Meredith's Husband 0:33

All right, welcome to episode 200 and I think four, which is kind of amazing to me because I remember when I started this podcast, I was wondering if I was going to make it to episode number 10. So the fact that we're now over 200, uh, I don't know what that says. Maybe it just means I have a lot of free time. But the question I want to talk about today is kind of a combination of questions, not really questions, but when students join the mentoring program,

Hitting Episode 200 Plus

Meredith's Husband 1:00

one of the first things that we do is we review their websites. We look at their title tags and headings and subheadings and image tags, just to name a few things. And a lot of times when we do that, we we find stuff that needs to be fixed. And what I'm finding happening more and

Website Reviews And Common SEO Fixes

Meredith's Husband 1:17

more is well, I'll see something and I'll say to the person who owns that website that, hey, this is a spam signal. You're sending a message here to Google, and what you're essentially saying is you're stuffing your keywords. So it's something we don't want to do. And what I am hearing the majority of the time now is the response from the student, oh, well, Chat GPT told me to do that, or

AI Advice That Looks Like Spam

Meredith's Husband 1:41

Claude told me to do that, or AI told me to do that. And at first, this was really surprising to me that AI was giving out these instructions how to do these things that were clearly going against Google's guidelines, Google's quality guidelines. But then I realized, as I've mentioned before on this podcast, that you know, these AI tools, OpenAI and Anthropic, they're not creating SEO experts. They are creating incredible tools, yes, but they are essentially blank canvases when it comes to individual topics like SEO. And so those tools, what they learn how to do SEO by looking at what is out there online. They read blogs basically to learn how to do SEO. And you know as well as I do that a lot of the blogs out there explaining how to do things for SEO are garbage. So it leads to what I have named the garbage in, garbage out principle. AI learns how to do AI by reading garbage, and guess what? It spits out. Now, the the bigger problem, I think, is that when AI tells you to do something, if you like me, if you are a human being, when a computer tells you to do something, you believe it. Okay. Computers are not supposed to be wrong. That's one thing that uh I think has been ingrained in our way of thinking for quite a while. The problem is that AI is often wrong. It is very often wrong. But when it spits it out with complete confidence, you are we believe it right away. We never question it. And so I see a lot of people ending up putting literally spam onto their websites because one of the AI models told them to do that. So what is the fix for this? Well, I don't think there is an immediate perfect fix, but if you are doing this, if you are asking AI, whatever model you're using, to help write your, say, title tags, for example, or your headings and subheadings, ask a follow-up question, something along the lines of, hey, is this best practice for SEO? Is this what Google would recommend on how to write title tags or headings or image tags or whatever you're working

The Pushback Question To Ask AI

Meredith's Husband 3:40

on? Now, I can't guarantee that it's going to come back and then give you corrected information, but you know how often, if you're using AI at all, you know how often you get a response and then have a follow-up question or pushback, as AI would probably call it, and then it changes its response. So you want to, you want to push back a little bit, at least enough so that AI will go and search hopefully Google's own recommendations on how to do stuff and what is considered spam, and then come back and give you a better answer. Now, is that always going to work? I don't know. No, it probably will not always work. Will it work sometimes? Yes, hopefully. I don't see how it could possibly hurt, which is why I think it's a good idea. But another follow-up question that what I do tend to get a lot is well, isn't AI getting better? Isn't it learning more? And uh yes and no, AI is getting better, absolutely, but it's like I said earlier, it's not developed as an SEO tool. So we still have the garbage in, garbage out. What is happening is, and I'm doing this too, I'll tell you about that in a second, but what is happening is AI is starting to release what they call connectors. And

Why AI Improves Yet Still Fails

Meredith's Husband 4:46

so your AI account is going to be able to connect to your, for example, your Google Search Console account or your SEMrush account. And that will help get around this garbage in, garbage out because the information you're getting is going to be coming directly from Google or SEMrush or some more reliable tool rather than AI just looking at blogs and figuring out how you should write a title tag. Now, there are really

Connectors To Google And SEMrush

Meredith's Husband 5:12

not many connectors out there yet. I don't think there's probably more than a dozen. And I think of it like you remember when you know, after mobile phones came out, and then they said they're going to release this thing called the App Store. And of course, this was supposed to be this amazing new thing. And so, you know, I was thinking, oh, great, an app store. What's an app? Okay. I had no idea Apple was saying, oh, you can do all these really useful things on your phone. And I was thinking, well, what possibly could you do on a phone that's useful besides call somebody or send a text message, or maybe now take a picture. So cut to now, and like everything is an app. Everybody's got an app. The world without apps would be a, well, actually, it might be nice. Who knows? But connectors, I think, are kind of in that phase now. Like at first we're thinking, well, what would we connect it to? Well, soon it's going to be like the app store. Maybe not soon. I don't know when, but that's what's going to happen. Now you're still going to need a SEMrush account, or you're going to need something to connect your AI to. And this is one thing I'm doing personally. Every day on the way to work, I walk to my office and I pick a topic about SEO and I use WhisperFlow and I talk about that topic as much as I can. What it means, the things to do, the things to not do, the common mistakes, related issues. And each day is a topic like title tags, for example. Or today I did what on headings and subheadings. Now I don't know if I'm going to technically be able to create a connector to connect it to your AI

Building A Better SEO Knowledge Base

Meredith's Husband 6:39

account, but it will be a database of information that will be available. You can ask AI to search through and give you instructions on how to write your title tags or your headings and subheadings, for example. And it won't give you advice based on whatever random blogs are out there. Of course, connectors are also coming. To be honest, I don't really know what that's going to look like. Just I didn't like I didn't know what the App Store was going to look like. And in the meantime, again, I recommend AI gives you some advice, tells you to do something with SEO. I know it's going to say it with 100% confidence. It's going to sound very believable, very factual. You need to give it some pushback. Okay. Somehow ask it to be critical of its own response. Hopefully that will at least get you better information. Might not be perfect, but I don't think there's any way it could make it any worse. And if you're already doing this, if you've used AI to help you do something like write your title tags, or your description tag, so your image tags, so your headings and subheadings, and you're wondering if you got good advice from AI, use the link below. I'm really curious to hear what all types of recommendations AI is making about this right now. All right? I hope this helps.