hello hello welcome everyone happy Wednesday I’m so thrilled to be here with y’all um my name is Shelley Fagan um I am a longtime SEO and very proud to be the director of SEO at Cloud hosting company digital ocean we are actually um siblings to the cloudways team so I was really excited to jump in and work with them on this project um so welcome to the 2024 um web grow Summit we actually have um I believe 10 expert speakers across seven um amazing sessions um four of them are today three tomorrow obviously they all center around the topic of navigating AI um as well as user experience um specifically for growth um in this everchanging landscape that we are in today it is really critical to stay up to dat um especially with all the latest news and changes and honestly have a forum or a platform to be able to converse and and hear the thoughts of different thought leaders and experts in the space and ask your questions so that’s really what we’re doing here um I’m very excited I do W to encourage yall um to to tweet or doy X I don’t even know what they call that um post a social um please use the web growth Summit hashtag um and I also want to thank my sibling colleagues over on cloudways team for putting together this wonderful event they’ve really done a phenomenal job um but I’m really excited to be here today I did want to do a little housekeeping um just to point out some things about um our experience today on the platform itself um to the right of the stage you should actually see a chat bot or chat box not a bot um wouldn’t that be funny chat box um we want to encourage you all to utilize it please chat with one another um you should also see tab um options across the top um first up is our chat then you should see Q&A and polls um probably won’t see polls until we publish them they’ll be published throughout um but keep watch there when I do announce the different polls that’s where you’ll go and vote um but in the Q&A tab um we’d really like to encourage you to post your questions s there you can obviously post them in the chat but sometimes the conversation gets to moving so quick that we could Overlook them so if you want to make sure we do not please post them in the Q&A tab so we make sure oh we make sure that we get them answered for you so very excited today um to bring up some of my colleagues um here on this panel today um the first of which not my colleagues but they’re my co-speaker here on the panel but um we first have Alex Moss coming up I want to welcome you to the stage Alex hi Alex um just a little brief intro Alex kind of blows me away with everything that you’re doing um you are the principal SEO at yast um but you are also the director of firecast which I believe is a digital marketing and web development agency um and then I also saw you co-founded um a WordPress bootstrap theme framework um and then on top of all that do you own a wine bar this is absolutely incredible I just I am in awe let’s just say and I’m not hearing you on my end do we have audio just hang tight we have a few little kinks to work out Alex will be right back on the stage one second hopefully this Works can you hear me yes yay okay we have audio awesome hi Alex hi how you doing I am great I am great welcome welcome here today um we’re excited to have you is there anything we should know about Alex Moss well I did hear everything so when I was replying yes I did co-own a bar yes but my wife really ran it and all I did was go really go in there and uh turn the rout off and on when it needed to so I was like the techie guy and just went in for a quiet pint in the back but uh yeah it was an Italian wine bar and uh yeah we did that what else do you need to know about me I’ve designed a backpack for when you walk you dog don’t ask that’s for another session it’s nice to go back to the basics to physical products right but um but yeah of course I am Prince pesio at yast I’m one of two Caroline Shelby is another who’s going to be on another session um here today as well or tomorrow I’m not sure I think it’s today yeah right yeah amazing amazing we’ve been chatting she’s had she lost power in a house so she’s been uh she’s been all over the place but has now found power back in a house so she’s going to be uh she’s going to be around later toart wisdom thank goodness I know I I saw that the storms went through the Midwest and everyone lost power and I’m like oh my gosh I can’t even imagine having to not have power but knowing you’re speaking and you need power but Carolyn is amazing um her session is going to be great I’ll actually cue that up a little bit at the end so you know what to to come and listen to she’s incredible um I’m excited to have this today we also have we have Gert and it’s melik that is joining us he is coming over hopefully we can get Gert up on stage or gt I gotta get this right was I close awesome awesome I’m excited to have you here as well um for those of you who don’t know Garrett he is the SEO consultant um and founder and CEO of SEO leverage um you guys specialize in a conversion driven SEO Consulting as well as reputation management um G I would love to hear a little bit more about your background absolutely um originally from Austria based in Madrid here in Spain um have been doing my fair share of web development in the past and eventually moved into SEO and now we’re probably going to talk about this across um different platforms as well not only Google SEO anymore these days it’s probably part of the discussion then right we all have to wear many hats these days if you work in search 100% awesome well I did want to go ahead and kick off and I’m going to make sure I do it we have our very first poll I wanted to start it before we launch into questions um first one asking everyone in the audience um on a scale from one to five how worried are you that SEO will make your skill or that AI I’m sorry AI will make your SEO skills obsolete um so I know this is a pressing fear for people I’m going to go ahead and publish that so you should be able to access that poll over on the poll Tab and then make sure to come back to the chat so you can continue to conversate with all of us there awesome thank you thank you we will close a lot of the polls at the end and we’ll go over the results so y’all can hear um but wanted to jump in um with some of our questions the first one being with all of this AI Buzz um obviously if you’ve been an SEO for a really long time it’s always on the brink of dying um but people are truly saying that AI is going to be the deathbed of SEO so what is your take my take would be that the end the death of SEO is the death of the search engine if there’s a search engine there’s someone to optimize it SEO isn’t dead at all it’s very much alive in fact it’s more interesting now than it ever was in my opinion especially with everything that’s happening it makes it even more important um not to abuse the system and not to be mediocre right to really stand out from the crowd so it’s harder but the gains can be uh a lot more beneficial in the long term I agree Garrett um how would you actually see the future of SEO shaping up in this Aid driven world I I agree with Alex it’s much more exciting now than it was in the past um I would say there are so many platforms that actually have a little search box on on top of their page or their app these days every search box essentially triggers a search result and as long as there is information to sort and we need access to that information uh search and especially SEO or some shape and form of it is going to have its place because there’s always going to be a certain methodology we can try to figure out in order to get more visibility to our clients Brands definitely true I couldn’t agree more honestly I think search will well as long as there search that will be SEO like Alex said um honestly it’s always been on us to be on our toes we’re always pivoting and having to change our approach and get better to be quite honest so I just see this as another one of those points um for sure where we gotta we gotta rise to the occasion and figure it out that’s what we do um so speaking of that let’s say our tried and true SEO Tech tactics really aren’t cutting it anymore in this day and age um with AI advancments um what would you say would be some fresh approaches that we could explore or utilize to stay ahead of the game for me I’d ask what was working before that isn’t working now because if it was working before maybe you’re lucky because I always go back to the base what are you there to do what are you there to achieve what are the website Web Master guidelines right um and the ethics of them the base ethics haven’t really changed it’s just the Technology’s changed and the rules around how to deal with the technology is something that we’ve all had to deal with but as seos I’ve always come from a white hat background it’s always interesting to watch black Hatter’s experiment see what’s true see what’s not see what succeeds see what doesn’t but the ones that generally don’t succeed are the ones that are more abusive so to me I’d be like carry on as you were but think more creatively about what you’re doing and always think about the user which is probably something I’ll say more than once uh during this panel I would say yeah the user is definitely not only on Google anymore I think this is probably the new the new thing I would bring to the table we have so many platforms we definitely heavily focus on those platforms in my agency these days because when when you play a little bit with whatever Ted Tool uh is out there TPT or clae or perplexity whatever you want to play with it’s very interesting to find out where does a certain piece of information come from right I asked actually about my own personal brand once and and whether I’m a woodwor or not I actually am but there’s hardly any information out there and then the answer actually went back to a a tweet from two years ago three years ago where I was SEO reviewing on a video at woodworking site and this was the only connection that was actually made back then so what this means for us these days and absolutely we need to focus on the user but the user might be actually making a search on different platforms or the search uh they type in might be coming from different platforms so if a tweet from two three years ago can be the input or the training material for a generative AI answer I think we are definitely up for an exciting next few months and years that’s a really great point I honestly as an SEO not a lot has changed about how I operate and the things that I do on a day-to-day basis like Alex she spoke to that it’s um focusing on the user that’s basically we just now have all these really great resources to help us do it better for sure um so I would say how would you say from a Google search standpoint um we’ve seen a lot of things going on with the algorithm how do you think AI is shaking it up and comes into that and what are some of the big changes that we need to keep our eyes on I don’t think there’s a bigger impact as what’s being maybe perceived I mean wasn’t there 85% of AI overviews about two months ago and now I think I read this week um that it’s gone down from 15% from 84 from last month and now it’s on seven so it’s clearly a test and it’s not being impactful and if it is again in my in my opinion it’s not it’s not going to be for a good few years until it makes a true impact on the mass market and the way people behave if you look at social media and the way people adopted it it it took it took over 10 years for it to become the norm maybe longer for it to become the Norman you know saying tweet as an actual verb in the vocabulary took longer than everyone thought and then we have to think about the technology of AI when everyone’s saying it’s growing up it’s not it’s not even it’s not even walking yet it’s not taking its first steps it’s and people think that it’s a lot older than it is um but there’s a long long way to go um and that’s what we’re going to have to adapt to and listen to but it’s just about listening to what the other technolog is doing and making sure that you’re just not over optimizing for a machine because it will sus you out that’s the if AI can do one thing it’ll be able to sus out what you’re up to if you’re doing something abusive in any way I think one thing that’s definitely shaking up things a little bit these days is that we need to check other engines so you type in something in PD doesn’t know how to answer it searches on Bing who has ever optimized for Bing I definitely didn’t until a few months ago where we optimized for beinging is is too much to say but we definitely check rankings and check where we are and check those those Web Master tools over there um who would have done that before um I would definitely think we we go a little bit broader now we look into different platforms look into how different engines what do they actually know about the brand we look more semantically through um through content as well we look what kind of semantics do we have around a particular link I think it everything got a little bit more technical from our point of view where you really want to dive in and say okay if this is now not a user but a machine analyzing this semantically does the machine understand this does the machine understand which of the concepts on this page are more important than another one so we would ask uh tools like ttpt more often or or pass text through Google NLP engines just to see what actually comes back and in this way really um I think it’s a little bit more technical but I mean Google has been training us for years to focus on user experience focus on search intents focus on specific answers to specific questions maybe with some AI training in mind so I think we’re definitely going to continue that route interesting so Alex you’re in housee and Gert you have clients on the agency side how are you answering their questions when they come to you with their fears about AI overview okay the client our clients we had really when ttpd came out we actually had a few fun weeks I would say from clients completely embracing it increasing their engagement with us to clients pausing for a couple of weeks until we calm down their nerves and say hey Google is not going to go away tomorrow and then they came back and actually we draw we’re drawing a new game plan maybe um clients obviously we have this situation like like Alex says things don’t move as fast as we believe then we’re always on this on the edge essentially of of what’s happening but we have a weird situation we have clients where we still have to explain what retargeting and remarketing is because they have no idea why those Banners are following them after booking a FL a trip to New York and and not even leveraging this as a as a as a marketing channel and you come together with clients that are using WhatsApp and the chatbot that connects with chat TPT so they actually ask for product information and this is a very low text sey uh audience so I think it’s we we probably don’t want to say okay this is going to take too long we just continue what we’re doing I would probably try try to open up a little bit and account for for both types of audiences there might be a part of your audience that’s actually Tech sevy or using latest tech without even knowing it because it’s just so convenient and then you have the really Tex saavy audience they stop using Google or you have a young audience they only my daughter would only search on Google if Tik Tok doesn’t bring up a result so you have this audience as well so in in our agency it really is a little bit different based on the client’s final audience what’s that audience like is this a product we sell b2c to to 16 year olds then definitely one not going to try to rank on Google too hard but if this is a a product like most products still do really really well on Google so we might focus on more traditional kind of SEO yeah from my side uh as well as being in house I’m also an agency owner so also have clients so with my clients they happen to not be well first of all most of my clients aren’t based in the US or don’t need to be targeting the US so there’s no AI overviews out really and they say they’ve been doing it in the UK but I’m in the UK and I’ve not seen it and I’ve got multi like two profiles I’ve got a y profile got my firecast profile and I’ve got a Gmail that I’ve had for 10 years and none of them have adopted any anything to do with AI overviews the other thing is is that none of my clients end user is going to be using AI in a way that they would get the information that my clients would need to be giving to the Searcher in in the first place you know it’s accountants you know no one’s going to chat GPT and saying who’s a good accountant near me right now that’s at the moment still in the traditional sense of Google your 10 links your Discovery in that way so it’s actually not been an issue although you know from a yast point of view I’ve got to be bit on it because there’s people who use the product a lot who are very worried and concerned you’ve got people who use the products who have you know um can I say that Fallen victim they’ve been penalized by the hcu updates in a way that they believe might be subjective against them you know um so it’s quite hard on the other way but again it’s early on and each time I do an SEO update every month with Carolyn we keep on pressing the facts of like calm calm down take a breath it you know it’s not going to take over it’s not taking over your job it’s not going to kill us all in the next four years it’s again not even walking yet we’re figuring out our relationship um from a many different levels you know from Humanity level all the way down to you know us figuring out how it’s going to be adopted in search results um it’s too much to happen in such a short space and I think that as long as we’re all listening and engag with what’s happening which is default for the jobs that we’re in anyway I think we’d actually be all right and we’ll be able to adapt because we’ll be time will be there because it’ll change the behavior too much people searching and I think about my mom my mom’s not going to go off Google for a long long long long time you know no matter how many you know article she reads about how chat gbt is great it’s not actually going to be something she defaults to it’s the defaulting that’s going to take maybe a generation to change and in that time we can figure it out and discuss it in nice panels I think there’s also an I think there’s also an aspect just to just to continue this thought process I believe the big Tech Giants are really pulling the brakes up right now on what would be possible do you think of an Alexa Google Assistant reacting like jtbd does right now I think something like this could change the game and really really fast so my mother-in-law my biggest fan on soci is definitely going to start using using their her Alexa if it’s starts giving better answers is she’s going to try to book meetings through Alexa she’s going to ask for opening hours she’s going to ask for directions and ask for whatever comes to her mind and if this device then can access her photo library she probably also wants to see some pictures so I think there is there is this potential of AI Tech just really loosening the brakes a little bit and see what happens like Google did with AI overviews they then had to pull back I don’t think it’s going to stay on such low percentages for too long when they figure out a few things um but I do see this potential of of the tech devices that we just use all the time uh to really open up and provide a much better use experience which is definitely going to impact how we search yeah I have teenagers and they start their searches on Tik Tok so it’s definitely times are changing that’s for sure um so AI stuff aside we’ve obviously had a lot of B with search and Google’s algorithm updates um what would you say to people um is there anything specific that you have in your playbook in order to roll with these punches that we’ve been thrown think of the user first told you how to say it again it’s the the moment that you start thinking too much about how the search engines going interpret that page or that site you might be overthinking it and I know that even in in house when you have to live inside maybe one website day in day out you are going to start looking at the nitty-gritty detail um but it’s not just about that just think about us and again with the leak stuff and I don’t want to chat too much about the Google leaking um but one of those signals is user interaction and you know and if if any attendee here wants to read more or watch more just read anything by Mike King or ran fishkin about this in the last three months and you’ll get more context and whilst it doesn’t tell you the weight of each of those variables that it’s a variable whether they’re using it today or not is is something they’re not going to tell us or something that we don’t know for sure but the fact that it’s there and the fact that they have and Ran’s now proven it with things is more interesting and the way in which we do behave around websites and mix that with AI is starting to figure out a user and how it does engage I think it would know the difference between the three of us and the way we just browse a website like whether it uses that or not is is not too relevant but if it does use it you’ve got to think about that you know that’s a good point I see a lot of a lot of companies really wait for a Google update drop before they change something and what I’m what I’m what we have found that works really well and might work for others as well we have we have a fortn nightly Rhythm here where every every two weeks we reassess everything on clients websites and we would check out their website we would check out their competitive landscape would look for big shifts we would say look in the next couple of weeks these are the most important items and what we achieved by them from my perspective and as much as I love reading all the big Google algorithm reviews from the well-known seos out there and they appreciate all the work they’re doing we pretty much ignore them because we are very very close to what’s happening in our industry for the particular website for our clients and this paired with a lot of soft conversion tracking we do where we track users behavior on a website are they actually doing what I expect them to do with this article I’m providing this just gives you a lot of um a lot of information it sets you up for a pretty sustainable success so I would really recommend everybody not to worry too much about the big updates but really more about uh like Alex says again really what this user does on your website do they do what you expect them to do or are they just coming here leaving is this even quality traffic to begin with if you’re obsessed about ranking updates and wanting to know when the next one is there’s that’s that’s a red flag already if you’re if you in a perfect world these algorithm updates should have have no consequence to you except neutral or positive if You’ got to think that there’s a risk somewhere there may be a risk somewhere absolutely and I would say even like people who there’s some incredible seos that has a lot of great information but you’re right like being on the outside looking in and utilizing tools doesn’t show the whole picture exactly of what is happening and some of the choices that might just have been made for other reasons that affects traffic but purposely um and they happen to coincide with the big update it’s easy to make the assumption that it was from that so I think there’s a lot of different things that can happen there um I am curious um are there any I I would say you shouldn’t be watching updates but I personally just I follow Danny Sol on Twitter um so at least we get a heads up but I would say you don’t want to wait obviously until after an update rolls out to start scrambling um we should be working on this I love ger that like you reassess every two weeks and that’s really truly what you should be doing um for sure um question I’m going to go ahead and pop up our second poll that we have here and this one actually we just want to know which AI tool um you think has had the biggest impact on search Behavior so that is over on the poll Tab and it is published live right now than thank you um there’s not a lot of votes it has a big impact doesn’t it oh there you go there you go go down now I was like chat GPT got 100% of the votes I mean not surprising I guess um I I would say I I’d be curious to see how this one rolls out to be quite honest um so Les actually we’re talking about Ai and how can we not talk about AI generated content um you know it’s tempting to utilize these tools to generate content I don’t know about you I’m a technical SEO um content was never like the top of my list honestly um so I would say um what are some of the pitfalls that we should look out for um how can we make sure this content is actually good not just a copycat of what’s already out there I’d start by asking what the list of advantages are to doing it especially on scale I mean I feel like I understand if I read chat GPT or AI generated content and I’ve realized over the weekend you know who it sounds like if you use the voice of Russell Brand that’s what chat GPT it’s trying to use a very extensive lexicon to make you impress the reader and it’s like it’s trying too hard like a like an eight-year old’s perception of what an adult would say if they were in Shakespearean that it’s like it’s a weird tone of voice but to me I would say no do not do it however tempting it is how do I say this profession heroin’s tempting but don’t do it you know it takes you down a bad Road and you’ll never be able to get out of it ever again you know it’s uh it’s it’s it’s a shortcut to maybe laziness and that goes towards abuse of the algorithm which will again get you penalized again it’s not a it’s a shortterm gain maybe at most but it’s not a long-term plan would you trust would you trust AI to generate content if you were the one who really really made this brand yourself from the ground up you know if the answer’s no then you shouldn’t be doing it and if the answer’s yes you don’t care enough I probably have a little bit of a different view here with with the with the agency in my point of view the the the times where you start with a blank page and start writing an article or over and for for quite a quite a few reasons from from an SEO perspective just with with AI tools and machine learning tools researching what is ranking what do those things have in common what kind of outline can I pull together really quickly in order to make sure that my article is in line with what’s ranking this has been standard for for us and for many other agencies for quite a few years already and we had we had a lot of AI writing tools that changed names I don’t even remember the last name of of that tool we were using before ttpd came out uh they were crap really to say the least there was no way of using them really productively and we had been trying for two years before ttpt um then ttpd comes out everybody thinks hey I don’t have to do my job anymore and that’s this thing with a on line prompt is just going to do what I what took me four hours to do and I can still report two hours but I’m not going to do this anymore absolutely this content is crap we have been doing a lot of work with prompts we’re still doing a lot of work with prompts a lot of work with feed feing information researched manually researched information into the prompts feeding uh writing examples um brand voice examples into the prompts in order to come up with a a decent enough piece of content where we have an editor rather than a writer go through this um we can apply Frameworks we can apply um even now we have a a proper knowledge extraction extraction process for clients that come on board where we have them essentially talk about their industry for a while and catch this transcribe it extract the bullet points make sure we use the bullet points for Content creation so we’re still refining it it’s not perfect um ideally you have an expert right every single article in Practical terms very often it’s not possible for a small car repair shop and we might be talking about local SEO a little bit later small car repair shop owner is not going to write a couple of Articles each month in order to improve their SEO there always needs to also be a practical approach to this and for us to be honest um bringing in the client and their particular experience in their area or in their industry and making sure this is part of the proms has been working pretty well lately we even running an internal competition where our R&D guy is going against human writers human writers can’t use AI he’s just using AI we’re going to see if this is something we can then report and and show a case study about it uh but we’re definitely always tweaking it I do believe it has been making big Chumps in the last two years both on the gp4 side uh GPT 40 now and also on the on the side of how we use this what kind of context we feed into it and what’s actually coming out afterwards yeah I mean G G does make a good point the two things I would not is that there’s still a lot of human editorial in the process right and you and you’ve had to create a system to make the right prompt so there’s been a lot of work to get to a place where you could do it and even then you can’t let it go on full Automation and make the decisions for you um so that that’s that’s one thing so I do agree if you are going to go on scale there still needs to be humans or a team of humans reading every word and approving it um Leanne did make a good point Google has made it clear that they have no problem with AI content and to answer you I mean maybe I’m a skeptic I believe they have no problem with it because they don’t know how to figure it out and so they’re going back this is to me a bit of P kind of talk and what again maybe I’m skeptic and maybe it is okay to have useful AI generated content but to me what Gate’s saying is more AI assisted production of content which is kind of semi-automatic which is the furthest i’ ever go but I would never again trust it with without human human intervention yeah internally being like the loan SEO I can’t necessarily vet every piece of content that we post and publish and our team of technical writers they’re not seos and so we’ve leveraged it internally um in some ways to help just enhance but I’ve always said you know ask your questions your core question about what your article’s about and um that’ll kind of feed yes maybe there’s talking points that needs to be in your article but what’s not there um and it’s funny because will renolds posted something the other day where he says how he uses it in content and I was like that’s basically it we need to be able to not be producing content today that an AI can spit out but what kind of experience and expertise can we add to this content that AI cannot um and so that’s kind of like we’re leveraging it um we’ve also working on you know how do we get people who are non seos if an SEO can’t be in there to help make recommendations um can we there’s some really great tools that’ll give suggestions for improving like on the optimization standpoint but not necessarily like content side of thing um but I think there’s a place for it I hearing mic feedback which is really odd um is there a long crew um sorry about that I think it’s not mine but um yes anyways I would say um I totally lost my train of thought so I’m gonna um so I would say what do you think is like I would come in we have a lot of like SDS and a small businesses um what would you say were the most critical SEO tools and strategies that you would recommend they leverage to provide a good Roi on their efforts um bonus points of these tools have any Aid driven functionality that you can call out as well I mean I’ll self-promote and say that Yost has AI functionality in title and meta generation so but I won’t I won’t go on about that right only in premium yes is great Y is great for that and it really is and it doesn’t go onto the you can make all it doesn’t optimize the actual body content which is um which is something we don’t want to delve into quite yet at least not until you know they’re walking the technology at least but I’ve also found sem’s AI functionality within their projects really really useful um and again it’s more timesaving it’s like a assistance you know AI assistants are the best thing they’re just this icing on top of all all the cake we have when we’re using all these tools and it’s just making our work more efficient so we can do more have more time and the last thing um in ideation sessions for Creative we have someone who’s like um who’s there asking chat GPT and another couple of others so there’s like one person on one AI platform and there’s about three people and they’re all there like another member of the team like what do you think to this idea that we’ve come up with and then it spits out what it spits out and then it’s used just as another team member but again it doesn’t rule the meeting right it’s just there to be a another another head if it does have a head I think we would probably use it sorry oh no go for it I we would probably uh say Surfer SEO phrase these kinds of tools make our lives easier uh it’s going to date me a little bit but when I started out with SEO I would use handwritten notes of what the top results have in common in order to make sure that our piece of content was actually good um definitely Surfer was a big step for us back then phrase has come a long way as well and other tools obviously so whatever tool you can get your hands on that compares what you have uh with what’s ranking well and shows you the Gap you can still then decide if you want to close it or not um I think it’s definitely coming in handy um I believe most of my team Ms myself included would have some chat bot right now open be it CLA which is really really good and I recommend everybody to check out lately the last version uh or ttpt just have it open have it ready ask it questions I like not only like as an additional team member as you say we we try to have it simulate the client as well so pretend you own a car repair shop in the south of Madrid and you are focused on BMWs what would you think of this article for example kind of thing right it’s just just really try to have fun with it use it as an extra and said look I I wasn’t in this position before let’s see what it comes up with or only or also for Persona definitions what is this per Persona of a BMW owner like what is this based on this persona definition that I now have in my chat um what would this Persona probably be missing in article or what would they want to see first and then just use it as inspiration it’s obviously not 100% true right but it very often changes your train of thought or gives you inspiration and you can pretty much do your brainstorming session you might be doing with your colleagues normally you can very often do it with with jtp or even the jpt app is really really fun in the car when I go and pick up my kids and might do a bra brainstorming session with jtp jet and it’s just interesting what it comes up with more often than not I might send a note to my email afterwards and okay this is really something I want to check out I like that um I’m gonna throw one more pull up because I’m kind of curious since we were talking about using AI to generate content how many of you have used it and publish it on your website so we got a true or false question here have you used it to generate content for your site or not um you mentioned local query so it raises my question um how would you say AI is affecting local search optimization um and if you have any share any strategies that businesses should employ to improve their local presence I would definitely say many local businesses don’t even have the basics right that we have been doing for 20 years so I every single week I get at least one inquiry from a local business that asks to improve their rankings and then you open up their website and it’s hard to find a location like those very very basic things or like really getting some reviews on business profiles so there’s obviously different sizes of of local businesses But ultimately input equals output and I think this is just something we see with AI all the time so whatever goes into it is going to have can have an impact on the output if you want AI to talk about your brand as one of the main with my example one of the main car repair shops in your area you need to connect the dots I always explain this to my clients with this join the dots game my kids play and you connect DOT number two do number three and then suddenly this is a cat this is exactly the way we think about SEO and have been thinking about SE for many many years so if there is one dot this is your brand you need to connect it to your location if you’re a car repair shop you need to related to the car terminology you need to relate it to whatever goes into this to mechanics to maybe other other companies in your area that Google might already know or some authorities and look at it through Google L what kind of connections would I need as Google on a local level in order to figure out that this car repair shop is actually a leading car repair shop in this particular area and this is going to help you both on organic Google search we have been doing for many years but also on AI well maybe if I go further than get the basics sorted let’s assume let’s assume that you’ve got the basics sorted um I would say the next step would be ensure that all your content is is is going to have more transactional intent if it doesn’t happen have it already um I seem to see that more local searches are transactionally based because you want to do something right now or you’re researching to do something very quickly um it’s not like you know you’re buying a couch right if you want to find the couch shop you probably you know why you’re there right so so there’s that and so and the good thing about transactional intent is that it can be mixed with all the other four well the other three intents so um for attendees there’s in information navigational transactional and Commercial so um if you’re you just obviously want people to be in a more transactional sense if transaction is something you can do on the site if not commercial um but yeah it’s it’s interesting that you should you should go for that that mix I would say and then that might have more of an impact on overviews because it’s going to tell you what to do as well as who you are good call so I have one last question and then I’m gonna dive in actually I had more prepared but we have so many great ones in the chat I want to try to get to those as many as possible but I’d be curious on your thoughts of should I be blocking llms from crawling my site um what sites should consider doing this should we not what is the general opinion here especially if we’ve spent years investing in high quality educational content me I don’t see a problem personally with blocking llms from discovering your site because if they don’t discover it they’re never going to present it in any context anywhere um the other thing is is that they might just ignore it like perplexity did anyway and just go for it anyway but let’s say you did have control yeah I get that there are some sites that want to protect the content through trademarks or you know um intellectual property but when I’m thinking of you know this local plumber or or hairdresser or whatever what why would they not want chat GPT to know who they are um and what they do and I don’t see it’s not stealing they’re not physically stealing business from you you know if they want to get someone to cut their hair then why wouldn’t they present that to you why you hiding it from that other it’s like saying do you want to be de-indexed do you want to have no no index you site right because if the AI aren going to say why why have anyone look at it you know um but again skepticism by me yeah I agree I actually got ask a similar question where was somebody asking if they should index their book because you can obviously on chat TPT now get very good book summaries and my answer there was pretty much similar to what I’m saying now it depends on your business model if your business model is selling books and you need the revenue to make money it might actually be hurting you to to see your book index on the other on the other hand it’s so easy to get a pdf version filtered somewhere and AI is going to use whatever content is out there so it might stand up there anyway uh for websites specifically you want to get eyeballs to your site so why would you block potential eyeballs from chpt just to make sure that they actually they yes they they should I I totally agree with everybody saying this they should be paying for using your your material is training material um and you can obviously put it in terms of service like YouTube does that it can’t be scraped we know from the Google leag whatever data is out out there at some point is going to be used talking about Chrome clickstream data and stuff like that um so whatever whatever material is out there is going to be used I believe so just allow it yeah I I kind of in that same same kind of train of thought myself as well um so digging into our questions because we have some really great ones I’m gonna kick off um we have um Kevin here asking um two to three searches on Google results in a no click um what would you say it’s worth spending on SEO if you still can’t get into positions one or two be at three or four wouldn’t that be it I mean it’s if if you say if you look at the whole overview of a ser and um I forgot his name for um Marcus Tober from uh from semrush he did this in a in a talk where he talked about how in fact wouldn’t you say that SEO is more valuable than it ever was because there’s less real estate to fight for in that in in the surf itself especially above the fold if you’re going to go down a bit because AI is taking it over there’s still a position one and yes while some people may get the answer from position zero um if you’re not in position zero you’re nowhere and you may as well try to fight for position one and at least get an answer so there’s brand marketing and exposure and what have you for that and at least try to be in position three and four as well try and cannibalize as much as you can I would also say on top of that it’s not only about um about this one single keyword that you are going for and that’s not driving clicks you you’re going to see if you check how many keywords you actually rank for it might be 3,000 on a particular article and also just coming up in position three and four means still that you’re are one of the top five most relevant websites out of 5 million or 50 million or whatever the result count might be which is not something to be to be underestimated especially as Google is very quick to shift search results and you might suddenly end up as the featured snippet you might suddenly end up as the source for go for an AI overview or you might suddenly chump a few positions as well so I think the value of of SEO um broken down by particular position that you can or can’t achieve is really hard to assess we’ see now with Reddit obviously taking over big spaces we can’t necessarily with a website compete with Reddit but there might be other strategies crossplatform strategies where say hey maybe I can participate actually on this red thread that’s ranking so well and still get brand exposure for me this is these days a big part of SEO we see who is coming up and how can we make sure we connect our brand to this particular result great answers um diving in Gary is asking how much of an impact will metrics like sight speed um a cohesive bug free user experience on search be in the next few years um it’ll still be important I think um I always say don’t try and get to a 100% or 100 score in all of these page speed things like you may actually be sacrificing user experience to obtain a perfect speed and a perfect speed isn’t perfect experience that that that should be that should be the next level down and whilst a technical person who’s extremely Technical and that what they grow especially from a web development or web design I get it I get that Strife for coding Perfection and optimization all all three of us here you know will know that as seos in our background but there’s other things that play just like ranking right you know you may get to this position one two or three but that’s only half the journey isn’t it once they click into your site there’s a whole other challenge um from speed but also ux conversion and all of that stuff that goes that goes along with it so a question yes it will be important maybe less important as the years go on and on and it focuses more on the content within there may you know take pity on a slow on a poorly performing site because it’s that helpful um so yeah that would be my input for it I would there definitely right now s speed use whatever you can do in order to improve the user experience I think is worth doing don’t chase the 100 page speed definitely completely agree U the better AI gets the the fewer times will we have to actually go to the website and find this and depend on the page speed I think this is probably something a few years out we might want to consider um but I would see it through a conversion lens um just because you’re faster you’re not getting more conversion maybe even more but not better conversions sometimes it’s the people that are happy to wait a couple of seconds for your site to load that actually then convert so we try to relate as much information we have and as much data to have to actual conversions and try to attribute this conversion these conversions to actual sales it’s not even the number of conversions is actually the sales that count so very often we get like overly focused on individual metrics and every developer wants to report a great page speed metrix and every site owner wants to have a fast site but ultimately everybody wants to make have this project make more money grow bigger grow the brand bigger and make sure we are present everywhere so if you focus on the on the convers very often a few of those individual criteria don’t seem that important anymore agreed um what services if any Ron was asking um do you think might be better than chat GPT is there any tools or llms that you like working with I thought was to get specifically I mean I saw talk of Javis and Claude but again I’ve not spent too much time producing new content as someone who’s terrible at producing content and being an editor myself with the more techy side so there’s other people who’ve done that but I have heard of both in in a positive light before I see them in the chats today um so maybe check them out and obviously I I use perplexity for research because it is good it is good and it does present data well sites it properly it’s what I feel like I en Vision it’s kind of a bridge between the traditional Sur we know and have known for years is and chat GPT there’s something I don’t like about the chat relationship I want to ask a question and be given structured um research in front of me rather than at most bullet points right um again that’s my personal preference I’m probably mostly using Claude and ttpt these days um but I think it’s more important to make sure that you use the the tool well and you put some time into figuring out how to use it best for different purposes um I’ve been keeping notes of of prompts and prompt templates for for a couple of years now where I just would make sure that whenever I ask for an article I actually fill in all these things I just shared on LinkedIn the other day some some template of the this as well um just to show how you can actually efficiently work with this and then refine those and whether you paste it then into ttpt or CLA you might actually get a good result as long as you as you know how to use it it well and how to provide enough context so just really pick a tool try to get good at it and make it work for actual use cases I think could be an an answer here I wanted to pull this one up um manov I’m probably mispronouncing his name I apologize um but I think we could actually say that this question might actually apply to just all jobs but he specifically asked about how AI might affect user experience or ux jobs um it’s taken over the UI as he said um so what are your thoughts on the impact of AI on our jobs it will be again slower than you think it’s going to be there’ll be assistance for now um but they’re not going to um take over um our jobs there’ll be some elements that might be more restricted on what we’re doing now but you know remember we were all developing websites that had no mobile friendly because not everyone was holding mobile phones in their hands so what was the point in optimizing for it but now we do and it’ll take a long time to do that you know mobile first um mobile first index thing is now only this year it was only in the last few months that it they finally chopped off desktop as a as a consideration you know when did they first talk about it maybe 10 years ago and in we’ve all had mobiles for more than 10 years so you know this is again one of those slow boil things so I wouldn’t consider the ux jobs and the UI jobs gone because as those things deprecate new things new skills will come out that you can excel in um be friends with the AI not not enemies it’s our friend I think awesome I am gonna see I was trying to pull up how do we close our poll results hopefully um I think we got them up here I want to pop them up on the screen um going backwards I think in Reverse um we definitely had a lot of people say um I think I believe um true it just switched on me but for a lot of people 82% actually said that they’ve used AI to create content that they publish to their website um interesting interesting um 62 people voting too on that one as well so that’s a significant percentage um as far as which a tool that you think had the biggest impact on surge obviously Chad GPT um kind of stole the market there um at 82% um I’m surprised Bard wasn’t a little higher percentage wise there um but yes I I can see why um next up interesting like the Monopoly is the opposite of the search Monopoly where Google has more than 82% you know um right well actually if you combine chat GPT and Bing AI as you know one one group I would guess you get in into the that was Google and Google B like they did it but you know personally the name’s not the best they didn’t do the launch the best the P was this was it yeah it was bad when they did that incorrect fact in their only demo video like you had one job just just make sure this one fact is correct maybe used but make sure and they won’t and because of that that’s probably got a lot of distrust which is keeping people sticking with chat GPT the longer this the longer this happens the more chat GPT is going to solidify itself in the above 80% in my opinion something big Google have to do something big big because I think they thought they’d just release Bard and everyone would just like join it like when they open Gmail and Google Plus and you can’t force people on it like you could with that stuff right I definitely I I’ve been doing some really cool stuff with Gemini but more in my tools from a productive standpoint um integration in our Google workspaces um I wouldn’t necessarily say for me personally is had a big impact on search behavior um that would go to Bard for sure um but I would say on our last poll I want to make sure to get to this and then housekeeping because we are a minute away from closing this session our last poll on the scale of one to five um most people are right about three or four I’m nervous um that AI will make our SEO skills obsolete so it’s not surprised only only 10% of the voter said um five they think it’ll make us obsolete soate right obvious moderate severe fear somewhat um I get it change is hard um but I want to take a moment to say next up please join us back in about 15 minutes actually join early 15 minutes we have um Carolyn Shelby she’ll be hosting a live website SEO audit session if you do not know the brilliant Carolyn she’s a principal SEO EO she’s formerly from ESPN and Chicago Tribune um but she’s an expert at Audits and if you want to watch her go please join us um 15 minutes so you got a break but I would love your feedback also in the chat as far as a session um speak Alex Garrett how do you feel like your session this went today hope it went well I mean it’s good to have a agreements and different sides of the scale as well especially on production of content but it’s been uh it’s been lots of fun it’s going to be interesting to watch this maybe the year from now as well and seeing what predictions we thought may come true or not maybe that’s something for next year J’s conference I think that conversation went really really well it’s so interesting when everybody has their experience in different projects and with clients or without clients whatever it is uh you just try to apply what you hear what we might have be hearing and reading the same things but we might apply them very differently than to the project so sharing experience I think is always a good thing I couldn’t agree more thank you guys for joining me um attendees please come back in about 15 minutes for Carolyn thank you so much thank you bye thank you