SEO 101 Ep 513: Maintaining Search Rankings After a Redesign

Summary

Podcast Summary: SEO 101 Ep 513

Episode Title: Maintaining Search Rankings After a Redesign
Date: October 30, 2025
Hosts: Ross Dunn (CEO, StepForth Web Marketing) & Scott Van Achte (Senior SEO, StepForth)
Podcast: SEO 101 on WMR.FM

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Overview

This episode dives into how to maintain search rankings after a website redesign—a crucial concern for businesses wanting to improve their site’s appearance or functionality without losing hard-earned visibility in search engines. The hosts, Ross Dunn and Scott Van Achte, deliver practical, step-by-step guidance covering everything from site backups and content audits to redirects, content management systems, and post-launch monitoring. They also discuss the latest SEO news and sprinkle in their signature laid-back, humorous banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. SEO News and Trends (01:21–17:31)

• Disney & Black Hat SEO Prank (01:21–04:34)

  • Humorous segment about spammers linking Disney with “black hat SEO packages.” Highlights Google’s update struggles and the persistence of negative SEO tactics.
  • Memorable moment: “If you've got the numbers. It works.” – Scott (02:46)

• Chrome Warning for Insecure HTTP Sites (04:38–07:14)

  • Chrome will warn users about insecure (HTTP) sites starting Oct 2026.
  • Still, 11–17% of sites are insecure—surprising to both hosts.
  • Immediate advice: Secure your site (HTTPS) and set up redirects; don’t delay as conversion rates will plummet with warning notices.

• AI-Powered Browsers: Comet vs Atlas (07:49–13:10)

  • Perplexity’s Comet browser and ChatGPT's Atlas are compared. Both are based on Chromium, but Atlas is currently Mac-only (at recording time).
  • AI browsers offer features like auto-applying coupon codes—Ross highlights savings and the convenience of AI-driven automation.
  • Notable: "If you're going to buy something...tell the assistant to keep trying coupon codes...I've saved a bundle already." – Ross (12:15)

• Google Search Console: Query Groups (13:17–15:01)

  • New feature grouping similar queries and surfacing page trends (up/down).
  • Noted lack of tracking for AI bots and AI searches, still a missing piece.

• The Return of Log Files (15:01–17:31)

  • With analytics not showing the full picture (bots, errors), log file analysis is making a resurgence.

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2. Main Topic: Maintaining Rankings After a Redesign (17:31–43:09)

Structured as a practical checklist, Scott shares a newly expanded 7,000-word guide distilled for podcast listeners:

A. Pre-Redesign Essentials

• Site Backup (17:55)

  • "Back up your site, back it up before you do anything..." – Scott (17:58)
  • Share stories of clients whose redesigns failed due to lack of backups—even recalling printed “backups” as a cautionary tale.

• Content Audit (19:42)

  • Audit pages for rankings, conversions, and performance. Record URLs and keep page copies for comparison.
  • Extra: Host recommends storing the old site on a blocked subdomain for reference without risking accidental indexing.

B. URL Strategy

• Keep URLs the Same (If Possible) (22:38)

  • "If at all possible, do not change URLs on your site. Keep everything the same." – Scott (22:51)
  • Even small changes (like removing/adding slashes or WWW) matter for Google; anecdote about a large ecommerce redesign where preserving URLs kept them #1.

• 301 Redirects (26:02)

  • Where URLs must change, map ALL old URLs to new using 301 redirects.
  • "If you don't do it, all of this fails. It's that bad." – Ross (27:23)
  • Don’t forget to capture and migrate all previous redirects as well.

• Update Internal Links (27:55)

  • Ensure internal navigation and deep links point to new or changed URLs (eventually).
  • Use tools like Screaming Frog to spot in-site links still going through redirects.

C. Platform & Technical Choices

• Choosing an SEO-Friendly CMS (30:39)
  • WordPress is a safe bet; beware of smaller, proprietary CMSs with limited/expensive customizations.
  • Story: A client was quoted an exorbitant rate to add a robots.txt file to their proprietary CMS (33:01).

D. On-Page Elements

• Titles and Meta Descriptions (33:33)

  • Carry over titles/meta for top-performing pages. Don’t stress excessively about strict character limits—longer is (often) fine if relevant and not spammy.
  • "Meta description is being used in rankings consideration." – Ross (34:13)
  • Discussion of spammy title tags for local SEO: works now but may backfire later.

• Structured Data (Schema Markup) (37:25)

  • Remember to migrate or introduce structured data.

• Site Speed & Optimization (38:31)

  • New site should be faster; optimize images, scripts, etc. for performance.

E. Launch and Post-Launch

• Unblock the Site for Search Engines (39:16)

  • Critical: Remove “block search engines” settings before launch. Simple oversight can be catastrophic.

• Monitor, Diagnose, and Troubleshoot (40:08)

  • Watch analytics, Search Console, and rank trackers especially during the first weeks.
  • Initial volatility (spikes or drops) is normal. Persisting issues after weeks need investigation.

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3. Special Case: Changing Domains After Redesign (43:09–48:01)

• Redirect EVERYTHING (43:41)

  • Redirect all old URLs at old domain to their counterparts on new domain with 301s. Now is the time to adjust structure if desired.

• Remember Old Redirects (44:31)

  • Carry previous redirect history to maintain long-held “link equity.”

• Tell Google (45:15)

  • Use Google’s Change of Address Tool (detailed walk-through promised in Scott’s upcoming article).

• Update Inbound Links (45:15)

  • Change all external links you control (directories, profiles, social) to new domain.

• Patience Is Key (45:15)

  • Domain moves cause temporary ranking drops—recovery takes longer than a redesign on the same domain (sometimes months).

  • Memorable client disaster: “...they listened to none of my advice and it was a disaster. Their rankings crashed...” – Scott (47:03)

  • Silver lining: With corrections and patience, rankings “skyrocketed in the past three to four weeks.”

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Additional SEO News

Local SEO: Google Business Profiles “What’s Happening” Expansion (48:01–49:48)

• New feature now available in several English-speaking markets and for multi-location restaurants/bars, automatically surfaces events/promos listed in GBP.

AI Ranking Update: Google DeepMind’s “Block Rank” (49:48–51:38)

• Experimental new ranking method for LLMs that speeds up contextual document ranking by restructuring how attention works in models.
• “…block rank ran about 4.7 times faster than standard fine-tuned models…” – Scott (50:39)
• Not yet live, but likely to be adopted.

AI and Education (53:24–54:53)

• Stories about AI’s permeation into classrooms, assignments, and even professional workflows.
• "It's just everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. It's insane." – Scott (54:05)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On site security:
  “If your site is not secure yet, it definitely should be. What are you waiting for? Do it.” – Scott (04:38)
• On AI Bargain Hunting:
  “Just tell the assistant to keep trying coupon codes...it's pretty wild.” – Ross (12:15)
• On updating site titles/metadata:
  “You can make your title Tag... pretty long and it seems to still be helpful.” – Scott (34:58)
• On not following advice:
  “...they listened to none of my advice and it was a disaster. Their rankings crashed and they had massive staff turnover.” – Scott (47:03)
• On the relentless pace of AI and SEO:
  “Every time I open a browser and look at anything...it's AI spaghetti. There's just so much stuff happening, it's mind boggling.” – Ross (52:55)

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Key Timestamps for Quick Reference

• SEO News & Disney/Negative SEO: 01:21–04:34
• Chrome Security Warnings: 04:38–07:14
• AI Browsers: Comet & Atlas: 07:49–13:10
• Google Search Console Updates & Log Files: 13:17–17:31
• Main SEO Redesign Checklist Begins: 17:31
  • Backups & Content Audit: 17:55–22:38
  • URL Management & Redirects: 22:38–29:30
  • CMS & On-Page: 30:39–37:25
  • Speed & Launch: 38:31–40:08
  • Monitoring: 40:08–43:09
• Changing Domains: 43:09–48:01
• Local Feature/AI/Block Rank: 48:01–53:24
• AI in Education and Wrap-up: 53:24–end

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Podcast Tone & Style

• Friendly and practical, with light banter and relatable anecdotes.
• Minimal jargon—advice is aimed at beginners and intermediate SEOs.
• The hosts stress proactive planning and avoiding classic pitfalls, but never shame listeners. Mistakes are described as learning opportunities.

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Summary

This episode provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to maintaining SEO rankings during and after a website redesign. The hosts stress the necessity of proper planning—backups, content audits, preserving URLs, robust 301 redirect mapping, and careful post-launch monitoring. They highlight new industry features and trends, particularly in AI and analytics, and inject humor into lessons learned from past client projects. It’s a must-listen for any business or webmaster planning a redesign (or domain change) who wants to retain and build on their current search visibility.

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For more SEO basics:
Check out Scott’s upcoming in-depth article on maintaining rankings after a redesign, and follow ongoing updates at seogrok.com.

Transcript

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[Ross Dunn]

Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 513. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Vanik. How's it going today, bud?

[Scott Vanik]

It is going great.

[Ross Dunn]

Yes. We've been tooling through all the news, and so AI Bonanza. It's just overwhelming. And so much of it is people saying all the same things, but it is what it is. We'll help pick through it for you and show you what's actually important. But first, something very humorous. Disney is offering black hat SEO packages. Who knew?

[Scott Vanik]

Who knew? Mickey Moses at it again.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. He's a shifty character, that one. Yeah. So I don't know. It's probably. I don't know. What. What was it that Disney got in trouble with lately? Everyone was canceling them. What was it again?

[Scott Vanik]

Well, there was. They canceled their ads on X and then Elon Musk got all ticked off about that. Are you referring to that or something else?

[Ross Dunn]

I don't know when people were canceling their Disney.

[Scott Vanik]

Oh, Jimmy Kimmel. When they pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

[Ross Dunn]

Right, right, right, duh. Anyway, so I guess I'm not sure if this is what incited it, but spammers have created Thousands of spammy links pointing to Disney saying that they offer black hat SEO packages. And well, Google and its negative SEO doesn't work. Is once again pie in the face. Yes, it does.

[Scott Vanik]

If you've got the numbers. It works.

[Ross Dunn]

It does. So it's been up there for a while. If you go and type in my Disney, I believe that's the most example, my best example, the other one is I think if you just type in Disney.

[Scott Vanik]

But maybe my Disney Disney account apparently brings it up as well. But I did a search for my Disney and it came up right away, so I just used that.

[Ross Dunn]

Okay, well it'll show up as one of the site links and apparently Google has acknowledged at one point or another that they have a have trouble with the login pages controlling what text is used for those. I don't know, I dig into it. It's not that important to me, but it was pretty funny.

[Scott Vanik]

Well, what I think is hilarious is it's been up for over a week. It hasn't been fixed. Like usually Google's like if there's a Google bomb of some sort, assuming that's basically what this is, I mean, I guess we're making assumptions that's what caused it.

[Ross Dunn]

I.

[Scott Vanik]

Who knows really? I guess. But they fix this stuff quick. It makes them look really bad and they haven't. So maybe they're also mad at Disney. I don't know. They're just going to let it ride. Maybe it's some Disney or some Google employee that manually put it up there to stick it to them a little bit, I don't know.

[Ross Dunn]

But maybe someone at Disney was all heavy handed with them going get it down now. And they're like, well, no, I'm not.

[Scott Vanik]

Going to, I'm going to go for coffee.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, you can just sit there. I mean it does look stupid. It doesn't make Google look good, but they don't seem to care much anymore about that. There's a lot of problems with Google these days. So I guess just another day there, I don't know. Awesome.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Disney, if you need help getting that change, call us, we'll send you a contract.

[Ross Dunn]

Well, yeah, we'll give you some very, very good advice for, you know, 20 grand.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah, perfect. Done.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. Okay, what's next?

[Scott Vanik]

Okay, so Google or sorry, Google. Well, I guess Google Chrome is going to start warning users before loading insecure HTTP websites starting in October of 2026. Now if your site is not secure yet, it definitely should be. What are you waiting for? Do it. We definitely have no clients who have insecure websites. And I can't remember the last time we got a new client that had an insecure website. It's very rare that I even account encounter them. I actually did a quick search and I didn't dive in deep for this stat. So we're going to trust that AI is somewhat close. But AI estimates that still 11 to 17% of all websites are still insecure, which kind of blew my mind. Like it seems very, very high to me.

[Ross Dunn]

You think it's caused by depression?

[Scott Vanik]

It might be from that thing we talked about a few weeks ago. Maybe AI is depressed. Yeah.

[Ross Dunn]

So insecure.

[Scott Vanik]

It's so insecure. So yeah, I don't know if the numbers are actually that high, but that seems very high. 17%. But if your site is not secure, make sure you get that taken care of as soon as possible. You should have done it 10 years ago, but better late than ever I suppose as of October next year if it is. You will get warnings if you visit your website or when people visit your website and I can only imagine that will just destroy conversions. You know, someone comes to your site and they want to buy your, I don't know, orange juice or whatever you're selling. It's a stupid example, sorry, your cool your Kool Aid and they see that it's insecure, that's going to be a red flag and they're going to leave. So if you haven't done it yet, get it done now. It's not a big deal these days. It used to be a big long difficult thing and now it's a piece of cake. Get it set up, Set up your redirects. Google will apply and rank your now secure website very quickly, if not immediately. It's really quick with stuff like that, so.

[Ross Dunn]

And for those that don't know by now they're probably yelling this. What the hell do you mean? Yeah, HTTPs, your website.com, whatever that's secure. If it's just HTTP://, slash, there's no S. That means it's not secure. So keep that in mind. And again it would be almost impossible. I mean it's very difficult not to be, not to have a website that is using secure protocols like this. I'd be very surprised if anyone listening has that issue. But if they do, yeah, fix it up. And very likely that requires an extreme website makeover because you haven't touched your website in a very long time.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah. If your site is covered with animated gifs and MIDI sounds playing in the background. We had a client like that once. It was awesome. And it's time, it's time to change it.

[Ross Dunn]

I was thinking the other day how fun it would be to build a website like it was 1995 and just have tons of fire emo fire animations and I don't know, just have a blast with it. You know, you could make it might even go viral.

[Scott Vanik]

We shouldn't have. Now all our listeners are going to do it and beat us to it. Thanks for. Thanks for screwing that one up.

[Ross Dunn]

Cut it out in the end. Oh, wait. Yeah. Okay. Anyways, yeah. Well, let's jump into SEO news so we've talked about in the past. I think we have anyway, that Perplexity launched the Comet browser and it's funny. Chat GBT has just launched their own called Atlas and no one's comparing it to Comet. It's like Comet never existed. I like, I look at the, the, the, the articles about ChatGPT's Atlas. They don't say, you know, it's the second browser that came out. Nope, Comet made not. Might as well not have ever existed. It's so weird.

[Scott Vanik]

I've only just started using Comet because I was on a wait list and I finally got through the waitlist last week and it's really no different than Chrome except you get some of the AI features that are built into Comet for the most part. It's very user friendly and familiar and it imported all my bookmarks and all my stuff and extensions. All still work and it's painless.

[Ross Dunn]

It's all on Chromium, the same platform, so there is no difference except for syncing. If you want to sync up with your bookmarks and stuff with your other profile, let's say you start using Chrome again and you add a new bookmark. It will not be synchronized.

[Scott Vanik]

Oh, so it imported them, but it won't make the changes in the future.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, it's. You have a Perplexity account now. You don't have a Chrome Google account. Even if you're logging in, you're logging into Gmail or sorry, into your Google account within Perplexity. They call it a Perplexity now. It's confusing and I don't like how they did it. I think that's actually kind of a shot in the foot for them, but. Right.

[Scott Vanik]

I didn't know that. That's good to know because I'm probably going to get really, or would have gotten really confused when I'm looking for a certain bookmark and it's not there and then I'm in Chrome. And it is there. Like, what's happening?

[Ross Dunn]

Yep. Hands up in the air. That's me. That's what happened to me. Like, what the hell's going on? And I had to find a tool that would allow me to synchronize them and. And then I decided to put Comet aside for a while because it's had a couple hacks lately. It's really easy to avoid them. Just don't click on links that are unfamiliar. It's pretty obvious, really. But anyway, let's get back to ChatGPT Atlas. It launched on October 21st worldwide and it's available to everyone right away, which is nice. Comet still is being rolled out slowly, but of course it's a lot smaller, a smaller business and such. Unfortunately, it's only available on the Mac, so, you know, screw them.

[Scott Vanik]

I'm looking at the screen, seeing that there's smoke coming off the top of your head, because I figured you probably. That would burn you a little bit.

[Ross Dunn]

No, it doesn't, because I don't really care. I would like to have tried it, but I'm not really all that concerned.

[Scott Vanik]

You'll get a chance.

[Ross Dunn]

They're going to come out soon. It's a rather large market, that PC market, so. Yeah. So the version for Windows, iOS and Android are coming soon. Built in Search features appear to be powered by Google, despite being Bing, being an early partner and one of their largest inventors investors, I should say you can Download [e-mail] atlas Some of the features, it's a traditional browser, has an AI sidebar where you can ask questions, rewrite content, et cetera. If you search in Atlas, you get chatgpt like responses. But there are also tabs for web images, video, news and others. Now, with all of my experience using Comet, which is significant, I literally switched over entirely for the last month. I thought it was actually quite useful. The thing is, all of the answers are AI. So if you even just type in a business name in the search or not search box, just the URL box, instead of putting an actual address, a website address, it'll start answering you in its own AI context window. And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's like didn't really want that. So I'll actually type in google.com, go there and search because frankly, local is far more enjoyable than Google. Yeah, they all have their downsides. One of the things that's really cool for anyone out there who's considered using these, even just to try it, this is neat, is if you're going to buy something and you see it's got a coupon option. Load up Comet, go to that page and then tell the assistant to keep trying coupon codes and that it can find online until it find one finds on. That works. I've saved a bundle already. It finds really? Yeah. And it will keep testing them until it one actually works.

[Scott Vanik]

Oh, see, that's money. Literally. That's literally money right there.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Vanik]

So what are the kids saying? It's fire. I hate that, by the way.

[Ross Dunn]

Oh, it's fire.

[Scott Vanik]

I hate that. But that's what they're saying.

[Ross Dunn]

Oh, there's another one that's bugging the hell of me. That'll come up at some point because, you know, I just want to show that, share the joy. But yeah, anyway, it's. It's pretty wild watching it click over here, move there, try different things. Searching in one window, applying it in the other window. It's pretty neat. And you can just leave it running until it finds a coupon code for it.

[Scott Vanik]

Just do it. Until you save me 100%.

[Ross Dunn]

That's right. And it starts this steam coming out of its ears. Okay, what's next here?

[Scott Vanik]

All right, there's a small but kind of cool addition to Google search console. They, they have added what are called query groups. So if you log in, you can see insights within your left hand navigation and it will group like keywords together and tell you if they're trending up, if they're trending down, and give you some basic information about them. The same goes with pages and like your actual content, your site content. Google will tell you, is it trending up, trending down? Very cool. I think I'm hoping they take it to the next level and keep expanding this. But it's just a nice little addition. It's nice to see these search console features added that are helpful and you can actually do something with.

[Ross Dunn]

So yeah, like the feature that everyone's been waiting for. And I correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's not even remotely being talked about or it's even here yet is some way to identify AI crawlers or AI searches. It still hasn't been broken out, has it?

[Scott Vanik]

No, no. It's gotta be eventually. I mean. But why are they taking so long? I don't know.

[Ross Dunn]

It can't. There must be some fiscal reason for it. And I just can't put my finger on it. And I feel dumb because there has to be. There's just no other reason why they wouldn't add it by this point, they certainly have figured out how to. Yeah, baffling. Yeah.

[Scott Vanik]

Like AI over AI overviews, data should be in search console automatically. They've got access to all that stuff. Totally easy.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's already AI trackers. We can already put them on our site to see AI you can look into. In fact, one of the things I noticed in an article recently was that someone said this, and I do believe it's true. Log files are back. So web log files.

[Scott Vanik]

Webalizer.

[Ross Dunn]

Oh, my God, yes. So for those who don't know, when you have a website, there are log files that are created every time something's happened on the site. Anything that visits the site, it doesn't matter what it is, a log is created and there are log analyzers. And they were very expensive, very expensive back in the day because they. You would literally run them on a machine. Machine pretty much had to be dedicated if you had a huge log file. Because log files can be in multiple gigabytes very easily. For a site that's got even just modest traffic. But everything is in there. And Google Analytics does not track even probably, let's say, I'll be generous and say it shows 70% of what's there. There's still that 30%, which is. Never mind. And mostly is not that interesting to the average person, but that 30% is bots and errors and all these different things that it doesn't necessarily track or track as well. So, yeah, I do believe that that is back and a lot of people are going to start digging into that further if there's not more uptake from the search engines on providing this data. Anyway, you have. Well, first of all, stepforth.com has. Well, it's got a little dust on it. We used to write copiously. We wrote hundreds of articles in the two between 2000 and 2010 and less. So probably not even. Probably maybe a hundred if we're lucky. No, probably 50 from 2010 to 2020. Now, I'm not counting show notes from the podcast here, but these were literally like. We went all out into articles and we created a newsletter and we had a great following, so on and so on. Well, all that content, well, a lot of it anyway, is still there, but it's all dusty and we really haven't done any work on it. And one of the ones that was quite popular was how to maintain rankings after a redesign. So when you go to website, you need to redesign it. Well, what do you need to do to get it running again and make sure that you're, when you redo it, make sure that you don't lose any rankings. Well, Scott took, took a look at it and I think decided it needed an update.

[Scott Vanik]

My, my brain exploded, Ross. Like can you just tweak it and clean it up a little bit, make it current? And I looked at it, I thought, wow, this is like 20 years old. There is nothing about this old, like very, very little about this old article that applied and it was just, I had to take it on and redo it. So I've gone from what I think it was about a 500 word article and I'm at around 7,000 words and starting to publish it to the site. By the time you're listening to this, it will hopefully be live and.

[Ross Dunn]

No, no, no, it'll be, it'll be a book on Amazon.

[Scott Vanik]

It'll be a book. It's definitely going to be a book. Should have been a white paper or something, I don't know. So I've kind of gone crazy. I don't have a link to share. I was kind of hoping I'd have a link to share by now, but I don't. But I'll share it later if you're interested. But in essence, you know, I've been doing this 20, I don't even know anymore, 23 years or something like that. And it's probably the question I'm asked the most. If I asked, you know, if I had the FAQ of all my client communication for the past 20 plus years, this one would be at the top almost guaranteed. And so I figured we need to do this right. And I thought, well, this is SEO101 and this is 101 level stuff that it just fits. So I've made a very condensed summary here and we'll go over some of the points again. I'll share the link and you can look at the intense details if you need to know more. But, but I figured we'll just go through some of this. Yeah, let's go. Okay, so if first of all you're going to redesign this seems like a no brainer. Back up your site, back it up before you do anything. I know we talk about that kind of stuff all the time, but it's so important, you know, you see sites launch. Who was it? Years ago we had a client who launched a new site but their old site was gone so they just, and then the new site was broken. So they were just stuck with a broken site. I can't, I wish I could remember who that was.

[Ross Dunn]

So if you have a proper couple, at least.

[Scott Vanik]

So, yeah. So if you have a proper backup and a recovery plan, you're good. If something goes bad, you're good. Like sometimes when you import WordPress across servers, things screw up and then it's totally messed up. Our programmer Dennis, I'm sure, has lost his fair share of hair dealing with issues like that. So it happens. And so rolling back. We've definitely had to roll back client sites before, so be prepared to have to do that if you need to. Also conduct.

[Ross Dunn]

Won't we just tag team on this? So conduct a content audit of the current site. So you really need to map out what content on your site is ranking and performing. Well, this is really, really, really important because if you're going to be moving over or if you want it, if you want to maintain rankings, obviously those are the most important pages. You're going to want to maintain rankings. 2 and when you create a new website, you're going to want to have a good map of what those original URLs were. And I would recommend having. Well, you've already got a backup of the site, but actually backup, create copies of those pages somewhere so you can compare and contrast when you're doing work on them later. That may be overkill. You could never use those. But just do it just for the backup sake anyway. Look at what's there, look at their rankings, which ones are converting better. Anything you can learn about them before you move forward into a redesign is a good idea. It's going to help everything your whole concept is. It's going to help. That's. That's.

[Scott Vanik]

I don't have this in here, but you made me think of something good. There is. It doesn't hurt to take your old site and put it on a hidden server somewhere so you can really easily reference it. Um, so consider doing that. Or even at a subdomain that's fully blocked. Make sure it's blocked and nobody can get to it. There's no links pointing in. Or you might even want to just put it locally on your own machine or something. I mean, have a separate proper backup, but just for your own reference points. That would make life easy.

[Ross Dunn]

I laugh because I know we've had clients do that or they kept a credit a copy and the damn thing got indexed and it just made things so much of a headache. Yeah, I definitely block it.

[Scott Vanik]

I. I don't want to go down story lane, but I remember years ago, like, I feel like I was brand new at this. There was a site A client redid their website and they did a backup and it crashed. The new site crashed and they had to go to their backup. But their backup was literally a printout. They printed their website and had it on paper and then they had to go back to their. Don't know if you remember that or not. And they wanted us to do it. And it was like, yeah, that's just not.

[Ross Dunn]

We're.

[Scott Vanik]

I can't remember. Maybe we quoted them really high because, I mean, how absurd would that be to do. So don't do that.

[Ross Dunn]

Don't print. I remember a ton of. Over the years of clients also coming to us when we're doing web design. Coming to us with a book practically of pages, all printed or written.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah.

[Ross Dunn]

And they wanted us to convert that into a website and. Oh, dear God, no. Because we'd already signed. We just. Like at that time I was junior. I hadn't like. I still didn't understand the pitfalls and the things you need to make sure are really clear when you're doing web design. And I should have made clear at that time. All content must be digital. You just didn't even think that the other. Anything else would be provided.

[Scott Vanik]

No, it's.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, I love that.

[Scott Vanik]

I love thinking back to it. I didn't like it then, but I like it now.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah.

[Scott Vanik]

Number. Whatever we're at. I don't even know the next one. Maintaining URL structure. So this is not always possible, especially if you're coming from an older content management system which has really weird URL strings and variables and all kinds of stuff.

[Ross Dunn]

Stuff.

[Scott Vanik]

But if at all possible, do not change URLs on your site. Keep everything the same. This allows you to avoid redirecting. It allows Google to index the changes on these pages very quickly. Your downtime is just going to be minimal. So if you can keep your URLs the same, do so especially. Especially on the content that's performing exceptionally well. And like, we actually went. We had a client come to us to do a redesign. This is several years ago. And they were panicked because they're not. They ranked number one for their main term and it was their bread and butter. If they lost it, they're done. And we did a redesign. They loved the site. We went above and beyond like they had. They switched into WordPress. It wasn't WordPress and all their old URLs were dot HTML. So we had to find a plugin that changed all the blog posts to HTML within a WordPress installation. A whole bunch of crazy custom Stuff to make sure they all stayed the same. Then they wouldn't launch the site. They waited a year because they were scared. But. But when they did launch, it went really, really well. So keeping those URLs the same is really good. That includes the use of WWW in your URL. If you're using it, keep using it. If you're not, don't use it. So just keep it the same. And as well as trailing forward slashes at the end of URLs. A URL with a forward slash at the end is different than the version without it. Google will, you know, so make sure that 1 version 301 redirects to the other and keep it the same as what you have currently.

[Ross Dunn]

It's so it seems so simple. Like why would us forward slash have a different make a difference. But it's vastly different. And I probably took too long if I look back on it to really realize that. I think it's probably six years in before I really ran into an issue where that became an issue. And I was shocked. I just didn't realize. Even though ironically I'd actually managed a hosting company at one point I had not come across that issue. I don't know why, but anyway, it's stunning the little details that can make a major difference. In fact, you were talking about a site where we did this work and I looked up the site and I can't say the name to say I noticed it's still on. I think they're just selling the domain so I can't mention it. Even though it was many, many years ago.

[Scott Vanik]

It was a long time ago.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. But our job for that and we knocked it out of the park. It's one of my proudest moments because it was not easy was to take this website that was vast, it was huge E commerce site and transition it to a brand new design that was substantially different without losing any rankings. And that was the mandate. They did not care how we did it as long as we did it. If we had to keep every single character the same. Otherwise fine, do it. And we did that. And we did it so damn well. It rocked. In fact, it did better out of the like that that I was proud of that. I'm always going to think back on that and proud of that.

[Scott Vanik]

I think you might have had the wrong domain if we're talking about the same client. Because their site's still up.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, that's what I mean. The site is still up. But it's for sale. No. Okay, so we're Thinking of different ones, we must have knocked out a park on a couple of them.

[Scott Vanik]

Then we're just that good, I guess.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah. So the next one is creating a 301.301 redirect map and make sure to implement it. So 301 redirects, if you do have to change URLs and you're going to have to change some, almost certainly you're going to. Well, maybe not have to. You're almost certainly going to. Even if you're consolidating content because you realize a whole bunch of it's cannibalizing another piece of content. But they're all trying to go up to the same rankings is what I mean. They should all be consolidated into one page. All those redirects, all those other pages that were removed, instead of just having people go to them by mistake and finding a dead page, they should be redirecting to the new one. And when, if there's a change in the URLs at all, like just site wide, well, that's going to be a lot of redirects and you need to make sure that that's properly set up. Either that or one site wide redirect that's set up in the code getting out of side of 101 here. But it's all stuff that your webmaster can help you with. But it does have to be implemented because if you don't do it, all of this fails. It's that bad. Your redirect map is everything. It's telling Google. This is now at this address. Don't consider it gone. Don't make all of the authority I built for this evaporate, which would be devastating for your business. Yes, hugely important. And I see it. We still see this. We still see clients coming to us saying we don't know why our rankings dropped after this. We did this change last year. Whether do you do redirects? I don't know. And we find that they haven't or we can't find conclusive either way. We just know that their rankings plummeted, which makes no sense. So it's probably a bad redirect implementation. Very, very important.

[Scott Vanik]

And in line with that same thing, once your redirects are in place, make sure all of your internal linking and navigation throughout your site is changed to and updated to reflect any URL adjustments you've made. So if you've got links within your blog posts that point to your service page or a product page, change those as well. Now the redirect will save you there. Because if you've done the redirects correctly, the those links will ultimately get people and spiders where they need to go. So that's good. So you don't need to panic over this one, but you definitely, over time, at least want to fix them. Screaming Frog is awesome. You could run Screaming Frog on your new site and you'll find all those redirects that you've implemented. And anytime Screaming Frog finds a redirect, you will know that that's a link you should ultimately change at some point as well. Huh?

[Ross Dunn]

What? Screaming Frog?

[Scott Vanik]

I don't know. It's a loud amphibian that. So the screaming frog. I feel like we talk about it enough.

[Ross Dunn]

I know, but you never know when someone's going to start listening to the show and going, fair enough. What the heck are they talking about?

[Scott Vanik]

All right, so go to. I was gonna say go to screamingfrog.com but it might be.co.uk actually.

[Ross Dunn]

Don't. There we go.

[Scott Vanik]

And check it out. Google Screaming Frog. It's a spider that will run on your site. So you open it up, you type in your website address and you say go.

[Ross Dunn]

And.

[Scott Vanik]

And it will crawl and visit everything on your website. All your pages. It'll categorize all your images, all your heading tags, your title tags. It just does. It looks at everything and then you can go and see what's going on. You can look at all your title tags, you can look at all your redirects, all your, your not found errors. It's just awesome.

[Ross Dunn]

And there's the ultimate diagnosis tool. It's excellent.

[Scott Vanik]

It's so good. And if you're worried about cost, it's not cheap. It's. I can't remember what it costs, like three or four hundred dollars. Like dollars. It's in euros, I think. 279 Euros or something a year. So I mean, I mean from a business perspective, if you. It may not be too bad, but they do have a free version that's limited to 500 URLs. So if you want to try it, grab the free version, it'll crawl the first 500 URLs and stop. If you have a very small website like a, you know, two or three page, 10 page, whatever, with all the resources like PDFs and images and things, it might even be enough. I'm not sure what internal features are also blocked out in the free version. So you won't get everything, but it might be enough. So Screaming Frog is the ultimate tool for SEOs.

[Ross Dunn]

It's 199 pounds a year.

[Scott Vanik]

Pounds.

[Ross Dunn]

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Not sure why. They are very coarse. Brexit. Yeah. Thinking they should still be euros, but they're not. Yeah. Actually, I forgot this. I didn't remember seeing this before, but they have their own log file analyzer as well. It's interesting.

[Scott Vanik]

Oh, I've never actually used it. That might be fun.

[Ross Dunn]

I'm sure we have to buy it though. It's got separate pricing, of course. Yeah. But that's probably going to get more and more use now thanks to the logs becoming an issue. Anyway, next up, choosing an SEO friendly CMS is really important as well. Now what we're talking about is are your content management systems and WordPress is an example of a CMS. It started out as just a blog platform, just a place to go and write and then over time people started building out on it and become. Become this powerhouse. Anyway, it is one of the options. It's certainly the most mainstream option. It does not fit every need, but whatever you choose, it needs to be SEO friendly. And WordPress definitely is very SEO friendly. There are many themes that can be used for WordPress. Most of those don't have any impact. Negative impact on SEO friendliness. I think there might have been one at one point. Probably I'll just say there's none. They're all good. Go ahead and go with WordPress if you can. Other ones not. Web flow is very good but it's. It's more technical to use. Yeah. There's also. What's the name of it? That one that's. Anyway, there, there's a number of them out there. Just make sure you do your homework and be sure that it does have the best environment for search engines.

[Scott Vanik]

One thing I'll. I'll note as well is if, if you're choo. I. I generally would say stay away from proprietary systems that companies have built that are smaller scale. I've had some good experiences with proprietary systems and I've had some complete and total nightmares. Like total nightmares. And it's hard to know if you're going to get a good one or not. So ask a lot of questions. Ask about functionality and is it SEO friendly and if I need something customized, can you do it and what's that going to cost? We had a client one time, they were missing their robots. Txt file. They just. It didn't exist in the content management system and they needed to add it and I said you should add it because. And in their case they specifically needed it. I can't remember why they. But they had to have it and they were quoted. I can't remember what the numbers were.

[Ross Dunn]

But it was like 300 or something just to add it.

[Scott Vanik]

No, it was more than that. It was something like 10 hours or something like that at whatever their hourly rate was like. It was just disgusting. Anytime they needed a small change, like dollar signs like you've never heard of. So whereas if you go with something like WordPress or Shopify or whatever, any of the bigger names, worst case, you're hiring a professional developer to come help you for a lot less than a proprietary system would cost you. But that said, you probably don't need help anyways because it's built into the system.

[Ross Dunn]

So.

[Scott Vanik]

Be careful. It's tough to avoid. But if you're going proprietary, ask a lot of questions. If you're going for a big name, you're probably okay. Titles and meta descriptions so meta descriptions, not so much. But yes, title tags. Again, if a page is performing really well, copy over your existing titles and descriptions. If it's not doing well and it's like a filler page, like, I don't know, like a privacy policy page, doesn't really matter if it's a main product page. You definitely want to make sure you get that over there if that page has any kind of rankings or performance. So definitely make sure you get those in there. And yeah, okay.

[Ross Dunn]

The other thing I want to mention is, although it's a very small part of the pie, still, there has been. There's enough evidence that OpenAI is using the meta description tag in its evaluation of a page. So do keep in mind that the meta description is no longer just a way to drag people in through search results, just by taunting them, tempting them in. It actually is being used in rankings consideration. At least. We don't know what the weighting is or anything. There's just too much of a black box out there right now. And gosh, it's probably changing every single time. But it is something to be noted that carries a little more weight than it used to, which is a bit of a surprise. Nice to see, but surprise.

[Scott Vanik]

All right, throw in one more little thing. I don't know if we talked about this in last week's show, and that's with title tags. There's always been Title tags have to be 50 characters, 55, 60 characters, 75 characters. There's so many pixels. Like there's always these rules on how long they should be. And there's just like mounting evidence that you can make your title Tag. I'm not going to say as long as you want, but you can make them pretty long and it seems to still be helpful. So, you know, at the very least, if you're creating a title tag and it just has to be a little bit too long for whatever reason, your branding or whatever, it's okay, don't stress about it, you're fine. So if you see a tool like Semrush or even Screaming Frog or Moz or whatever, and they're yelling at you, saying your title tags are too long. Yoast or Yoast. Yes, Yoast especially, you know, as long as they're not like 5,000 words in your title tag. You know, I wouldn't, you know, if you're still within a, I don't know, 50% or something, I don't even really know. I have a number for you, but if it seems reasonable, don't worry. But do note that anything beyond that approximately 60 character mark, it's not going to show up in search results. Nobody will ever see it. But please don't spam beyond that either. Second might get you in trouble too. There's a fine line between spam and just making use of that tag.

[Ross Dunn]

So, yeah, there's, we mentioned it, I think in one of the most recent podcasts that in local SEO, Julia Hawkins and, and that sort of crew of hyper focused local SEO companies are saying, hey, just go ahead and add local locations that you're doing business in in the title tag and go nuts. You know, they just don't seem to care. And it's working for rankings and it's always kind of giving me a sour taste, the idea of that, because it is, it harkens back to the worst of the spamming days.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah, but early day keyword stuffing.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. You know, if you absolutely had no other choice, I guess you could do, you could try it and if it works for you, you might be really, really, really pleased. The problem is, and I was talking to my friend Steve about this other day and he's kind of in the same boat as us. And then he really likes to do everything really ethically because it stands the test of time. Says they're all going to be panicking when things change and it's, and it's clearly spam. There's nothing around it that's not spam. It's black hat. Even if it is working right now. And what's, how bad is that going to look? H. Yeah. I mean, I'll be the first to admit we're tempted to test it on one of our own sites. Um, but it's more of a test. I, I just don't think it's the best idea for anyone to try again if, if you're down to just, ah, I got to get money in. It's got to be done and I don't mind taking the risk. Well, at least you're doing it with all of the facts that it could be hurting you later. And keep an eye on things. Yeah. Anyway, beat that. Beat that one down a bit. But I wanted to make sure we covered that fairly important point. Next up is structured data. Remember to copy over and update your structured markup. This is something that was done generally in existing websites before they're redesigned. They typically have this information, so make sure that is copied over. If you didn't have any, well, now you get to add it and you're probably going to be much better off for it. But just remember to copy it over.

[Scott Vanik]

Site speed. Not a lot to say about this one, but if you're redesigning, definitely work on making the new site faster than the old site, period. It's probably going to be faster naturally, anyways, because if you are redesigning, your old site is likely aged quite well and it probably runs slower naturally. So, you know, make sure that you take care of that and do whatever you can to make it faster. Optimize your images for file sizes and things like that. That's something that can be really difficult from an SEO perspective normally, because to rename image files and resize them for resolution and file sizes and stuff isn't always an easy task. Now's a good time and that'll improve your page speed and it should filter down to your rankings.

[Ross Dunn]

Awesome. When you do make the switch, please unblock the new site. If you built the site separately, which you probably did in a sandbox, and all the contents in there, it's all being proofread. It's been optimized. This beauty is ready to go. And then launch it. You gotta make sure that you've unblocked it. There's a setting in WordPress. It's a simple setting. You can live or die by it. If it's. If it's blocking search engines, that's it. You just kissed everything goodbye when you launched it. And you. It's devastating. Yes, you can potentially get it back if you learn about it a week later and turn it back on, but in the meantime, you've done damage. So make sure that you have unblocked your new site and the last is.

[Scott Vanik]

Just after Everything's launched, monitor how things are going. I know it seems obvious, but some people just don't do it. You know, Google Analytics, see what your site traffic is doing. Google search console, look for things like pages that aren't being indexed, 404 errors, that sort of thing. Semrush, Moz Ahrefs, or any kind of reporting platform. Just to get a sense of how your rankings overall are doing. And keep a close eye on that for the first while, because that's when you're gonna see the biggest and most dramatic changes. One thing I've seen. Well, two things I've seen. I've seen sites that launch and immediately the rankings go through the roof. They're awesome. And then after maybe a week or two, they come right back down to where they were or maybe even lower. And I've seen the opposite of that. I've seen things crash and burn and then come back. Those spikes are not that unusual. So don't get too excited or too worried if you see it initially. But after a couple weeks, if it hasn't leveled out, you know, take a deeper look and try to figure out what went wrong. If anything, maybe Google just likes your site less or more, I don't know, depending on what you're seeing. So. But keep a close eye on all that.

[Ross Dunn]

Maybe that you've increased the cannibalization content. You're just, it's too spread out. There's a whole bunch of things that could have been done incorrectly. But if you follow what we mentioned there, I think you'll be in a good place. The other thing about that, ups and down, that is you got to keep in mind Google, it's not unusual for a website to change hands. And when it changes hand, it's essentially a new business. So when something fundamental changes in the design of a site and how it's running, everything Google has the kind of a. Would be smart. And they do. They need to take a step back and go, is this the same company? What's going on here? They were number one before. I think I'm going to put them down to 10 because just not sure. Oh, okay. No, no, it's the same company. Yeah. This is great content. Okay, back to number one or two or whatever. It's. It's very logical and I love that. It's just a logical process. All right, let's take a quick break. And we come back. We're going to talk about a few more points on this. And that's if you're also changing your domain there's some stuff to keep in mind. Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepford Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vannack. I want to make a note too, that if you want to keep up to date on any of these big changes in the world of SEO SEO grok.com that's S-O G-R-O-K.com is where I'm doing some additional writing and keeping everyone up to date on all the stuff that I'm learning right now. So don't forget to check that out. I think you'll find it good and a fun read. All right, back to this. What happens if you're also changing your domain after a redesign? What do you need to worry about here? Scott?

[Scott Vanik]

Okay, so one thing to note. We talked time.

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[Scott Vanik]

Creating a 301 redirect map if you are changing your domain, that makes this map even more critical. And in that case, you are redirecting every single page from your site to the new domain. So those redirects are so, so important. Make sure you do it. I just want to emphasize that more. On the flip side of that, we did say earlier, and I didn't have this in our notes, but I did say earlier, don't change your URLs unless you absolutely have to. If you are changing your top level domain, now's a good time to change URLs if you want to, because you're there. You're redirecting anyways because your domain is changing. So if you want to change your structure, now is the perfect time. Because you have to do it. Or you don't have to do it, but you have to redirect anyway. So and do it now and don't do it in a year from now. So something to consider.

[Ross Dunn]

One thing I just wanted to add. I did just add it to our notes here, but we were talking about 301 redirect maps. Also, don't forget about the redirects you had on your past site. Yes, you might have had some there that you want to make sure are passed along to the new one. And it's very easy to just forget about that because you're so stuck on this new site and your mind's all in there. There could be some really important redirects there that were passing along authority from great content you had before that had links from news sites for all you know, like they could be just game changers. You don't want those to go to 404s, you want them redirected. So don't miss those. All right, I was thinking about that too much. So I don't know if you finished up here. Did you cover all that?

[Scott Vanik]

Uh, no. I'll just go through it real quick. It's pretty simple stuff. Google's change of address tool. Google it. Just do a search. Change of address tool. You'll find it. Make sure you use it. When I get this article published, I actually have a step by step guide on exactly how to do that. It's a bit involved, but it's not complicated. Trust me, just about anybody can do it. So do that. If you're changing your domain again, updating internal links, we talked about that. It just applies even more so here. And then also updating inbound links from third parties. So your social media profiles, your Better Business Bureau profile, your all your directories, Google business profiles, all that kind of stuff. Make sure that any links that you have control over out there on the web, that you change those to point to your new domain, don't rely on the 301 redirect because you know, if you can change it, change it. And then finally, I just want to say that if you do change your domain, do note that things may take time. It's not as quick as a redesign on the same domain. When you change the domain, you're probably going to see ranking drops and they will take a while to get back. And I'll give you one quick example. We had a client who redid their website recently, like around the turn of the year, New Year, like January or so. And then they didn't launch it until February, March. And they listened to none of my advice and it was a disaster. And their rankings crashed and they had massive staff turnover at the same time. And it was just like, oh my goodness, what's going on here? And they went through a proprietary system for their content management system. They just did all the things I would say, don't do this. And so I've been stressing about that and their new contact, he's been great and we Chat often and, and he knows and understands that this is going to take time. Well, the redirects are also implemented wrong. They only put half of their content back on the site, their blog content. So all that's been fixed. The issues are now resolved and we are about six months in and their rankings have skyrocketed in the past three to four weeks. Things have finally caught and grabbed hold. And that's not unusual. It wouldn't normally take that long. But because they had all these other issues and they're, you know, trying to get the developers to give me access or fix things so I could add the schema markup back into place because I couldn't put that in and, and there was no code for. Anyways, the list goes on and on and on about all the stress I've had with this particular client. Even though the people are great, the project has been stressful, but things are coming back in a hurry now. So even if you screw up, there's hope it can come back and you can be fixed. But if you don't screw up and you follow all the steps that need to be followed, you won't even. Well, I shouldn't say you won't. You probably won't have downtime like that.

[Ross Dunn]

So let's hope. Let's hope. Okay, so local SEO news Google Business Profiles what's Happening feature has expanded from just the United States to uk, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When it launched initially in the US it was for a single location food and drink business is now also available for multi location restaurants, not just single locations. Oh, and bars. Google plans to roll us out to other categories in the future other than just restaurants and bars. But that's what it is. So how does it work? From what I've been able to gather, essentially whatever you are advertising within your Google Business profile as an event coming up, it will. Smartly, intelligently. Intelligently is what they want you to think. Grab that and add it as today what's Happening. The example they have here is today, I guess it's the. I see the bar is called Dive bar. So it says Dive bar Happy hour at 5 or whatever. So this person's coming on to, to sing today or whatever. You know, it, it gives some leverage to why you might want to go there, giving you a little reason to get excited about going to the restaurant or whatever. So it's, it's cool. It's not something that they've added and expanded and I really wish they would just focus on the spam. That's in Google business. But hey, they don't seem to care about it. So moving on, they, they do not. No. And what's here? Google's DeepMind Google DeepMind's block rank could reshape how AI ranks information now. I didn't read this. Tell me all about it.

[Scott Vanik]

You didn't read this? Wow. I put in a piece of AI news that you haven't seen yet. So Google DeepMind researchers have developed Block Rank which is a new method for ranking retrieving information more efficiently than traditional LLMs. It is not in place currently. Google is not using it yet. There is a paper that the link will be in the show notes if you want to really dive into it. There's a research paper that Google put out on this. Essentially it's designed to help solve a problem, a challenge called in context Ranking. Essentially this is a process of having a model read a query and multiple documents at once to decide which one matters most. And this is a quote from Danny Goodwin from the actual was a search engine land Search Engine land article I started to write. I'm like I'm just going to to quote him instead. He said ICR is expensive and slow. Models use a process called attention where every word compares itself to every other word. Ranking hundreds of documents at once gets exponentially harder. For LLMs, block rank restructures how an LLM pays attention to text. Instead of every document attending to every other document, each one focuses on itself and the shared instructions. So if that makes sense to you, awesome. If it doesn't, it's okay. Essentially what Block Rank is doing is it's making everything faster. So Google's team has found that Block Rank ran about 4.7 times faster than standard fine tuned models when ranking 100 documents. And it scaled smoothly to 500 documents in roughly one second. Which sounds pretty good to me. And again, as of today it's not being used by Google but let's be real, they're going to use if it's that much faster, it's just a matter of time. What impact they'll actually have on rankings, I don't know, probably none. But you should get faster results so that's always a win.

[Ross Dunn]

It sounds like something I actually read about just the other day. I don't know if it does. It's exactly the same. There's so many different technologies out there right now, but this one was essentially the AI takes a picture of the document and that picture allows it to understand the document completely and utterly immediately. It's, it's insane how it does this. It's like a, I don't even, I, I part, part of the reason I didn't put it in here is because I don't understand enough to explain it. But it was, it was mind blowing how much faster it would consider because they also mentioned the in context ranking and that's why I think there's a connection. But they did it because they're fundamentally running into this issue where if you need it to analyze long documents and you have multiple long documents, let's say in a project, it AI just falls apart. It just loses context so quickly. Apparently it's exponentially more difficult as the content gets longer and they need to solve this. So this sounds like something's very, very similar. I think a block, I think of a photo. That's a big block of a photo. I don't know, who knows, maybe they're not the same thing, but they're obviously trying to go for the same concept. At least it seems that way. And there's going to be so much more to come. It's mind blowing. Every time I turn the corner and every time I open a browser and look at anything, anything related to news in our industry, it's AI spaghetti. There's just so much stuff happening, it's mind boggling. So enjoy the ride everyone. We're trying to, it's, it's all just crazy.

[Scott Vanik]

Like even, like I, I seeing AI parallels all over the place. Even my wife's a teacher. Well, Ross knows this and she's seeing it being used like she uses it all the time. Her students are submitting AI generated assignments. Assignments. So that's, that's a bit of an issue. But she's even working on her master's right now. And part of her, she's doing a big research, what's it called, an inquiry project. And that a lot of what she's doing is based on AI and how older teaching populations are struggling to use AI and adapt it in the classroom and actually make use of it because, you know, you're a few years away from retiring. Do you really want to adapt this new technology and teach your students how to use it? Well, you should, but it's tough. So she's doing a whole project on that and it's just everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. It's insane.

[Ross Dunn]

It's, it's fascinating. Scary at times, but mostly invigorating. I was very, very reluctant about how much it was affecting our industry and just reluctant about the whole concept of the change that was coming, but I mean, there's no stopping it. So I just, you know, as I figured it would have to. I'm embracing it and it's helping, but it is also frustrating. I've literally spent hundreds of hours trying to make it work the way I want it to work and I just had to give up and just work with it more so because I didn't find a way to make it work the way I wanted it to. And that just seems to be the nature of it. It's nowhere near where we need it to be, but soon enough it'll be more than we needed it.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah, it's like it doesn't do what we want, but it does enough that it's now disrupted and screwed everything up.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, exactly. And has everyone on their. On their tippy toes. It's a little scary just how much change they're expecting and.

[Scott Vanik]

Yeah.

[Ross Dunn]

Anyway, well, on behalf of Myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanac, thank you for joining us today. If you have any questions you'd like to share with us, please feel free to post them on our Facebook group, easily found by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. Have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm.

[Scott Vanik]

Thanks for listening, everybody.

[Ross Dunn]

Foreign.

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[Scott Vanik]

So.

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