Scott Vanac (2:41)

Yeah, not a lot about this, but I like to include these little PSAs sometimes if they're important enough. And, and I actually have a former client who uses WP Bakery and I just checked and they have a version that is vulnerable. So I'm actually going to email them later today and just who knows, maybe. Well, maybe it'll give me a thank you. Anyways, if you have WPBakery installed in WordPress, all versions up to and including 8.61 have a vulnerability really bad. You really don't want attackers injecting code into your site. So update as soon as you can to 8.7 and you should be safe. So not a lot to say about that. I mean there's a link in our show notes if you really want to learn about it. Roger Monti has a write up on it and it's, I don't know, a few thousand words long and great if you really like diving into that stuff. But I don't know that anyone wants me to ramble on about the technicalities of all of that. So you can check it out for yourself.

Ross Dunn (3:36)

All right. And some update on reporting tools.

Scott Vanac (3:39)

Yeah, so back in September, September 11th I believe it was. Did we talk about this on a.

Ross Dunn (3:45)

Previous show at all?

Scott Vanac (3:46)

I can't remember if we had or not.

Ross Dunn (3:48)

I don't remember what happened yesterday.

Scott Vanac (3:49)

Okay, what happened yesterday, Ross. So okay, really quick overview, high level overview in case I didn't talk about it in the last show. I think I might have, but I'm not sure. September 11th, Google changed the way they display ranking results. You used to be able to add ampersand num equals 100 in the address bar and that would serve the top hundred results on one page. Well, basically every single reporting service out there uses that variable in their reporting of keywords. Well, Google got rid of it. They eliminated that, meaning that to see the top 100 results, tools would now have to crawl 10 pages of Google results, which increases all their costs and everything tenfold, which isn't good. So basically all reporting tools broke. Every single one. Like I don't think anybody was left out of that. Everybody broke. And anyways I'm finding now that they the ones we use at least. So we use Authority Labs, Semrush and Bright Local and they're working. So I don't know if everybody's got their got their tools fixed or not, but those three are fixed. I'd imagine the others that aren't will be very soon.

Ross Dunn (4:55)

So we'll see.

Scott Vanac (4:56)

I guess there were a lot of rumors I had heard that these tools would be having to increase costs or increase fees for using them. I haven't seen price increases. I mean, granted, I don't look super closely, but I did check today and things seem the same. But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if fees go up in the next little while because of this. But right now that isn't the case. And as I say this, you know, everything is updated and working. I am seeing some situations where some keywords aren't appearing when they are actually ranking. So it may not be at 100% perfect at the moment, but it's, it's pretty close. It's good. So I was worried that would be broken forever and we'd have to do massive changes for our clients that like these reports and want to see these ranking reports. But it looks like they're still going to work for a while.

Ross Dunn (5:45)

All right. Yeah. And when it comes down to it, really what matters. And I think a lot of us were thinking this might change how we report and kind of hoped it would in a sense because it would allow us to focus really on what matters. And that's lead generation conversions. You know, what's really making, you know, improving your bottom line. Obviously we want to know keyword stuff. I find it very valuable, but it's not the end all, be all, really. Every SEO company, we need to be focusing on getting you more money. However that ends up being, we got to make sure this is, there's a huge return on investment. Fortunately, because we make that number one. It's probably why we have clients that stay with us an average of 10 years or more. Just focus, laser focus on that. Anyways, these ranking reports, it's good to have them back, but I wouldn't say they're going to be back forever. You never know.

Scott Vanac (6:46)

You know, I thought they'd be dead a long time ago. I think if we go back probably 10 years at least now when people are saying stop doing this, you know, report on traffic and these other metrics and that sort of thing. But I don't know, clients, they, they kind of push what we do a little bit that everybody wants them and, and they're not bad and they're helpful still. So naturally you're going to do it if the client wants it.

Ross Dunn (7:07)

Yeah. One of the things that we were talking with a client about the other day was, you know, how are we going to report on AI? And it's not happened yet, although I'm already testing the tools. But we will, will be rolling out at some point tracking of citations in AI results. So if a client wants to be really well found for a particular term, we want to make sure we're trying to tackle most of the main queries. It's going to be pretty hard because every query is slightly different and that would mean entirely different results but and just see whether or not they show up more often as a cited resource in an answer in AI. And the more that improves, the better. There's a massive part of the SEO industry, more enterprise level I would say by and large all that are already doing that and making that one of their basics or one of the basis for getting paid. It's paper performance in some places. So lots of different plays in the enterprise realm. But it is kind of where things are moving in terms of expanding our reporting to include AI. But how that will ultimately look, I don't know. We're still working it out. All these things are so new. And remember it's, you know, Google's still 90 over 90% of the game for search and AI overviews. We'll get into it in a minute. Don't make that big a difference over what things are the kind of searches that are happening anyway in Google. I don't want to cut ourselves off of the knee there. We are going to talk more about that in a few minutes. I do want to share, however, a nice new addition to the work I've been doing. It's called seogrock.com that's SEO grok.com SEO grok.com and that'll take you to a substack newsletter that I am writing every week. Plus it also includes my notes. They're called in substack, which are like tweets in a way. So if you create a substack account, they're free, you can subscribe and you'll get an email with my latest substack newsletter when it does come out. I don't. I haven't really picked a day of the week yet, but I'm going to do one a week, probably near the end of the week, maybe the beginning of next week. I don't know. I'm figuring it out still. It's literally two weeks old, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. And the point of the entire thing is, well, first of all, grok, what does it mean to understand profoundly and intuitively? That's from Merriam Webster Dictionary. And you know, it is the 28th year I've been doing SEO. I think I understand it pretty profoundly. And the thing is we practice it. We're always learning. I never ever feel satisfied with how much knowledge I have in SEO. There's always more to learn and it's a bit self destructive, but it's just how I am. So I figured what the hell, I should be sharing as I learn. So that's where I'm going to do it. I'm going to share there and I'm going to make sure that it's accessible to all. I want to make sure that I use great analogies, things that make it really easy for everyone to understand because I know not everyone's created equal and how they understand technology. And they still may be interested in learning SEO or learning how search engines work or how AI works and how it affects search engines. And so I'm going to get into all of that and so far so good. It's been a lot of fun and I'm pumped to do it. Content's going to be a new push for step 4th in many, many different ways. But this is my first one so I hope you check it out. SEO grok.com if you want to be on top of stuff even faster and more often than the podcast, where we can only get into things to a certain depth, I think you'll like it a lot. Also, I was on the to the Trade podcast that's to the Trade. It's a podcast for interior designers. And on my LinkedIn I've got a link to it. But in that particular podcast there's a video that they shared where I put in some golden tips on how to keep your WordPress site safe. It's only a portion of it. There's lots of other tips that talk about SEO and talk about AI and such, but this particular one I felt proud that they shared because it we run into this issue so often and I've talked about it and I'll continue to talk about it very quite commonly on the podcast because it's such a big issue. WordPress is fantastic. I love it to bits, but it needs to be kept. You need to update it regularly and if you don't, there are problems. It can be easily hacked and you know, you end up with some serious issues there that can impact your whole reputation online, which is something you don't want to mess with in there. I talk about hacking, ensuring that you have at least 90 days of backups for your website and why that's even though that sounds crazy, why it's important. I also share something and I'll give this to you because you're listeners instead of having to Listen to it. But check and test your forms on your website every week. So forms, your contact form, your lead form, just run a test, that's it. Every week. If it's not you, have someone else do it in the company. It's peace of mind. Because I don't know how many times now we've discovered that forms aren't working on a person's site and they were wondering why they weren't getting business. Thousands upon thousands of dollars this could save you. That's no lie. So do check that out. Make that a monthly test. A monthly test that you're going to be doing on your website.

Scott Vanac (13:09)

I. Years ago, years and years and years ago, I had a client call me, right. Like days before, I think it was two days before we took our two week Christmas break and this client lost her mind on me. Like, I've never been yelled at like that before because her contact form wasn't working on her website. And now that is outside the scope of what we do for the majority of clients. It's not, it's just not part of what we do. Not that it couldn't be, but it just, it just isn't. Especially then. And it ended up being her webmaster had actually broken it and at the end of the call, she apologized and everything was good. She's actually still a client and she's very lovely, but it was months that she wasn't getting contacts. Months. And my, my question is, you would think after a while you would wonder if I'm not getting contacted by anybody, maybe there's something else going on there. Right? Because she had traffic and rankings and. But nobody was. The calls dried up. So, yeah, check, check that stuff like Ross says. Every month for sure.

Ross Dunn (14:11)

Yeah, it's. It's scary if you don't do that. It can be quite impactful. All right, so next up, tips for optimizing for generative engines. What have you got here, Scott?

Scott Vanac (14:20)

Yeah, so this, I figured I'd throw this in. This isn't from a specific, specific article or anything, but I've had a lot of clients ask about this recently and, and we're of course working with GEO and AEO and LLM. Oh, I'm seeing used now and I don't know what other acronyms there are. SEO for AI. Can we get an acronym that's just all encompassing? I think we need to coin something Ross and just use that.

Ross Dunn (14:47)

Just called it SEO for AI. That's what I'm trying to do now because it is just SEO, basically.

Scott Vanac (14:52)

It is, yeah. Exactly. So I've had basically this answer that I'm going to give everybody on the podcast. And I've said this to a few clients now and in emails and I figured, well, at first I thought I had already talked about this on the show. I had to go through my old show notes and be like, have we not talked about this? And I couldn't find it anywhere and I thought we had, which is kind of crazy. So I'm just going to go through some of these points. I think I've got a 8, maybe 10 quick points here. So the first is write in a conversational tone. Don't keep things all techy and, and, and stuff like write like you're talking to somebody. AI loves that. That's going to help. You know, people search in the LLMs in a conversational type tone. They're not just typing in, you know, gold earrings, they're where can I find these old Goldie. I don't know what they're saying. They're saying stuff. Right, so, right, right. As if you are searching kind of thing. A lot of aspects on this content you want to create would be things like FAQs, how to's, lists. Some people use the term listicles, which I absolutely hate. But if you like that term, create listicles, go for it. Charts and graphs, tables. So use old school HTML tables and not CSS based tables. And this is, I'm seeing this in a lot of places now. People are saying don't use CSS for your tables. Use an old school HTML based table for things like comparisons, statistical data specifications, anything that can fit in a table and really Clarify your data. AIs love that stuff. Using obviously lots of images, video and other media. You know, you can have podcasts or audio clips or whatever. Like using all that kind of stuff works really, really well in your content. Lead with the answer. Start with a nice clear, you know, tldr too long, don't read summary at the start. That people can, you know, soak up what they want quickly. This sort of allows for sort of a two pronged approach. You've got your quick, quick blurb that answers people's questions and then follow that up with like a deep dive into the topic. That's great for Google, it's great for AI. Ensure clear heading use and proper hierarchy for your heading tags. That's, I mean that's a standard SEO best practice anyways. But it's good for AI. Make every claim you discuss, easy to cite. Attribute facts with direct reliable sources. You know, if you have to link off site. Do it like, don't be afraid to link to another site, although maybe not your direct competitor, unless you want them to your business but you know, supporting content out there, don't be afraid to link to it. Make sure you show your credibility. You know, display bylines, bios, dates and. Actually I'm gonna talk about dates again in a bit here. Any reliable sources like just cite and claim everything that you've got going on there. Use structured data. You know, your structured markup is so good for SEO and for AI. You know, faq, page markup, item, list, person, product, all, just all the different structured markups. If they apply, make sure you've got them in place. Keep your content indexable and fast. So indexable is again just standard SEO stuff. Make sure you've got basic links into the content. Make sure Google can find it. Keep your site as quick as possible. So you know, page speed insights won't really apply much to AI. Maybe a bit for AI overviews in Google, but not so much for the others. But keeping that, you know, your site is, I don't know what the word is, I'm trying to find in my brain as I talk. But just keep it fast. Keep your site as quick as you can. And then of course all your other standard fundamental SEO items like you know, title tags and meta descriptions and image alt attributes and all that kind of stuff that still applies. So make sure that's still in place. And if you follow all of that, you stand a good chance. And, and what I'm seeing ranking really well. You know, the things I said to incorporate like FAQs and Lists and all that posts that are really exhaustive and long form, that include all of that stuff in single posts tend to be doing really well right now. So don't be afraid to mix and match and do all that stuff. But make sure the content is good and not just fluff. Don't throw in a bunch of FAQs because you can, you know, make sure it works.

Ross Dunn (19:15)

So yeah, and I felt like the icing on all this is the simple statement that we should all be living by which Google beats like a drum. Write for your readers. You know, they want this information, they want it well, provided this is what you're doing. Really all we're doing is we're just being very technical about providing the best example, the best result. So power to you doing it is just going to work. It's that simple. And I added another section here. This is based on an article in Search Engine Journal Google Answers what to do for AEO or GEO or AI.

Scott Vanac (19:59)

Or SEO for AI.

Ross Dunn (20:01)

Getting so tired of these terms, but I guess better start loving them. I don't know. Anyway, in short, why does Google often say that AI really isn't something you need to optimize for? I wanted to get into why. So Google's VP of product, Robbie Stein explains that when Google's AI kicks in to answer a question acts more as an extension of Google search by automating the process of querying Google for you to find the answer to your question and related questions. This is called Query Fan Out. One of the examples I used in the SEO grok when I tried to explain Query Fan out is, you know, if, if you asked Google, you know, what should I take with me to Hawaii? Well, it's a pretty, pretty broad question, right? Is it could just give you a list of things that most people bring, but it won't. What it's going to do is it's going to, it's going to look, it's going to look at maybe the weather. When are you going to go? It might ask it. Or if you're in a sort of a conversational AI, it would ask that. But otherwise it might say about what times of years, what to bring, you know, the most common things people bring. It may break down other questions such as, you know, what sunscreen is best to take, what's best for reefs and what isn't. There's just so many different things that it could provide. And that's called Query Fan Out. And it's doing that because it's, it's trying to guess what you would want to know in addition to the answer you're, you're trying to get. It creates a more comprehensive and more enjoyable result, is the concept. And to be fair, it does often do that. And the problem of course, for everyone who owns a website that had this content on their site is now they're not getting that visibility. So what they need to do now is ensure that they're. One of their pieces of content is being used as a source, it's being cited. So essentially Google's AI is querying Google for all the answers and then providing you with a great result using its AI. Its AI uses parametric memory. Parametric memory is a fancy term for the fact that it has its own memory as well. It also knows a lot of things, so it'll use a little bit of that mixed with what it finds online to give you an answer. So this isn't new, but what is kind of new anyway, in my opinion is that the credibility signals that determine if your source is picked up or not that is newer in that they've been cranked up a bit. Now, Stein doesn't say these are new, but it does seem to me that they've been strengthened. So in order to demonstrate your expertise. Scott's already talked about a few pieces, but I'll just reiterate some. It comes down to ensuring that the citations are in place for any reputable like with using reputable sources for any fact or piece of information in your. In. In the content that requires some history or some, some kind of background and a verifiable fact. Losing my English there for some reason. Anyway, next is your own expertise on the subject. So this is, this is something you got to keep in mind. If you have someone else publishing your articles, make sure they're publishing it under you as the author and then ensure that your authorship is set up properly. So first of all, a lot of times people post and it's under their own name, even though they'll say that it's writt by you. The author that Google will see is the person posting it and that person probably doesn't have any of the expertise that you have attached to their Google knowledge graph. Like far as Google knows, they're no one or they have very little experience. If you set up your authorship properly on your site, if you're using WordPress, that means going to your user profile where you log in, go to your user profile and then fill out all the information there. This is particularly easy to do if you're using the Yoast SEO plugin because it actually expands the information that you can add within the within your profile and it'll allow you to add all the different places where you've got social, your, your main website, your email address and any other information about you and why you know you should be listened to, that will be embedded in that article as the author. And that's very important and it will also and if you've gone the extra mile, link to your main profile, site or profile on your page on, on your particular website. That's your author profile. And everywhere you write, everywhere you, you've had any kind of interaction that you want to be considered as part of your footprint online as an expert, should link back to that profile or to your website. In my case it's RossDunn.com I'm making sure that I'm going through because I'm doing a bit of my own cleanup. I'm going to places like LinkedIn and making sure that I've got RossDunn.com linked to from there. I'm also trying to go to my, my social profiles and ensuring that RossDunn.com is linked there as one of my main sites. And because my site@rossdon.com is linking to them and they're linking back, it's creating this nice circle that works really, really, really well with the knowledge graph. And it, because it's, it's clear you're not just trying to take credit for someone else's work, they're actually linking back to you. It there's a proof of concept there. What that does is when you're, you've got a fairly good footprint and that'll happen over time. If you're new, it will build if you do this ahead of time it's going to create a much more powerful credibility online and, and your expertise and authority according to Google will be, will be raised. So keep that in mind. I know that's a lot, but it is very important and I will actually have an article on this soon. I'm not sure where I'm going to post it. It might be SEO Grok. I might try to get posting on one of our industry sites. I'm not sure yet but it's really important stuff.

Scott Vanac (26:31)

When you're saying that, excuse me. It makes me think or makes me wonder if every business owner or high level employee, maybe me, should have, you know their name.com and create a page like you have for yourself.

Ross Dunn (26:45)

I think so, yeah.

Scott Vanac (26:46)

You agree with that?

Ross Dunn (26:48)

Yeah, I think so. I mean if they're, if they want to build their own profile and footprint in the industry, that's a good idea. I mean you can still have, you know, the backup is that you have your author page on the website that you normally write at and then anywhere else that links to you, make sure they link to that page. That's tough to do sometimes. For example, I can't go back and do that with the podcast. Unfortunately itunes and all these different places won't allow me to add a link to RossDunn.com so there's no way for me to connect that. But it's still, it's still good to have in my, my schema. It's good to have there saying that I do this and I do this and I do this even though they're linking back to me. But the more you do get the link backs, the more value you're going to get anyway. Also do your own form of Query Fan out when you write the resource. Now this doesn't, this isn't always applicable. If you think about a topic on your website, say it's about, I don't know, BMWs. And then it's a hub and spoke concept. So the spoke would be to a resource about the different types of stick shifts you can get, I don't know, whatever. And on there you're not really going to have a Query Fan out on that. I mean, maybe you, you might have something about all the different questions someone could ask about a gear shift. I guess. Fair enough. So there's probably something there, but Query Fan out might get a little difficult as you get more and more laser focused. So just saying, it doesn't always need to be that thought of, but something to consider. Lastly, if it's something that everyone has said way too many times, don't bother writing it. I'm not saying as a component of what you're writing, but the whole article, if it's just something that's being regurgitated a billion times, don't even waste your time. This is not worth it.

Scott Vanac (28:39)

Yeah, you need a new angle or piece of information or something to make it.

Ross Dunn (28:44)

Yeah, a study, a case study. Yeah, some kind of new evidence or new data. Sure, absolutely. But otherwise, just don't bother. Okay, let's take a quick break and we're going to come back with some LLM tracking information. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Van Ak. All right, are LLM visibility trackers worth it? So AI are there. Are the trackers that are used for them worth?

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Ross Dunn (30:58)

Wow. What do you say, Scott?

Scott Vanac (31:00)

Yeah, so at this point I'm going to give it a hard maybe or it depends. There's a long, really long article and great by Harry Clarkson Bennett. Sorry Harry, I didn't know who you were before. I read this over at Search Engine Journal and the two long don't read notes are basically what I'm going to cover here. His article goes really in depth into how these LLM trackers work and pros and cons and just really super in depth. Well beyond 101 level stuff, but essentially how they work. Right now LLM trackers are a bit of smoke and mirrors and those are his words. If you ask an LLM a question, for example, and then ask it the same question again from the same computer at the same spot, you're going to get a different answer and you will get different citations quite often. Ask that same question 10 times in a row, you're going to get 10 different answers with 10 different sets of citations. So it's very difficult to track what people are saying and what citations are being brought up for that. And that's part of the problem with a lot of the trackers is it's not going to be super accurate because of the way people search and the way responses are provided back to you. So what a lot of the trackers do is they simulate prompts repeatedly throughout the day and then basically average that visibility and those site and provide a citation score. So they might do a certain citation, you know, I don't know how many times. So let's say 100 times in a day. You might show up seven times or something and then you get a score based on how many times your site appeared. So at this point the, the way it appears is that these trackers are good for sort of a high level overview on if you're appearing but not really laser focused on on how accurate that is. So we were talking a little bit or Ross was about if we start reporting on this. Well not if, but when we start reporting on LLM visibility, if a client wants to be found for a certain phrase, maybe we put it into the tracker and it shows up that, yeah, they are showing up, but then the client asks ChatGPT or whatever and they don't show up because they're not going to show up all the time. It's going to be different and, and even regular rank trackers for, you know, organic search results tend to vary a little bit because you've got all kinds of personalization and your location and your search history and, you know, a million other things. They're not always exactly what you see, but they're pretty close most of the time. Well, this is less close more of the time. I'm not sure how to say that, but it's just not super accurate right now. And so the value there is less. So. So depending on the trackers you're trying to use, paying for one right now, unless you're finding you're getting a lot of traffic to your site from AI and you're trying to figure out why you're getting that traffic, it may or may not be worth it to you. If you're just getting a little bit and you're hoping you're maybe showing up but you're not getting much traffic, it's probably not worth the expense, but it might be. So that's why it's kind of a depends. I think these trackers may get better over time, but it might not happen because who knows how AI is going to continue. I don't think we're ever going to see the case where a single, I want to say search query, but that's not really what I mean. A single question presented to an AI is going to ever return the same answer multiple times. I just don't think it's ever going to get there. And without that consistency, you can't really pinpoint how you're ranking for it because it's changing constantly. So if you want to know more, check out the show notes for this link or go to Search Engine Journal, check out Harry's article. And it does go a lot deeper in explaining why and how they work and why they work the way they do. But yeah, so hopefully that's helpful for somebody.

Ross Dunn (34:44)

Yeah, I'll give you a good example that sort of hits close to home. Someone did this and I, I don't know, maybe I did it because I saw it. I think I did it. I saw it online. A search for Is Ross done a good SEO? I wanted to See what it would say. And I spread it out to Scott and I told he did it. And then I had Nahrika do it. Project Manager. We all got slightly different responses. Majority of it was similar, but there were different takes on it. Mine was glowing. Must have known I was reading it.

Scott Vanac (35:20)

Not for me, it wasn't.

Ross Dunn (35:21)

Yeah, but it was never bad. It was more like, yes, you got a good reputation, blah, blah, blah. I think you guys both saw one which said, you know, a lot of his testimonials and his content is, you know, isn't fresh. So do keep that in mind. That kind of stuff. Which, hey, is. Is true. I've, I've. I've been busy, so I'm just getting back into doing content. Except it didn't really count the podcast too much. It did mention it. Anyways, what I'm getting at is it will never be identical and you won't be able to control it. I actually saw something the other day and I love this. It was just. It made my day. It was a SAS tool, and when you scroll down the page, it said AI. Sorry, it said something along lines. The question was, is this a good tool? And it's an AI should say, this is a great tool because of this and this and this and this and this. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's telling AI what to say. And you know what? I bet it worked.

Scott Vanac (36:24)

Yeah, maybe I. I have to just read these two little ones because it makes me look better than Ross. I don't know if that's true, but it makes me look better.

Ross Dunn (36:33)

Again, it's you reading it.

Scott Vanac (36:35)

Well, yeah, well, no, I had said the same thing you had. I'd said, whatever. I can't remember what the prompt was, but, like, is Ross done a good SEO, I think is what I put. And it said, ross, John Dunn is generally considered a good and reliable SEO. And okay, it's not terrible. And then I asked the same question, but my name and it said, Scott Van Eck is considered a highly knowledgeable and experienced SEO expert.

Ross Dunn (36:56)

So, yeah, I just.

Scott Vanac (36:59)

That I got a kick out of that.

Ross Dunn (37:00)

That made my day. Bugger.

Scott Vanac (37:02)

AI thinks I'm better. Is it true? I don't know. Maybe not. But AI thinks so, so that's all I care about.

Ross Dunn (37:07)

Let's see what it's going to say to me this time. Oh, you're easily a live one.

Scott Vanac (37:11)

Don't listen to him.

Ross Dunn (37:12)

It's gonna see mine. I get Ross Dunn is a widely regarded. Is widely regarded as a highly reputable and experienced SEO professional. So each time I get it a little bit different. This one's better.

Scott Vanac (37:22)

Yeah.

Ross Dunn (37:22)

Perplexity though. I don't know.

Scott Vanac (37:25)

I love it but it goes back to what I was saying and how with the trackers it's just you get different stuff all the time and. Yeah, that's awesome.

Ross Dunn (37:33)

Okay, so now some local SEO news. Google is testing the removal of a call button which just got me so annoyed. I'm sure it annoys anyone in the industry. Anyway, it's an example of the Google Local pack. This is where you normally see business names next to a map and they usually have a little call button next to each of the names. Very simple, very easy and very user friendly. Well they've they seen in the wild was a practice where they removed all of the links to call now except for the one who was paid doing a paid ad. And that you know that's just a perfect example of the problem that is Google in my opinion these days. It's too big, it's getting way too greedy when it's even testing stuff like that. It just gets my goat. Anyways I, I do hope that we never see that take hold. Unfortunately I won't be surprised if they do, but it would be sad. Next. And this is a really big takeaway for anyone here with a local business who may have created a Bing profile for it. Bing Places has upgraded its systems and not done such a good job of it for business owners. I saw this actually give Credit to Matt McGee which is great. He I saw him post this on LinkedIn. He he had noticed that and I found this the same that some very important information on profiles is being removed. It's just not even there anymore in the the ones I've seen it's been the category, the description and amenities blank category is so important. Well category, description, both are so important. Category, that's where you're going to show up. It's the only thing that really it's one of the key deciding factors on where you're going to show up. Description is almost the same in terms of priority. It tells the search engines what you do. It's just a massive mistake and every single client I looked at had these lost so please check yours. I guarantee you're going to have one or two things that are broken. If you're lucky enough not to please let me know because I've not heard of anyone yet who's had a perfect profile. In my case for Step Worth the photos were also broken. I didn't see that elsewhere but for. For us, we got the extra special experience. All right.

Scott Vanac (40:14)

I actually have a really quick thing I want to say here about local. It's kind of. So I'm not going to go into the details because nobody cares, but I had a bit of a car accident the other day and I had to call and put in a claim for that. Not my fault. Nobody's hurt.

Ross Dunn (40:26)

All good.

Scott Vanac (40:26)

And what really annoyed me is when I went to the insurance company's website and went to call to make a claim on my phone. Their phone number was not linked, so I had to remember this 1-800-number in my mind if I could read it on my phone because I didn't have my reading glasses and I guess I'm old now and I can't read my phone anymore. And so I had to write it down on paper so I could read it out to myself so that I could then key in the phone number. So just a quick little. If you have your phone number on your website, please make it a link for I'm not that old, but old people like me so that it's a lot easier to call you. And I could, now that I'm saying this out loud, see people maybe not even calling you if they can't click it. I bet there are situations where you might miss out on phone calls if. If your number is not clickable. So little quick psa, do that, please.

Ross Dunn (41:12)

Yes, that's all. Well, you get to jump into this next one. Google expands.

Scott Vanac (41:18)

Yeah, this is like a really small, small thing. AI mode. It used to be only available in the States. We finally got it in Canada and they've now added 40 more countries for a total of 200 countries. And it's available in 35 languages. So 200 countries. How many countries do we have? I feel like it's not much more than 200. So almost everybody has it now. So if you want to test it out, you can, which is great. Unless you speak one of the 35 or you speak one of the languages not included in the 35. That might. But then you're probably not listening to this.

Ross Dunn (41:47)

So true. Very true. I don't think we. We come out in many languages, I think.

Scott Vanac (41:54)

I think we come out in English and that might be it.

Ross Dunn (41:56)

Yeah, it depends on, I guess, who's taking the time to subtitle us, which I pity them because our English. Yeah. So next up, just for the last piece here, and it's kind of interesting, actually. Research have researchers have found a way to fool AI models with fake dates. To boost visibility kind of says it all. When something new comes out, when some new technology comes out in the SEO world, it's inevitable someone's going to try and find some way to hack it, to manipulate it. And it took very little, which is not surprising for something so fresh and fallible. Essentially, researchers took some content that they'd created and changed the publication date on it to something fresh, something new. It was quite a few years old, but they changed it to new and immediately saw dramatic improvements in the visibility for that content. That's it in a nutshell. The most, the models that were the most susceptible were Meta's Llama, Alibaba's Quinn, which I've never even heard of or used. And I just heard about today From Scott and OpenAI's GPT4 and GPT4, sorry, 4.0 and GPT4 fell in the middle. So those are pretty big. GPT is like the one these days. So there you go. If you really want to hack, you can go that route and change your dates. I actually tried testing it on an article the other day and I haven't checked to see whether I made a difference yet. We'll see. Oh, we'll see. It would be nice to see if it actually worked. I can't imagine it being that simple. But you know, back when Google started, we did crazy things that were so dumb and somehow they worked because they were so simple and their algorithms just weren't complex enough.

Scott Vanac (43:54)

I hate this and I hope they fix this very, very quickly because otherwise all articles are published today in no time. When SEO's get their hands on it, every single thing on the Internet will be brand new every single day. So you know, that's got to be fixed.

Ross Dunn (44:08)

So yeah, they'll have some kind of the recency penalty or something like that.

Scott Vanac (44:15)

Your content is too new. Yeah, we're not going to rank it.

Ross Dunn (44:18)

It's repeatedly too new. There you go. Yeah. And it doesn't change more than 30% or I don't know.

Scott Vanac (44:24)

God, you know, they probably will. There'll be some kind of variable there metric that they're going to use.

Ross Dunn (44:29)

Yeah. I saw someone the other day say that they thought soon there'd be penalties for people using too much of a structured out layout and content to, you know, appeal to AI. I'm like, oh for Pete's sake, that would be ridiculous. Because who cares how the layout as long as it's good quality and everything.

Scott Vanac (44:47)

But focus on user experience and it shouldn't matter.

Ross Dunn (44:50)

I've been shocked and appalled by Google's decisions before, like how they decided to penalize links versus just ignore them. Then they finally ignored them. Just some stuff just makes no sense. So we'll see. Hopefully it doesn't happen. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company Senior SEO Scott Van Ak, thank you for joining us today. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes, which air every week on WMR fm.

Scott Vanac (45:20)

Thank you for listening everybody.

Mira Potassan (45:25)

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