Quick Q And A Setup

Meredith's Husband 0:24

All right. So today is some QA, and I figured who better to ask help me ask some questions than?

Meredith 0:30

Me. Yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:31

Meredith is back today to help us with some questions. Okay. So we have a few questions that have come in. And we're going to do a few of them. No particular order. Meredith, can you give us the first question, please?

Meredith 0:44

Actually, I can. It is, can AI tools like ChatGPT actually do my SEO for me?

Can Google Detect AI Help

Meredith's Husband 0:53

So that's a good question. I've gotten this one a few times in a few different I've sort of paraphrased them all and put them together. And I certainly understand the appeal of this. However, uh the short answer is no. It is not a Mac like a magic bullet, not a magic button. AI can do some things, and it also there's some things it can't do. For example, AI doesn't know your clients. AI doesn't understand your local market. AI can't tell your story. AI can't make like strategic decisions. What it can do is it can help you do keyword research. It can help you write drafts. It can help you write your meta descriptions, your title tags, organizing data from Google Search Console. It can do a lot of this kind of monotonous task. And in the my mentoring program, that's what we do. We use AI as much as we possibly can. But the distinction is that it can do the execution, not the strategy. So it can't tell you like what you need to do, can help you get it done, but it's not going to be able to like right out of the box say, here's what you need to do. Think of it kind of like hiring a really super smart, fast uh assistant. Okay. Doesn't matter how smart the person is, they're not going to be helpful if they before they understand your business, before they understand what you're doing. So kind of the same approach applies to AI. Tools that say, oh, we're going to do your SEO for you, just one click, that's not going to work. Certainly, though, AI can help you do a lot of the execution. It'll save you a ton of time, but it's you're you're still gonna need, you're gonna need to tell it what to do first.

Meredith 2:30

Aaron Powell And does Google, can Google tell if ChatGPT does do things like that for you?

Meredith's Husband 2:37

Aaron Ross Powell Your SEO stuff? No. Google has done a lot of testing to try to identify AI-generated content, but that's not the same as like having AI do your keyword research or write your title tags, et cetera.

Meredith 2:51

Thank you.

Zero Click Search And Content Value

Meredith's Husband 2:51

Question number two.

Meredith 2:53

If AI search gives people the answer without clicking through to my site, what's the point of having content?

Meredith's Husband 3:00

Aaron Powell That's a great question because we've talked about in the past how uh one thing that AI is doing is it is overall reducing the amount of traffic that's going to people's sites. Because you go to AI, you get so many answers, it summarizes what is on people's websites, and people just end up visiting fewer websites. Okay, so your traffic is going to go down. And people tend to call this uh zero-click search. Okay, so your website might be cited in search engines, it might be, I'm sorry, cited in AI, might be referenced in AI, people might consume your content, but then never actually get to your site. So the question here is, well, well then what's the point? If people are not getting to my site, what's the point? It's a good question. It's a really good question. A few reasons I think you still would want to have your content out there. First, and I think most obviously, you still want to have your brand information out there. Okay, if somebody sees about your brand and they read something that you say, and AI says, oh, Meredith Zinner says this, uh, that's still brand awareness. That's still important to have. The second reason is that conversions are going to be different now. The types of traffic that are going to decline are going to be generally the types of clicks that don't convert anyway. It's going to be, so for example, you might have a blog that gets a whole bunch of traffic, but it doesn't lead to any business directly for you. That's the type of traffic that you will lose. The people who are really looking to hire you and really in your area are probably still going to be the ones who end up on your site. Okay. So your conversion rate is going to be at least the same. It's probably going to go up. So you're going to get not as many clicks through to your blog, and that's okay. But the clicks that do come through, you have a better chance of converting those people to leads. That's reason number two. And third, AI needs to get its answers from somewhere. And if AI is getting its answers from you, that's just a benefit. I don't see how you can think that there's no benefit to there. If you stop creating content, you literally disappear. Okay. That's not, I can't see how that is would be beneficial in any world if you're not out there anymore.

Meredith 5:08

Aaron Powell So it would seem that the more content you put out, the more chance that AI will use you as an example whenever somebody poses a question and you have the answer, the more you blog, the more chances you have of being indexed by AI and then being included in an answer that relates to you.

Meredith's Husband 5:36

Aaron Powell Exactly. Yeah. The more you start to become a trusted authority. And AI doesn't index websites the same way that Google does. And this is where there is a whole lot of overlap. Like if remember, if you're not in Google to begin with, you're not going to be cited in AI. So your blog still needs to be out there, be indexed by Google, et cetera. It basically comes down to being a trustworthy source. And also I'll add, you're going to want to change what you think of in terms of results moving forward. Clicks and website traffic are not going to be the metric that are used as much as they have been in the past. Moving forward, it's going to be more about impressions, even more about impressions, impressions in AI, et cetera. So just the way that you think about success with your website is going to shift a little bit just because the metrics are going to be different.

How To Write For AI Search

Meredith 6:23

Thank you. Question number three. What should I actually be doing differently with my website right now to prepare for AI search?

Meredith's Husband 6:36

Okay. Related to the first two questions. What you want to do now and do moving forward, whenever you write, and it's again for a lot of the content that we're creating in terms of AI, stuff that we want AI to pull, it's going to be from your blog. And on top of that, your blog is really meant to like answer questions. It's meant to be helpful, but at the core of it, you're answer you're asking, no, you're not asking anything. You're answering questions that people have. They may not type in questions, but you're providing information, you're giving answers. For AI specifically, you want the answers to those questions to be right at the top of your pages. You go right into your answer. Traditionally, when you're writing a blog, you can embed them in a story. And what I have always thought of as like good copywriting in the past, not so much great for AI anymore. AI wants the answers right away. And AI is going to pull answers. When AI cites a web page, it's going to just look right for those answers and it's going to pull them right out. Okay. So answers clearly explained and right at the beginning of the page is number one. Number two, include factual information, factual stories with real places, addresses, names, etc. AI will do a lot to fill in the blanks, but AI is not going to make up names and addresses and dates and things like that. So the more factual information you can use to back up your claims, the better. That's number two. Okay. Number three, whenever you can, try to structure your content kind of like an FAQ. A question and an answer. A question and an answer. Pages that have that format do much better in AI results.

Meredith 8:20

How many questions and answers would you recommend per blog?

Meredith's Husband 8:24

There's no magic number. I mean, it could be, you could honestly just be answering one kind of big question, or you could take a question and then often what I would recommend in a blog, especially as you have a big question, you kind of know what the follow-up questions might be. Those would be your subheadings. And with those subheadings and the sections that fall into those subheadings, it's kind of like a Q ⁇ A, like an informal QA format.

Meredith 8:47

Thank you.

Meredith's Husband 8:48

Okay. And then finally, just keep in mind like none of this is totally new. None of this is totally different. This advice has been there. It's always been good for SEO. It's just shifted a little bit more to, I would say, if I could summarize it in a word, you know, clarity, make it clear right from the very beginning.

Meredith 9:05

Aaron Powell It's kind of the same content, different packaging.

Meredith's Husband 9:09

A little, yeah, I want to say it's a little drier. It's a little more like it's a little more like you're writing for a robot to pick it up. Unfortunately. That's kind of my feeling.

Meredith 9:19

Aaron Powell So you're kind of drawing a fine line between robot and humanity.

Meredith's Husband 9:24

Yeah. You're like, you know that a robot is out there reading your content, deciding if they should give it to a person. So you gotta be like, hey, Mr. Robot, here's the answer. Give it to the person. Here's some more information for the person.

Meredith 9:39

A You said Mr. Robot.

Meredith's Husband 9:40

Mr. Robot.

Meredith 9:41

Best show.

Final Takeaways And Send Questions

Meredith's Husband 9:42

Yeah, that was a good show. That's it for today. I hope that helps. If you have questions, use the link below, send them.

Meredith 9:48

And we'll answer them.

Meredith's Husband 9:49

I will try to answer them. Yeah. Hope this helps.