway in terms of AI. That's how to best prepare your site.

Meredith's husband: 10:13

Definitely don't feel the need to talk about children's photography in your blog, right? If your blog focuses on parents and things to do with your two-year-old, or you know resourceful information for parents, let's say Mm-hmm, and on your website you talk about photography, google already knows what's going on there, right? So your blogs don't have to be. Do not write If you're looking for children's photography. Let me show you an example of a recent shoot of children's photography. Don't write 52 blogs about children's photography.