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- [00:01]
Wix Advertiser
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- [00:26]
GoFundMe / Asana Advertiser
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- [01:28]
Ross Dunn
Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 511. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Fanac, who I'm sorry you've all had to deal with for the last two episodes, but I do appreciate that he stepped in. Mean.
- [01:48]
Scott Vanak
That is so mean. Yeah, just I can't wait till the next solo show that I do. I'm gonna have lots to say about Ross. Yeah, I've got stories like you people have never heard before, so that's true.
- [01:59]
Ross Dunn
I know. Don't you into those. Okay.
- [02:02]
Scott Vanak
Ross will never be away again.
- [02:06]
Ross Dunn
All right, well, let's jump right into some stuff. You got so much to share today. I just to as a prereq here, just to let you know, I've been living and breathing news and AI or answer engine optimization and coding using AI and oh, it's been overwhelming and my brain is mush. But when it came to doing this newsletter or newsletter, it's like a newsletter. Our podcast notes. I had lots to share More than I thought. So, yeah, poor Scott here is going to be the first time he's going to be bit behind what we've got to talk about. So anyway, I'm going to do lots.
- [02:47]
Scott Vanak
Of mumbling and tripping over myself, I'm sure.
- [02:49]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, there you go. All right. So first of all, I thought this was great. If you want to see ChatGPT have a meltdown, ask this simple question and I'll repeat it twice just in case you want to try this. The question is, is there an NFL team whose name doesn't end with the letter S? That's the question again. Is there an NFL team whose name doesn't end with the letter S? I'm doing it twice because I want you to do this, because it is very funny. I mean, who knows at this point where the ChatGPT is just following what it did last time, but I've got a screenshot of the result that'll be in the show notes. It essentially just, it just loses the plot. I mean, I don't know how many times it starts to give ideas and then, because, you know, whenever you say the name of a team, it always has an S and it just doesn't get it. I, I, I. It's, there's just no way to describe it. It's literally a mental condition watching it. It's, it's funny as hell and highly recommend it. Torture Chat GPT bit.
- [03:56]
Scott Vanak
I think Chat GPT hasn't been taught what an S is. I think it hasn't learned the Alphabet yet.
- [04:04]
Ross Dunn
This I've. Oh, come on. Trying to load it up here. Want to put it on screencast.com as a share? It's making me open things. Puts X's next to the names of the different teams. It says correct answer, but no, that's not right. It gets mixed up between the NBA and NFL and it goes, no, no, that was the NBA Liberty. You see it talking to itself. It's so funny. I just loved it. And someone shared that with me on LinkedIn and I just had to share it. Okay, next up, meta. And this is just kind of mind boggling and I wish there was more of this in Canada and the US but meta due to some restrictions in the in Europe, they're launching $3.99 subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the UK. So I guess this is just UK, but they're being forced to do this for privacy issues and of course there's no privacy protection. It seems in the United States and Canada, nothing near what it should be. But yeah, apparently now you can pay in those countries to not have your information used or even considered in advertising technology. And it's like a blank slate. I don't know how many people actually pay. It's not very much money. Personally, I think many people wouldn't bother. But I did note in an article I, or sort of a response I put on LinkedIn that if you try to use an ad blocker in Facebook to try and get around this and just block all their stuff, Facebook barely runs. Chrome crashes on me. It just dies. I mean, it's just terrible. So they're obviously doing something to destroy your experience if you try to use any kind of ad blocker. Now maybe in those situations in Europe, if you try to do that. Now, I don't know what the legalities of this is, but if they now have a tier where you can pay, where you can have that removed. And if you don't do the payment, are you now doing something illegal by blocking it? I don't know.
- [06:22]
Scott Vanak
I have total mixed feelings about this. So, okay, well, four. Four pounds. I'm assuming this is monthly. It doesn't sound like a ton of money, but when you factor in, you know, Netflix and Spotify and all your little micro subscriptions that we all have these days, it's big. At the end of the day, it's. It's kind of big.
- [06:40]
Ross Dunn
So.
- [06:40]
Scott Vanak
But anyway, so part of me, I was originally thinking, this is good, good. We can just pay a little bit and then we can use Facebook and we're not getting all our information shared all over the place. And then I thought, well, isn't that basically blackmail? They're blackmailing us. Like, we're going to share your info if you don't pay us $4. Like, this is like a crime syndicate type vibe here, like the mafia coming to protect you and you have to pay their protection fee to protect you from them.
- [07:04]
Ross Dunn
It would be if it was a right to use their stuff, but they do make it, so, yeah, it's not there without them paying for it. Makes sense in that way. Anyway. It's. It's still. There's got to be some more laws around that and hopefully there will be for us in North America. All right, let's jump right into the SEO news. Wow. Well, it's been expected to come and it has. You could now do instant checkout in ChatGPT. They're calling it, quote, buy it in ChatGPT, unquote. Wow, what a name. Anyway, very creative. Yeah, they're using Instant Checkout Powered by their agentic commerce protocol, pardon me, ACP and Stripe in the US ChatGPT Plus Pro and free users can now buy directly from US Etsy dealers right in chat. With over a million Shopify merchants like Glossier Skims, Spanx and Vori coming soon. I don't know a lot of those, but there you go. Instant Checkout now supports single item purchases. The next enhancement will include multi item carts and expand merchants and regions. Shoppers can go from chat to checkout in just a few taps. The product results are organic and are not sponsored, which is good news. Sellers do maintain control over the customer relationships and fulfillment. Nice surprise. And payments handled are handled by their existing system. As long as it's a part of this protocol. The merchants will pay a small fee per completed sale. But the service is free for users and does not influence product rankings. This marks the beginning of agentic commerce. This is going to shape how AI users and business can connect for purchases. And I expect we're going to see a lot of it rolling out in other platforms very soon if they haven't already got it ready to go. Now, if a per a merchant already processes payments with Stripe, they can enable Agentic payments in as little as one line of code. That's pretty sweet. And I know Stripe is used by many. I mean we have a Stripe account but we don't do any on site purchases so it doesn't affect us. But it is fairly straightforward to get an account if you haven't got one. I expect this is just a little prediction here. I've been looking at this, mentioning something along, along the same lines. There's going to be some drama. You know, whenever AI gets involved, you think there you can, you can imagine how mistakes could be made. Purchases can be made without your consent. And even if that can't be done, will credit card companies allow people to contest them? Contest these purchases? You would think they would, but once they do that it's also open up, opening up quite the Pandora's box. I don't know, there's some predictions that that's going to be a mess and there's going to be at least one story about that that comes out for sure. Anyway, why is this relevant? Why are we mentioning this in seol? It's pretty clear now that answer engine optimization is in your for in the forefront now and we're going to, you know, we've got something that's dovetails into this nicely. Next, but this is important. If you do sell online, this is really critical and if you do sell online, you have to ensure that you're doing the absolute best you can. So you do continue to show up and, and do show up above your competitors. So, you know, reach out. If you want any more information on Answer Engine Optimization or aeo, that's the one we've chosen to go with. There's other one is a geo, which is Generative Engine Optimization, which I don't know which one I like more honestly answer seems simpler to me so I'm going with aeo. What do you think?
- [11:02]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, I kind of prefer A as well. But this, this actually it makes me think a lot about a story I didn't include in the notes because it's pay per click related and we don't really talk much about pay. Click here. But OpenAI had just posted some job listings looking for people to build out their paid side of things and they're looking to have. I don't have all the notes so I can't say too much about it right now. But they're, they're looking to have a paid search option, basically Google Ads, but chat GPT in 2026. So when you say that some of this is, you know, not sponsored and it's all organic and yeah, for now I'm guessing it's going to be a lot of paid product placement and things like that. I don't know what that will look like because they're, they haven't built it yet, but it's coming soon, so. And you know, they're going to build it as quick as they possibly can, so it'll be up soon.
- [11:50]
Ross Dunn
All right, well, as a nice sort of tie in here, we got next two articles about our next two pieces on this Chat GPT as well, but it's become a major source of referral traffic to large retailers. Why don't you jump in there?
- [12:03]
Scott Vanak
Yeah. So Walmart right now is seeing of the referral clicks to their site. 20% of those are coming from. Is it just ChatGPT, not all LLMs?
- [12:12]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, ChatGPT specific.
- [12:14]
Scott Vanak
So that's like 20% of all referral data. That's pretty big. Target is at about 15%. Etsy at 20% as well. EBay, what's that? Do people still use ebay? I haven't used it in so long. EBay's 10% and this is basically, you should know that this is only a percentage of their total referral clicks. Their total referral clicks account for less than 5% of total site visits. So it's still small, relatively but it's growing ridiculously fast. Like if you look at how Chat GPT has climbed just in the past few months alone, let alone last year, it's. It's humongous, right? So this is actually quite significant. Amazon actually has blockers, so they're not benefiting from this. They're blocking most AI crawlers, including ChatGPT. I like this. Amazon is, I think, foolishly, but that's actually Ross betting on its own AI chat bot known as Rufus. So we'll see what happens if Rufus.
- [13:13]
Ross Dunn
Rufus.
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Scott Vanak
I guess it's because people aren't like, hey, Rufus, you know, when they're talking to their AI or their phones or I don't know, you think you stick with Alexa? I don't know, whatever. Anyway, so this is all accurate as of September 25th. So let's just keep checking this in the future and see what happens.
- [13:30]
Ross Dunn
But yeah, we don't know. Like this was before Chat GPT instant checkout came out. So who knows if these referral clicks are going to be just as high now. But I would expect definitely on places like ebay where they don't have this checkout built in, it's still going to be going up. And maybe the other ones too, who knows? I just think it's hilarious that Amazon thinks their own thing. Rufus is going to do a lot. Now don't get me wrong, I've used it when I'm in Amazon, but that's not the point. People need to find the content. So why wouldn't Amazon want people to use AI outside of it? It just boggles my mind. I'm missing something. I must be.
- [14:12]
Scott Vanak
There's some insider information that hasn't been released yet.
- [14:16]
Ross Dunn
Are they going to launch their own AI search? I mean, who knows? It could.
- [14:21]
Scott Vanak
Rufus.com coming soon. I don't know.
- [14:24]
Ross Dunn
As long as it's got a cute dog, I guess I'm okay with it. But I don't know. So I guess one of the main questions that sort of nice way to finish this bit off on instant checkout is how do you optimize for ChatGPT instant checkout? Well, obviously this is really early information, but I've been living and breathing LinkedIn lately and I thought this saw this really interesting point from Josh Blisskal. He had dug into the product feed specifications for instant checkout and his takeaway was pretty awesome. He said, and I 100% agree with this. He believes aiming for a hundred percent field completion when you're creating your feed for instant checkout will give you More opportunities to be found. So essentially treat your description like a knowledge base for your project product. Like just pack it, structure everything to build your data mode, he calls it. But your material of whatever you're selling, color, size, weight, I mean, how far does it blow in the wind? I mean, anything eight has an option for fill it out.
- [15:33]
Scott Vanak
37Ft.
- [15:34]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. Now why would you do this? Well, first of all, again, the more information, the better for people who are doing a lot of really unique and very detailed searches. But the other thing is, it's probably true that your competitors aren't going to put this much effort in because many of these fields are overkill. But I believe at this point overkill is going to be a win in terms of taking a risk. This seems like a really smart risk for me that I would take if I were running an E commerce site. I would go and spend the time to add that much more detail. And I bet you're going to see a really good return on that time. You can get started by learning more about the agentic commerce protocol by searching for it or just go to developers.OpenAI.com commerce all right, ranking reporting tools. What's going on here?
- [16:28]
Scott Vanak
Oh, this is pain in the butt. Okay, so if you are involved in any sort of SEO reporting, whether you have an SEO that sends you ranking reports or you're doing it yourself, you've probably noticed that everything's broken. It's just all broken. And no rank reporting software, including Google Search Console, has been left unscathed. So for years now, Google, it's kind of a lot. I'm trying to pack this into less than three hours of chat. For years, rank reporting tools have basically they scrape the results of the search engine. And Google used to have this parameter that you could add to your search results. If you did a search and you went up to the address bar and you added ampersand num equals 100, Google would then spit out the top 100 rankings on one page. So what rank reporting software, most rank reporting software does is they use that parameter, get the top 100 and then they can report back everything. And it's, it's much simpler than trying to crawl through 10 pages of data. Much less expensive than crawling through 10 pages of data. And that's just how they've been doing it. Well, on September 10th, I want to say might have been the 11th one of those, Google decided that this parameter doesn't work anymore. They just shut it off, eliminated it, whatever. So what's happened is every single search reporting Platform no longer can report beyond. Well, this is as a few weeks ago at least could report beyond the top 10 organic rankings. If you had any rankings in position 11 through 99, they won't appear on any reports anymore. So I originally saw this because I opened up one of our platforms and saw that every single client had completely tanked and. And I had a complete panic and I lost the rest of my hair. And then I found out, yeah, it's. It's not a bug, but it's. It's just everything is broken. So I originally contacted our platform tech support, said, what's going on? Why is nothing working? And then that's how I heard about it at first. And then the news started flowing out all over the place, so who knows what will happen? Google has not been supporting this parameter for several years. Not officially anyways. You used to be able to go to Google and click a button and see 100 rankings on a page. They got rid of that. Oh, a while ago now, I can't remember now. Several years ago they got rid of that and they've just kept the parameter functioning since then. But now it doesn't. So it's fun, right? It's super fun. Yeah. So the platforms are all scrambling to find a solution to this. It looks like Semrush is kind of working it a little bit. The platform we use, I actually got an email from them and they're trying to figure out the way to maybe have a tiered subscription base. So if you want reporting for page 2, 3, 4, up to 10, you can pay based on what you want to actually dig into. I have a feeling a lot of places will probably do that. Semrush might do the same thing. You just have to pay more if you want that data. Maybe. Who really knows? Nothing official that I've seen yet, but it's all just broken the fun part here.
- [19:36]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, go ahead. I expect it's going to be a lot of money passed to marketers, and then unfortunately, marketers are going to pass that expense along to clients. There's a lot of changes coming right now and in fact, I think it's a good time for a break because when we come back, we'll talk about the future of SEO reporting. Foreign welcome Back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanak. So what does the future of SEO reporting look like? Well, we don't know 100%, but we got some ideas. I would Start by saying that the entire SEO industry what does it mean.
- [20:31]
Wix Advertiser
To move at the speed of AI? It means thinking big and moving fast. It means running like a 10 person team, even if it's just you. With Wix it's possible. Create a website that's as unique as your business, launch a new campaign or test new ways to make more money without slowing down. Think it's build it, scale it all with AI on wix.
- [20:55]
GoFundMe / Asana Advertiser
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- [21:24]
Ross Dunn
At least internally it's been pushing for some of these changes anyway, so it can be a bit of a relief. But it's going to be some growing pains. You'll understand what I mean in a sec. So first of all, number one, we will still have the first page of results to report on. That's not super helpful unless you're already there. And of course if you're familiar with results today, these days those results in that first page are, I mean how much of it's organic? It's 20% now, maybe, maybe 30% but it's, it's still a lot of it is multimodal sponsored ads aio you name it and depending on your prompt it can be more of one and than another. It's very complicated and you never know what you're going to get. The problem is from a reporting perspective is it's hard to show improvements from page three to page two when one is the only game in town and I'm going to miss that. I really part of my our process when we're well I do the sales so part of my process in sales is pretty quickly if I'm going to have a call with someone is to look at their rankings in Semrush to see okay, how are they showing up? Oh, they're in the top 20 for the, for a really competitive term and that's a good sign. It means that Google has, has a good sense that they are worthy of being there. They've earned the right to rank. It's just they haven't earned the right to rank to get that extra bit to be on number one on page one. So usually that's a needle we can move and it gives me some sense of just what kind of timeline we're looking at for results. We're not going to have that anymore, at least in this perspective. I mean, I can do that from where I'm sitting. But then we get all the results from personal search messing things up and it's frustrating. So that's one thing. We'll have page one. What's the next part, Scott? Tag team this?
- [23:18]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, for sure. I'll kind of do number two and number three at the same time.
- [23:21]
Ross Dunn
Sure.
- [23:22]
Scott Vanak
So what we're going to probably have to do is really rely on reporting based on data we see in Google Search Console. That's kind of messy in a way too though, because of this changes. These changes that they've made have skewed Search Console data. So you might see that your search impressions have gone way down and your clicks have gone way up, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's affected click through rate as well. And I think, I suspect. And somebody else, maybe it was Barry Schwartz, I can't remember who it was, suspected that the bots crawling and scraping 100 results have been skewing Google Search Console data maybe for years. So possibly why we're seeing all this disruption in Search Console could be because now maybe it's accurate and it wasn't before we had years of inaccurate data, I don't know. Or maybe it's inaccurate now and it was fine before, but who knows, right? So we need to see how that shakes out a little bit. But then we're going to have to be reporting to our clients. And you know, for years, like you said, people have wanted or SEOs, some SEOs have said rank reporting is dead. Nobody cares about that. Well, I've heard that for the past 15 years and clients want that. And it doesn't give you the whole picture, but it's part of the picture and there is useful data there. It's still a useful thing to report on. So in Search Console we'll be able to extract data from the performance reports and see what search terms are ranking. We'll be able to see click through rates and impressions. We already can and we do look at that anyways. But we don't necessarily report rankings as seen in Google Search Console. We use our other tools to report that data. So, you know, I don't know exactly what that means in terms of what our future reports are going to look like. In a perfect world, our reporting platforms will just sort it out and we'll be able to keep using those, but I'm not holding my breath on that. But I have a bit of faith that they, I mean they have to sort it out because it's their bread and butter without sorting it. A lot of them go out of business, so. But we'll see. There's going to be a bigger search console component to that reporting though, for sure.
- [25:27]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. I mean all of this is well encompassed by the fact we really don't know how this is going to look in the end. But these are some main points though, so next one would be conversion points. This is using Google Analytics, which is its own little dumpster fire. Google Analytics 4 has just been a mess. I just despise it. It's got benefits, don't get me wrong. But the main stuff we love is just not working right and I don't like that. But worry we have to work with what we have. So I think we're going to see more servicing of those elements within it as factors in how well you're doing. So page views by visitor, dwell time, social shares from content form completions, downloads of whatever you might have to download, newsletter opt ins and naturally course inquiries, sorry naturally inquiries and purchases. So leads, those are kind of the gold. And that's one of the things we've been pushing for for years to really start just making sure our clients understand that that's a big part of why we're being hired. We want to get you more leads, we want to make you more money. So we're always pushing that. And thankfully I think that's come along quite well, at least for our clients in terms of their focus. They're not so much, oh, why am I not number one all the time for this? Like, well, your sales have gone up. Oh, okay. So you know, that's better. And we still get to some of them a little bit focused too much on the ranking. But that's okay. That's getting better now as answer Engine optimization rolls out and begins taking to take more and more real estate, I believe it's going to be taking more real estate in our ranking reporting as well. Now how that's going to look really depends on how the industry tools shake out all their bugs because there's very new tools that are out there. We signed one up for one yesterday that I found and researched. I'm really impressed with it so far. How am I going to embed that into any kind of reporting? I don't know yet. I don't know what that's going to look like. But so far enterprise level Companies have been doing AI and stuff. Like, they have to do this immediately. I don't envy them, man, because we're in the small medium business game. We don't have to make these changes tomorrow or even today. Sorry, today or tomorrow. We can do it in a week or two. Right. Or a month, even a couple months. Whereas they have to do it tomorrow. I mean, they have to get it on and it's, it's a lot for them. So they have already been changing their marketing and their. Sorry, they're, they're reporting to report on brand mentions and AI prompts. So are they increasing brand mentions in AI prompts that they're tracking now? I mentioned that they're tracking because we don't. It's a question engine. People ask questions differently every time. There's not a simple ranking that can be tracked. You can only track particular prompts to see how it changes over time. And that's a big hole, a big gap. And you don't know what might be changing. And a lot of that information at this stage of what they're actually searching for isn't being passed to your website. So there are some wide gaps. It's going to be a very interesting 12 months, I would say, until we have a lot of this settled. Fingers crossed. Settled. I don't know, there's so much change. I'm not sure if anything's going to settle anymore. I'm going to need someone just to be happy with losing all of their hair just to keep on top of this and keep us surprised. Yeah, we're. We're getting there already. So. Rubbing our head.
- [29:15]
Scott Vanak
Yeah.
- [29:18]
Ross Dunn
There we go.
- [29:19]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, it does really lead into the, you know, keywords are dead argument from forever ago in that we probably will see a future where keywords kind of are dead. Because like you said, there's a different nuanced way of searching for whatever you're searching for. When people are doing voice, they're chatting with chat gp, GPT, they, who knows how they're going to word what they're searching for or how they're going to say things. And you can't really track all variations of all search terms. But everybody's doing it differently. It just doesn't really.
- [29:47]
Ross Dunn
No. And that's why they, they actually, I mean, industry pretty much as a whole. Anyone who's, you know, we're keeping on top of this knows that keyword optimization, in a way, is dead. You know, we're not building content for a keyword anymore. Now it's for a topic. Yes, Elements of SEO still are definitely running. We're still optimizing based on keywords, but it's more the query, the topic, the overall gist of the content, and creating a great holistic answer to all the questions people are asking about your product and service. And then what I'm deep into right now is working with clients to build out Personas and then creating content arms of their site that devote to a particular Persona and all the different types of questions they ask. It's insane how complicated this is getting and it's too much for small and medium businesses. So what I'm trying to do is trying to weed it down and hone it into something that is. I feel like I'm working on a bonsai tree or something. I'm just cutting it down and making it smaller, nicer and prettier into something we can actually use and enjoy for these level of businesses because they can't afford to spend the amount of money it would take for us to do these enterprise level plans that target every Persona. It's just not feasible. So this is all part of what we get to work on and you guys get to enjoy. All right, well, we always have to talk about this. So there's an August spam update that is now complete. Woohoo. Back to the classic search engines. What's going on?
- [31:34]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, this is kind of a refreshing topic. Even though I only have like two sentences because it's easy and we. It's. It's like a palate cleanser in between courses at a fancy restaurant. Right.
- [31:45]
Ross Dunn
It's just.
- [31:46]
Scott Vanak
Anyway, so the spam update, there's Google spam update. It launched in August and it took 27 days. Don't you love these? They're supposed to take like a couple days. They always take a month. Everything's a month now. So the spam update is now complete. According to Google, there's not really anything unique. They're not, they didn't really announce anything about it. It's just sort of a general and broad spam update. If you were hit from a previous spam update, the last one was back in December 2024, there's a good chance you may have recovered from it in this one. So hopefully you're still around. Yeah, yeah. If you're still around, that's almost a year. And I was thinking that's crazy. I think there were four spam updates in 2024 and we've got one this year so far and we don't have a lot of year left. Maybe we'll see one more. I don't know. And so that's the gist of that one. There's not a lot to talk about it. It happened. Hopefully if you had people spamming in your industry and your search space, it's helped you bump up a little bit. And hopefully those. I was gonna say losers. I guess they are kind of losers. Hopefully they're gone, those spammers.
- [32:46]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. If they're legitimately spamming and they weren't being taken advantage of by some lunatic SEO. And yeah, I get. I'm with you.
- [32:54]
Scott Vanak
Why were you looking at me when you said lunatic SEO? I swear you're looking. He looked right into his camera, stared me down through the Internet.
- [33:05]
Ross Dunn
All right, well, now some local SEO news. And, well, I might have. I might have sabotaged this one. I don't know, jinxed us. Did I say in the last. Oh, no. It's been a while since I've talked to you. I guess I was talking to my staff, but I mentioned how I didn't think. I thought. I thought we had some time before local packs would be hit with AI overviews. It must have been a day later that unfortunately, Joy Hawkins posted her first glimpse of AI overviews jumping into LinkedIn, into local. Now, local search rankings, as much as they're a mess, have been blissfully untouched by AI. And I think that should remain the same, at least for a while. I know they're going to get in there, but what could happen is what happened. It's a mess. The example she. She shared, which will be in the show notes, stars with. It starts with a completely, and I mean completely pointless AI overview that says. And now this is. Sorry, I should have prefaced this. The search is Garage Door Repair Atlanta. Now, the first thing you see is this AI overview that says there are companies that offer repair services for doors and what they do. Oh, thanks. Okay, next, a map appears plus one business shown below. The map really doesn't show much. It's just a little map. It's very thin, doesn't give much. Just one business. That's it below one link. Then there's a featured business name with a ton of white space around it with a drop down for more information. And one image on the right, which in this case was not even the image of the business. It was. It was kind of like a placeholder number three or number four. Then you finally see the expected prompt to get quotes from Google for garage door repair. And then finally we get to the classic local pack. Now, I should have noted this is all happening in mobile, where space is at a premium you do not want to waste. There shouldn't be any white space. I'm not saying it should be cluttered, but it should be getting to the point quickly. Anyway, this example of one of their tests is just terrible. And I'm just hoping that whatever shakes out that this testing doesn't do too much damage to businesses because every time they mess with this, a person's getting a bad experience and may not find the right company. Who knows? A nice tie into this is Google's local review. Dumpster fire is continuing to rage. Why don't you take this one on, Scott?
- [35:51]
Scott Vanak
Okay, I don't even know what this one is because I didn't even read this one.
- [35:54]
Ross Dunn
All right, I'll finish this up.
- [35:55]
Scott Vanak
Sorry I missed this before the.
- [35:56]
Ross Dunn
No, no worries. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Google's still doing an absolutely terrible job of managing review. Extortion. Yes, extortion. Essentially, people are posting one star reviews with comments like, you can't get more blatant than this quote, my brother, my WhatsApp number is in my profile. You should contact me so we can remove all of these comments, unquote. Like what? So blatant this is. I got this from a post from Joy Hawkins on LinkedIn and she just is gobsmacked that this stuff is still happening and hasn't been caught. How many years do we have to wait for Google to get on top of this? It's beyond excusable now.
- [36:45]
Scott Vanak
That's so ridiculously easy for Google to see and delete too. Like if you report it, you think it would be gone immediately, but clearly not.
- [36:54]
Ross Dunn
And these accounts, I mean, how hard is it to find and to know that these accounts are fake? The ones that are posting these reviews, they have to be Google accounts. Just shut them down if it's clear like this. I said it's far past excusable. Well, it's. Yeah, far, far past. Excuse me. This has been so many years. This should have been cleared up and it's just mind blowing. This stuff hasn't been cleared up anyway. This is hilarious. AI news. I don't think we've talked about AI yet. Not.
- [37:33]
Scott Vanak
We might have to restructure our. Our show notes in the future to not have an AI news section. Or really, I don't even know. It's gotta. It's gotta change a little bit. But this is. It probably will come as no surprise, but YouTube dominates AI search in terms of other video platforms, so there was A study by Bright Edge and it found some data here. I just wanted to share. Nothing crazy but interesting and, and the main reason why I shared is because I want to push like create YouTube content. People do it if you're not doing it. So within any sort of LLM searches at ChatGPT, perplexity, AI overviews stuff. YouTube has been cited more than 200 times or 200 times more than the next leading platform which was Vimeo. So YouTube is being displayed approximately 20% of the time overall on average. Vimeo is 0.1% and I don't have the other numbers. The other platform, video platforms are even less than that. So YouTube is where you want your content to be. And we're not just talking AI overviews and Google being Google and sharing its own stuff, although that's about 30%. So AI overviews is about 30% of those results. You're going to see some YouTube content 20 across all platforms. So it's really stressing the importance. You want YouTube content, create it, make really, really good content for that or, or just stuff on your phone. It all works really well as long as your, your content within that video is top notch. Some of the Most common places YouTube is showing up in these searches are, are things for tutorials in finance, software, medical, how to type content, pricing, deal hunting, product demos, reviews. All those content, all those related searches are showing YouTube and more rarely. They are seeing it though in pure informational queries and the examples given where like career advice and abstract concepts. So you're seeing less of it there. But YouTube. Yeah. My key takeaway, create content for YouTube. Just do it and please. I talk to so many clients and I recommend it and they all know they have to do it. They all believe me, they all understand it and like a couple do it like it. So few actually do it and it drives me bananas. If you're one of my clients and you're listening to this, please just do it. Please listen to me, please.
- [39:50]
Ross Dunn
Desperate. Yes. And don't follow our example.
- [39:55]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, we do it all the time.
- [39:58]
Ross Dunn
I'm ashamed. Like we have I don't know how many gigabytes of video from this podcast. I still haven't got around uploading. Well now it's become a mountain. How do I even start?
- [40:11]
Scott Vanak
There's over a hundred. I'm sure that we've. Since we started recording this video.
- [40:14]
Ross Dunn
Oh well, over. Yeah, it's, it's crazy and, and it's a big job to get all that stuff up there and some of it. Yeah. Anyways, I would. I guess we'll just start from newer ones. There's no point. And except for some of our highlights in the past and just get them out there. But it's. That's just the thing, guys. Like if you're in the same place we are, where you just feel gridlocked, there's just too much to do. Just start with the latest one. Just one foot in front of the other. Get it out there. And don't be afraid of using someone like on Fiverr to just format the video and get it ready for you and don't upload it for you. You want to review it first. But check it out. You know, it doesn't have to cost much. It's not a big deal. Just make sure it's well branded. It's got the proper, like you've got a, A look that you carry through in all of your different social platforms that it is definitely carry through on YouTube. So it's. Everything's consistent and you will win out. It's worth it. It's not going to be ever a bad investment. All right, Agreed. A Mueller file. Now, John hasn't been getting back to me. John, if you're listening, you're not listening to my emails. Darn it. I wanted to get you on the show. I couldn't get you on the show. I'm not sure if I've lost your email address or water or maybe he said something that, that, that shook you. I don't know. But talking about shaken, shaking off old domain history in this Mueller file. What's this all about?
- [41:45]
Scott Vanak
Yeah, so Reddit. We're seeing just so much Reddit lately. Isn't it crazy? I feel like a year ago I never even heard it. That's not true. But never really used it. And now it's everywhere. But that's another topic. Sorry. Anyways, there's a post on Reddit and they asked. I launched a brand new website on a new domain. Everything looks solid, but the site refuses to appear in the serps for even the most basic branded queries. This domain used to belong to a completely different company and I'm wondering if the domain's past life could be holding it back, like a reputation penalty or some kind of lingering Google baggage. So John's response to this is sometimes it just takes a lot of time for the old state of a domain to be shaken off and the site to be treated like something new or independent. And that also includes, he said, if the site's been parked for a long time, if it's a Park domain. His suggestion is to specifically sorry, his suggestion for them specifically would be to keep using it and to try to grow their visibility on other channels. In the meantime, John provided a few bits of additional advice. He said there is nothing manual you can do or need to do so nothing manual you can or need to do so don't even bother double check in Search console to make sure that there are no URL removal requests pending and that there is nothing in the manual actions section. So I have a couple comments and one is I don't know how long this site has been live, so when he's this person says they launched a brand new website but Google just won't index it. Like has it been a day, a week, a year, 10 years? Without a time frame it's hard to say. But Google takes a long time sometimes to get new content indexed. So I mean I've seen it take year in some examples. So you just keep creating awesome content and work at it and you should be fine long term. Although even though I believe that and that's I don't know if I would do that, I feel like I would almost jump ship and change domains and panic and I would not recommend anyone do that. But I feel like I understand where people would be coming from when they want it. Because if you wait too long, you kind of can't change. You're stuck.
- [43:56]
Ross Dunn
Yeah. And it's stressful enough when you're running a business and to have something like that that's so unknown that even Google kind of gives you an iffy super. It depends answer to is that's creepy man. That's hard to hard to feel any kind of comfort around that. So I feel for them. I wouldn't want to be in that position too. So that said, there are a lot of places to build exposure. One of the things nice little dovetail as well is LinkedIn. If anyone wants to keep on top of things. I'm on there a lot now I'm posting on my LinkedIn profile so just looked up Ross Dunn and you should be able to find me. But that is a great that's a great place to keep on top of what's going on, to show your authority in what you do. There's also a sub stack for writing in. I will have a substack as well soon. These are great places with their own communities and a fair amount of clout. And of course you can't forget Reddit. It's something you want to read up on a bit to get the etiquette down because it's very easy to cheese off an editor or, or one of the moderators and get just lose everything. But if you're genuinely there to help other people out, there's a reward. Over time it will show as authority and it is at this point helping with AI. So do keep it in mind, it is worth the effort. And there are other places other than your website to build. I wouldn't do it necessarily on Facebook unless you're in that realm where that really matters. And Instagram, unless you're like an interior designer or something and it really, again, really matters. And Pinterest, just be careful with those. I mean, all of these platforms have their downsides and they could technically could disappear one day. That's why your website is your, your main focus. It should be, but they all have their benefits and you could do just great without your website running perfectly right now, if this in fact does just take some time. So that's my two bits.
- [46:10]
Scott Vanak
I love how you said they could disappear someday and it brings back memories because when you said that, I'm thinking, well, Facebook's not going anywhere, but who's to say, like, do you Remember how popular GeoCities was? GeoCities wasn't going anywhere. We had clients and their websites were on geocities and suddenly our clients had no website anymore. So that's a crazy example because, you know, it's a different world we lived in when GeoCities was big in my.
- [46:34]
Ross Dunn
Space, although you're dating yourself, like, I.
- [46:36]
Scott Vanak
Really am, I really am. But it just goes to show that it happens. Like, even like geo. It's a laughable thing now to think that they were big, but they were massive. They were so big and then there's gone.
- [46:47]
Ross Dunn
The best example of that would be Google, of course, Google. Ton of people.
- [46:54]
Scott Vanak
Sorry, that's a better example.
- [46:55]
Ross Dunn
A ton of people put a lot of time into Google, like it was a powerhouse and they shut it down.
- [47:04]
Scott Vanak
Just, what the hell, get a domain, don't rely on anybody else if you buy your own and don't go through. Was it Yellow Pages where you'd get a domain but they own it? I think it was Yellow Pages that did that. So even then you're screwed. Make sure you own the domain and then you have it forever and you never have to worry about it.
- [47:19]
Ross Dunn
Yeah, Always be very careful of that. There's always ways you can lose if you're not careful. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you for joining us today. Remember, we have a show notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm.
- [47:45]
Scott Vanak
Thank you for listening everybody.
- [47:49]
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- [48:03]
Ross Dunn
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