Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
SEO for people who don't like SEO. I run an SEO agency. My wife Meredith is a family photographer. Our podcast explains how I got Meredith's website to the top of Google and answers questions from photographers about SEO and website marketing.
Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
Update from Google: The Next Step in AI Search (2026)
•A professional photographer and her SEO husband•Episode 196
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Google's developer conference just delivered what may be the most significant shift in SEO in years. Meredith's Husband breaks down what Google announced about AI-powered search, why website traffic will decrease for most owners, and why that can be good news for photographers and small business owners who want more qualified visitors and fewer window shoppers.
Timestamps [0:00] Introduction [0:26] Why Google's announcement matters for SEO [1:23] The end of the 10-link search results page [2:20] What search results will look like instead [2:52] Critics say fewer options hurts consumers [3:30] Why Google was already making choices for you [4:47] How conversion rates will change with AI search [5:45] Is SEO still worth doing if traffic drops [6:10] What will actually change in how you do SEO [6:37] Final thoughts and what is coming next
All right. There was some really big news from Google last week. Technically, I think it was the week before last week, but they had their developer conference. And so this is their big, one of their big annual events, kind of like Apple has their big annual event. Google has they have a couple annual events, one to announce their phones and stuff, just like Apple, and another for developers and people like me. And usually it's pretty boring. But
this year, some really big news came out. And I think it is probably the biggest thing to happen in SEO for a number of years. And it's AI, no surprise, it's AI. But the changes that Google announced are really going to be the next leap forward in terms of how AI is changing search. And I'm going to probably break this down over the next few episodes because there are a few categories of things that were discussed, like how to do SEO for this new AI world. And this is news straight from Google, like how to do it. I'm definitely going to get into that. But also, and I want to cover this first, how search is going to be changing. What exactly is Google going to be rolling out next in terms of their AI search? Now you've already seen or searched with Gemini, I'm sure. You've used their Google's AI mode to search. And it's no surprise that it's that's the direction everything is going. But I think with what Google showed on stage, this is a big step towards
the end of the list of 10 websites that you get with Google. Now, we've known this was coming. In the industry, we've known this was coming. We didn't know how soon. It wouldn't surprise me if that disappeared any day now. Now, I don't think it will totally disappear. I think Google will keep it as an option because some people are obviously very used to searching that way, and that's how they want to search. So that will likely still be an option up in the top nav bar when you go to Google and you do a search that says things like news, images, video, et cetera. So one of the things that's going to change is those options, searching images, news, videos, et cetera, that is very likely all going to be combined into one single search experience. You can put anything into that search box that you want to, an image, an MP3, text, whatever you want. And the result is not going to be a list of 10 different websites. The result is likely going to be different depending on what you're searching for. So literally the
page could return images, it could return videos. It's all going to depend on exactly what you searched for. And already people are saying that, well, some people are saying that this is not good, that this is taking away options from users, because traditionally you do a search, you get, well, you get 10 websites to choose from. And they're saying that now Google is basically just going to give you one or maybe two options. And number one, your search traffic is going to go down. So the number of people are visiting your site are going to decline. I'll cover that in just a second. But the people who are critical of this move
are saying it's in the consumer's best interest to still have those lists of websites. Now, I'll tell you my thoughts on this. Number one, that's what Google has always done. Google gives you a list of 10 different websites out of thousands of options. So Google is already picking for you. They're giving you a list of 10 when there are many, many, many, many more options. So this is not really anything new. And the fact that it's going to be or likely going to be one or a couple options to choose from rather than 10, what this means is that your search is going to get a whole lot more specific. You're going to be able to ask questions of Google just like it were a person, rather than punching in keywords and getting a whole bunch of websites, most of which you are probably not what you're looking for. Like if somebody were to search for family photographers near me, they're going to get a list of a bunch of photographers near them. And then it's their job to go and visit each website and choose one. With this new method of search, what's going to happen more is people are going to do an initial search, get a response, and then refine that search inside Google, doing things like being more specific with what they want, what they're looking for, the styles they like, et cetera. And then Google is going to come back with one or two very close matches. And so that person, rather than visiting 10 different websites and choosing on their own, Google is going to narrow it down further. And that person is probably only going to choose one to two websites to go visit. So this is, like I said, not new. And I think it is going to be more efficient. Google is going to do more of the work. Search and AI are going to do more of the work of helping us narrow down potential options before we go visit random websites. Because if you've ever looked at your website traffic and compared the number of people visiting your website to the number of people who actually contact you, that's your conversion rate. A healthy conversion rate is around 1 to 2%. So that means that 98 to 99% of your traffic are people just shopping. That's people like you. You do the same thing. You and I. When we go out and we visit sites, we look at a bunch of websites and
we use time that we don't actually need to. So Google is going to try to take over some of that time. And so one of the results for you as a website owner is you're going to get fewer people coming to your website. That's just a fact that's probably happening already. Whether or not you've noticed, it's going to continue to happen. That opens a bunch of questions I hear people now asking. Well, then is SEO really important if I'm not going to get any website visitors? Absolutely 100% yes, it is. I will get into that in a future episode as well. That's going to be part of the what you how you want to do SEO for the new AI search model and what parts of traditional SEO are still going to be important and which are less important and any new things that we want to think about. But you are going to get less people coming to your website, but the percentage of those people who contact you is going to be higher. So the people who actually get through and visit your site have already sort of gone through a round of selection with AI. Most people don't search AI and say, give me a list of the top 10 websites about XYZ. Some of them do. Sometimes you do. Sometimes that makes sense. But normally people are going to be more selective and they're going to be getting a more personalized result. So by the time they actually visit a website, they know that they're going to like that photographer's style and they're going to like their price points. And it's going to be a better match than just visiting websites at random. Okay, so that is the big news in SEO right now. And I will give you a small spoiler alert. It's not going to change that much in terms of what you need to do for SEO. I'm going to go over that guide that Google released, which I mentioned earlier, which is how to do SEO in this new world of AI search. And yes, some things have changed, but really not dramatically. In fact, in terms of what you need to do for SEO, I've seen many
changes in the last 20 years that have been bigger than this one, in terms of what you need to do. This is more of a change in terms of how people search. So pretty much all the technical stuff is going to stay the same. So you're going to build on whatever SEO you have. And the change really is just going to come in how you present information on your website. And if you want my honest opinion, I think this is great because it makes creating content easier. You know more specifically what you want to be doing. All right. We will get into this more in upcoming episodes. I hope this helps.
