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- [00:01]
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- [02:08]
Ross Dunn
Hello and welcome to SCO101 on WMR FM. Episode number 518. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Fanack. Well, this is our last episode before the holidays and the new year. Time just flies. It's been an incredible year of change. I never saw this coming, did you?
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Scott Vanac
Never, no.
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Ross Dunn
Although I guess we shouldn't say never. We did have a. A getaway where we went and we just thought about what's coming and knew that there's going to be big changes. It's just that this was fundamentally awe inspiring. How much change has been in the SEO world?
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Scott Vanac
I would say the change is not even just SEO, but just AI in general. And the non SEO stuff, it does. Like, I think I kind of saw it coming. We probably all did, but not this quickly. And I know things move fast in the world of tech, but who would have thought that we're this close to, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back and murdering somebody. Right? Like I, I would have thought we'd be years, years away from where AI is today. And it, it's terrifying thinking where is it going to be? I was going to say in five years. I guess that too. But like in a year from now.
- [03:28]
Ross Dunn
Let alone five years, five years will be dramatic more. And, and, and they were actually saying we'll get into SEO in a sec here. But I mean one of the things that they, they were saying in a lot of the videos I've been watching with experts, and I'm not just talking about Armch, these are people who literally built some of the AI that we're using. They're saying that they can't even predict past a couple, maybe five years because as soon as, as soon as AI becomes super intelligent, no one, no one can guess what's coming because it'll be literally fundamentally more intelligent than we are. So who knows? Anyone who thinks they know is guessing and arguably, I guess that's any kind of prediction, but really, really guessing at that point. Anyway, we'll see what happens. It's an arms race right now for it. So it's kind of terrifying how fast it's going and that's what we're not even seeing at all. Just wow. Well, let's jump right into it and start with some AI and SEO news. And this is Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google. He says that they messed up by under investing in AI. He admitted that Google for quote, for sure messed up by under investing in AI and failing to seriously pursue the opportunity after releasing the research that led to today's generative AI era. Of course what he's speaking about are the Transformers. Is this form of. I don't even know how to explain it because I don't know it well enough. But literally it's the, it was the linchpin. It was what allowed AI to become possible. And I have read about it. I remember even explaining it at one point. I can't remember right now, but what did he say here, Scott? I mean paraphrase, this looks like a.
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Scott Vanac
Lot, but I am going to not make an Optimus prime comment when you said Transformers. So I'll just skip past that. That's the first thing that came to mind anyways. So this is a quote from Sergey Brin. I guess I would say in some ways we for sure messed up in that. We under invested and sort of didn't take it as seriously as we should say. Eight years ago when we published the Transformer paper, we actually didn't bring it to the people because chatbots say dumb things and you know, OpenAI ran with it, which is good for them. It was super smart insight and it was also our people like Ilya Sutskever. I know I'm saying that way wrong. I'm sorry.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
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Scott Vanac
You don't know either. So I'm not the only dumb one here today. Great. Who went there to do that? But I think we still have benefited from that long history. When he was asked where AI is going, he said, I think we just don't know. Is there a ceiling to this intelligence? I guess in addition to the question that you raised, can it do anything a person can do? There's the question, what things can it do that a person cannot do? That sort of super intelligence question. And I think it's just not known how smart things can be.
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Ross Dunn
Yeah. And just to jump back to the Transformer bit, an AI overview is informing me of the answer. Here is a Transformer in AI is a powerful neural network architecture introduced by Google in 2017 that excels @ understanding sequential data like text by using a self attention mechanism to weigh the importance of different parts of the input, allowing it to grasp context and relationships across long sequences efficiently. Not Super 101 there, but you know, totally nerd out here. Remember in Terminator how they went back to try and get the guy that created the chip? Well, whoever created, they're in trouble. Yeah, Transformers are in real trouble, man. They're going to get a visit because they literally set all of this off. Without it, none of this would be possible. At least we know of.
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Scott Vanac
It. That's proof right there that time travel is impossible. Because that would have happened by now if it was possible.
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Ross Dunn
Right? Well, we wouldn't know. Depending. Depending on how you believe in time travel, we wouldn't know. If it had, something could have already been changed. Oh, oh.
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Scott Vanac
That'S. That's a good.
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Ross Dunn
Point. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe the robots went back and made this happen earlier. I don't know. All right, Google's Robbie Stein Names five SEO factors for AI Mode and AI Mode for those who don't know when you're doing a search in Google, there is a tab. Many people forget it's there. In my experience, it's you just click on it and all of a sudden you're in kind of a chatgpt scenario where it's just a prompt and only your results and you can have discussions with the AI that is Google AI mode. So Google's Robbie Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, was interviewed recently on the Forward Future Live podcast. The discussion revolved around AI search and the interview he discussed in and in the interview, he discussed five factors that are used for determining if a website meets their quality and help helpfulness standards. Number one, is your content directly answering the user's question? Number two, is it high quality? There's a loaded one, but anyway, Number three, does it load quickly? Number four, is it original? And finally, number five, does it cite sources? That's a good one. Now, of course it can cite sources, but I'm hoping that they weigh put a lot of weight on the quality of the sources. I do believe they do, but I've seen instances where they don't necessarily because the sources are some armchair person. It's like what that person really doesn't know what they're talking about. Anyway, there's some good stuff there. Like I said, is it high quality? Is very much a loaded question. They were not really giving anything away there. But we do know a lot about the algorithm based on experience. We've talked about it before. We did it even in our our SEO 101 learning series. We talked about what it is that you need to have to be a high quality resource and get rankings. I think that really falls into that. Number two, is it high quality? It's the checkboxes for typical SEO. Okay, on that note, and this is. This will dovetail well into the next one. Todd Friesen, one of our colleagues and a friend, he posted something today. Maybe just cheer because not a lot of people are saying this. Not enough people are saying this. In my opinion, AI SEO is part of SEO. I mentioned it before, but there's a lot of people wanting to coin terms like geo, ae, A, I, E, O and I mean, it's just, there's just so many different terms and we've mentioned it before, but he's just like, no, this is a lot of what we're doing is exactly the same as we did before. There's really no change. And dovetailing into this search engine Land wrote something about a interview with Denny Sullivan and a whole crew of.
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Scott Vanac
Googlers. Wasn't it the one that I referenced? I think it was just Danny Sullivan and John Mueller. And then I also saw another article Barry Swartz wrote about Nick Fox who's from Google being interviewed with basically the same.
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Ross Dunn
Opinion. Okay, so in Search Engine Roundtable it shows five people that are, you.
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Scott Vanac
Know. Oh, I didn't see.
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Ross Dunn
That. Google's Denny Sullivan and John Mueller on SEO for AI. It's the same. Anyways, that's the nut. That's really the whole point here. In a recent search off the Record episode, Google's Danny Solomon and John Mueller pushed back on the idea that brand a separate AI SEO strategy. Sullivan noted that the acronyms keep changing. Yes, but the advice does not right for humans, not for ranking systems, whether those systems are traditional searches or LLMs. What was the rest of this.
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Scott Vanac
Scott? Yeah, so then there was a separate interview as well. Oh, I didn't write down who he was interviewed by. Sorry people. But it was a separate interview. Nick Fox, who's Google's SVP of knowledge, which I didn't know that was a thing. Sorry. Of knowledge and information. He chimed in on this also and he was asked is there guidance for publishers who want to be part of AI about if they should view their content in any way differently? Now, kind of an awkward question.
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Ross Dunn
But that's what it.
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Scott Vanac
Was. And he responded with the shorter answer is no. The shorter answer is what you have built. And the way to optimize to do well in Google's AI experiences is very similar. I would say the same. And how to perform well in traditional search. I read that badly. I'm sorry. And it really does come down to build a great site, build great content. The way we put it is build for users, build for what you would want to read and what you would want to access. So you're fired. We were joking about that too. He's going to fire me live.
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Ross Dunn
On SEO101 but I think I'll. Yeah, no, I hopefully got the point across there. Now I'm not saying that they're right here, 100%. There's clearly ways to influence AI and get better rankings by following the formulas that are everywhere of writing in chunks, you know, making your article very cataclysm like catalog. That's not the word I want to use. Structured. So you've got the headings kind of like you would normally do an article but in this case it is more so structured. Right. Like when you did the article you did, Scott, redid, you made it more structured and followed the formula and it worked within a.
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Scott Vanac
Day. Yeah, yeah, it worked.
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Ross Dunn
Fast. Now your mileage may vary. I mean, this is an article that was already well known by Google, had ranked well before, and this just pushed it back up again. So. And we have a lot of clout and in the sense that we are known as SEOs, we weren't an unknown quantity. If you had a brand new website, you were trying to do this. No, you're probably not going to be showing up day one somewhere. You need to have a certain amount of trust that has been built and authority. So just keep that in mind. None of this will be accomplished in a vacuum. Like, you can't just have a great article if you don't have the authority. If you don't have a great site that has a certain amount of, well, I guess, I guess authority again. Yeah. So really it comes down to the authority and ensuring that you're being seen because, hello, I think I saw something recently. Someone was saying it was Reddit, that, you know, they just don't understand why they're not being found or, you know, they're not being, they're being being indexed, but they're not still not showing. And it's like, well, they're just a website if they don't get links to them. I mean, I can't even fathom how many websites must be out there that Google sees each day that are new, that they're just like, well, earn your way there, man, because you're just a website right now. Nothing. You have to prove it. Or as my old friend Dana Lucadu used to say, earn the right to rank. You have to earn it. And once you do, though, these are the kind of tools and processes that will help you stay there and get the kind of visibility you need. Okay, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Google AI overviews. Welcome back to SEO101 on WMR FM, hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vanac. All right, what's up here there.
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Scott Vanac
Scott? Yeah, some information from SEMrush about AI overviews and, and how they surged in 2025 and then pulled back a little bit. So the, the analysis that Semrush did was based on 10 million keywords between January and November of 2025 and showcases a few trends that we've seen in AI overviews. So just some interesting little facts here in tidbits. So in January, AI overviews showed up for about six and a half percent of all queries, which seems low to me, but that might be right. In July that had peaked to 25% and then in November it's actually dropped back to about 16% of queries. So it is interesting to me because I guess the types of searches I do just tend to show AI overviews more because to me they show up 100% of the time. It's basically always. But you know, when you look at the big scheme of things, that's kind of where we're at about 16%. They did find that zero click searches actually have been reduced a little bit, at least based on the sample of keywords that they checked. They did. The analysis showed that since January, click through rates for keywords where AI overviews are shown actually rose slightly with zero click rates falling from 33.75% to 31.53%. So not a huge difference there. About one and a half percent or so better. Which it kind of contradicts everything that we've been learning lately. But again, it might just be based on the sample of search terms that they analyzed.
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Ross Dunn
For. Yeah, I guess just to clarify, for listeners, zero click searches essentially means kind of the worst case scenario for business owners. In many cases it's when AI overviews creates the answer and no one clicks through to a website and they just stay within Google. So we are seeing there was an improvement in that. For a longest time it went from it was at 33.75% of searches that used AI overviews led to no click. So no one got the benefit of that. It's gone down to 31%. So there is an improvement there, which is great to see. I mean it's. Who knows whether this is going to last but it's a data point. So I just want to clarify in case someone wanted that in a different perspective. And there's been a shift in intent, apparently. Once dominated by informational queries, AI overviews now appear more for other intents. In January, 91% of all AI overviews were for informational queries. In October, this drop to 57%. Commercial queries are up from 8% to 18. Transactional queries are up from 2% to 14%. That's probably because that's a money maker for Google. Yeah. Navigational queries are up from less than 1% to 10%. I wonder, you know, I'd love to see, let's see if there's any data on this But I would love to know what kind of adoption rate Google's seen for AI mode. I mean I forget about it half the time. Do you? Yeah, I still use Google and just, just, I just want to use Google. I just want to get the results and I use the AI overviews. I find them helpful sometimes but I don't click on AI mode. I did it like once in a month just the other day. Most of the time when I want to do an AI search I go and use one of my tools like Claude or I use Chat GPT. I don't actually go and use Google's AI mode. Just an interesting piece. No, I don't know. Something I find.
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Scott Vanac
Interesting. I use it sometimes. I guess it just depends on what I'm searching for. Rarely do I actually go in and click on a citation unless I'm trying to research something for a client or something. But on my own searches I rarely click on them. I actually had something interesting when was a couple days ago I guess and I, I was thinking about the game crib and I was trying to figure out what are the statistical odds of getting a 29 hand which if you play crib you know that's like the best you can get and it's almost impossible, right? Like it's super low odds. So I asked AI over, I asked Google, I said what are the odds of getting a 29 hand? And AI overviews gave came out with 1 in 280,000 or something like that which is, I don't know, probably correct. What do I know? And then it went on to describe what a 29 hand is. And I'm reading it just cuz. And it was wrong. It was like where is it cut? It's like no, that's not a 29 hand. It was talking about how the five, the, the jack had to be cut and so anyways whatever, if you don't know crib, you don't care so I won't go into it. But it was wrong anyways. The description of how to do it was wrong so. Well that's funny. So then I went into Chat GPT and I asked the same question seeing like well what's it going to give me? It gave me a different wrong answer for what a 29.
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Ross Dunn
Had.
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Scott Vanac
Really? And then I yelled at it like well where do you get your rules for crib from? Because this is way wrong. Oh, I'm sorry, I apologize for the mistake. And it gave me a new answer which was also wrong. Like what is happening here? Like these are the types of things that AI should be good at. Because the rule, it's like a clear cut rule. There's nothing about if you pick up a book or an instruction on how to play crib, the rules are very clear. It should be easy for AI to get that.
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Ross Dunn
Correct. And you're.
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Scott Vanac
Not. No. I've played a lot of crib.
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Ross Dunn
In my life, a.
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Scott Vanac
Lot. So I know I'm right. I know I'm definitely right. But it really, I don't know, opened my eyes a bit. Like, I know AI can be wrong, but something like this, it shouldn't be wrong on. It should be dead on perfect every time. And so, I don't know, like opened my eyes into how things that you would assume it would get right might still be wrong. I get the weird complicated stuff. It's going to get wrong or anything. That's a bit terrifying, isn't.
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Ross Dunn
It? Like, for what are people going to base their judgments on if that's the.
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Scott Vanac
Case? I know. So it's like don't, don't try research. I don't care what you're looking for in AI overviews. If you're asking is it going to rain tomorrow? And it says yes, go to, you know, I don't know, Weather Network or your favorite weather app and double check because it's probably going to get.
- [22:14]
Commercial Announcer
It. Tuesdays, it's Mac Break Weekly with Jason Snell, Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay and me, Leo laporte. If you're an Apple enthusiast, there is no better podcast to listen to than Mac Break Weekly. Not only all the news, all.
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The information, analysis, everything you need to.
- [22:30]
Know before you buy a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple.
- [22:33]
Ross Dunn
Watch. It's got it.
- [22:35]
Commercial Announcer
All. And I hope you'll join us.
- [22:37]
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- [24:07]
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Scott Vanac
Wrong. I don't.
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Ross Dunn
Know. It's one thing I did do. I'll just be brief on this, but it was fascinating. I have a lot of, I've got personal, I've got issues with anxiety. So I was looking for different kinds of tools I could use to system assist me with some, you know, decreasing it and saw all these things about the vagus nerve and I thought, this looks like BS to me. There's enough. So I asked AI, um, I used, I think I used Claude Opus 4.5, which is their best research and thoughtful AI to do a deep research into this. And it was awesome. The results were just so, so well thought through. I mean it provided me like a research paper and pretty much said all of these are bunk. Like none of them had, like they were so market marketed so heavily. I won't name names that don't get any trouble, but I mean it's pretty obvious which ones. If you go online and look up vagus nerve stuff, none of them had true strong Medical in fact or medical proof in fact. All of them, if you looked at the bottom line, said these are not medical devices, they are not going to help you. Pretty much is what they're saying. It's all user based feedback that they're selling it on. People saying, oh, this helped me and that's all people need to hear. But it's not true. But it did fine. I said, well, if those aren't the ones, what does work? And it did find me one that actually has extremely good results. So I've ordered it and I didn't even know it existed. It's not marketed anywhere and we should probably contact them to help market them because they really need the.
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Scott Vanac
Help. You should put it in their Google review or whatever. Put a product review in or.
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Ross Dunn
Whatever. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, a fascinating use of AI really to do this kind of research. I mean, not to say I haven't done like that before, but I thought it was a really neat use case. It was fun. And I still did my digging and said, you know, I'm finding stuff that maybe you're wrong. And it says, no, no, no, that stuff is this. And it explained why I was wrong. It's like, oh, okay. It's the first to say it's wrong if you're really confident. But I was like, okay, makes sense. All right, so making up stuff. Oh man. All right, so Google's AI overview made up career damaging claims about a doctor this is just terrible. A UK doctor and YouTuber Dr. Ed Hope says Google AI falsely accused him of selling sick notes and being suspended by the General Medical Council. Earlier this year, Google's AI generated a detailed narrative accusing Hope of professional misconduct. Despite no investigations, complaints or sanctions in his 10 year medical career. He said in a new video, this is coming from him. Google's AI said he was suspended by the medical council in mid-2025. Said he profited from selling sick notes. Said exploited. He exploited patients for personal gain. It said that he had faced professional discipline following online fame. Hope says he has no idea how long this was live or how many people have seen it. Once discovered, it was able to replicate more hallucinations and false claims about him. Legal experts have chimed in. The question now is whether Google is protected by section 230, which typically shields platforms from liability for third party content. Experts have argued that AI generated outputs are not third party speech and false claims may qualify as defamation. I think this is.
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Scott Vanac
Defamation. No.
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Ross Dunn
Kidding. Seems clear to me their AI is doing this. That's devastating. This poor guy. I mean if none of this is true, that's just.
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Scott Vanac
Unbelievable. He should own Google by the end of 2026. I'll make that in a prediction. If we do predictions in our next.
- [29:18]
Ross Dunn
Show. Yeah, our next episode will do some predictions for the.
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Scott Vanac
Year. Dr. Edholt, owner of.
- [29:24]
Ross Dunn
Google. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Wow. Anyway, that's terrifying. So you got to wonder, someone must have written something somewhere. That's usually how stuff like this, it's like Google bombing. You know, someone's written something and it's. You'd be. I don't understand where the AI would have even gotten these seeds of doubt.
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Scott Vanac
From. Yeah, in the article at Search Engine Line. I maybe should have put more about this in the notes. There was another doctor that was doing some of this stuff and I think what it did is it found and not the same name, but somehow it's pulled stories of other doctors who have been accused of this stuff and attached it to this doctor's.
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Ross Dunn
Name.
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Scott Vanac
Oh. Even though he didn't do.
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Ross Dunn
It.
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Scott Vanac
So. But that's like, it's absurd. It's just absolutely.
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Ross Dunn
Crazy. Wow. I have a hard time sleeping at night with that kind of anger. I think that that guy's probably putting.
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Scott Vanac
Out. Well then what do you do about it? I mean, how do you just email Google? Hey, this is wrong about me. Well, I know what I do. The first thing I do is go find a really good lawyer and I try to make some money off of this.
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Ross Dunn
One. Yeah, that's one of the capitalistic pursuits in good old North America.
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Scott Vanac
Unfortunately. It.
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Ross Dunn
Is.
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Scott Vanac
Yeah. I'm waiting for my ticket. It hasn't come.
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Ross Dunn
Yet. What's next.
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Scott Vanac
Here? All right, so don't you love errors at Google? So Google is like full of errors in search console and local and all kinds of stuff. There was a reporting bug in Google search console that resulted in a month long delay with the page indexing report and that has now been fixed. So that's great. Reports are now showing data as recent as a few days ago, which is totally normal. In addition, emails to site owners regarding indexing issues have once again started being sent out. So if you haven't had any of those emails, you might start seeing them again. Hopefully you don't because that means you're having indexing issues. There was also a bug that delayed performance reports. Google has fixed that. So all major reports should again be running smoothly. So there you.
- [31:26]
Ross Dunn
Go. Excellent. I can't believe I just added this to our script because I just didn't even know why. I don't know why I Didn't think of this before I wrote an article on SEO Done. Okay, first of all, I have to preface this. I changed the substack name from SEO Grok, which I've mentioned in previous episodes to SEO Done. Now the reason why is I, I was terrified that people were going and I heard enough that made me think it was going to happen. That I was somehow connecting the dots to Grok, the AI, which is a piece of crap. I don't want anything to do with that. No, no, no, this has nothing to do with that. This is purely. Was purely about the term Grok created by Robert Heinlein. And it, and anyway, I, you know, it just became a stupid move switching to SEO using SEO Grok. Cause I just realized it was going to confuse people and that's the last thing you want when you're trying to do marketing. So SEO Done. S E O D U N N My last name. That said really what I wanted to say and it's what we've changed it to. All right, that aside, I wanted to put something out there that really helped people for and got them geared up for 2026. So I created an article, AI search plus SEO in 2026. The ultimate small business playbook, focused entirely on small business. And I mean that's been something. We work with small businesses for our entire careers. It's a, it's one of the mainstays of step force business. So I thought let's go back to our roots. We've been working with a lot of medium sized and larger businesses which I, which I enjoy. But the small businesses are really where we make the most impact. And I thought this would be a great way to start the new year. So check it out. I, I do think you're going to find it useful. I've packed it full of great info. It's to give you some ideas, some of the key points on here. It talks about how people search in two ways. Now. You know, we've got the AI, we've got classic SEO kind of which does have some AI mixed in. But just the same, it's, it is a different form of search. And now you have to win in both. You need to deliberately prepare for both of them and get your website marketed well for those. And I get into why and how that works. Then I get into a checklist of 30 plus things that small businesses should actually do. Here's just a few. You know, if you're a local business, this is a, this has been one of the tried and true things to do fix your nap. That's your name, address and phone numbers everywhere. Make sure that every place that's fairly significant, that has some clout and you can just do a little research and determine if it does. Any kind of directory or anything like that that mentions your business has exactly the same name, exactly the same address, exactly the same phone number and URL. It's just one of those trust factors. It's so simple to do. So I made it number one. It doesn't mean it's the highest priority, but it's so simple and it is so effective that you should do it first. So make sure you get that all synchronized. Number two, repair technical landmines. These are some of the basics, but they are important. You know, making sure that you have HTTPs on your website. It's something that I think isn't it in 2026 that Google's going to actually finally put the big.
- [35:04]
Scott Vanac
Warning. Now, I want to say October 2026, but I might have the month.
- [35:08]
Ross Dunn
Wrong. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, it was near the end of next year. But they're going to make it glaringly obvious that the site is is dangerous because it doesn't have HTTPs. So make sure that's done. Really simple stuff, ensuring key pages aren't blocked by robots. Txt making sure that your navigation uses normal links. Not too much fancy JavaScript that hides everything from search engines, at least in the first round of crawling. Run basic speed checks, clarify your services and locations. If you've got particular services that you really aren't doing a good job of of explaining on your website. I look at ours and think, oh my God, we're the worst case, worst example right now. But we have what we've got work to do, I can tell you that. And if you are focused on particular service areas, make sure that you do look at creating pages that are dedicated to those areas and services. Teeth whitening in Victoria. Emergency plumping and plumping plumbing in Nanaimo. You're fired. It's a long list, but we get also into the AI how to, you know, creating case studies. There's a ton of stuff. One of the cool things I did this at the end and I decided it was kind of fun to put in and a little trickier than I thought. But it is neat is I've created a case study builder that you can click on and use within ChatGPT and as soon as you click on it, it will, you know, it. It does everything for you. You just have to enter the information and it will Create a good case study for you. You know, it's not top of the line case study. It's not. I mean, you could certainly build on it, but it's a very good starter and I'm gonna. And there's other ones, other prompts that I've included too that you can copy and paste that I'll also, over time, I just didn't have time right now. But I'm going to build little builders or GPTs for that custom GPT so you can just click on it and run them. Anyway, I packed it full of stuff, so I do hope you find it useful and, and you check it out and share it too, please. It's a lot of work that goes into these and it's always nice to know that people are, are checking it out and subscribing to my substack, that's seodone.com. all right, what's in local SEO news here?
- [37:27]
Scott Vanac
Scott? Yeah, we got a couple things, one from you and one from me. We'll start with me again. Bugs. There's just so many bugs. So this, this one goes back to October when businesses were reporting that reviews left on Google Business Profile were disappearing. I actually went back. I was going to reference a previous SEO101 where we talked about this and we didn't talk about it, but I thought we had. So this must not be the first time this bug has happened. Actually, we must have talked about it before because I feel like we had. I know I'm going crazy. So I don't know. Are you listening? What episode did you hear us talk about this on? Because we can't figure it out. Anyways, it was a widespread problem, but it didn't happen to everybody. So two months later, December 17, Joy Hawkins actually posted to X that Google confirmed this is actually for us yesterday confirmed that the bug should be fixed. Now, Barry Schwartz went out and he checked several examples of complaints that he knew had been affected and they all seem to be back to normal. So if you saw your business reviews disappear or some of them disappear, go in, log into your account, check it out and see if they're back. Hopefully they are. I know there's a business that I reviewed not long ago and they contacted me. They knew I told them I'd reviewed them and they're like, oh, why did you take your review down? Like, I didn't take my review down. It's still there. I can see it when I log into my Google account. But when I look at their business reviews, my review doesn't show up online. Super weird. Don't know why that is. And I I checked it actually, since reading this and my review still isn't live. So I don't know why Google does that sometimes. If it's part of an extension of this bug, if there's another reason why they decided my review isn't worthy. I don't know who I really.
- [39:08]
Ross Dunn
Am. I'm talking about our. That client. We've been touched. Is that the.
- [39:12]
Scott Vanac
Client? Yes.
- [39:13]
Ross Dunn
Yes. Okay, so I actually keep meaning to follow up on this. We had the same problem for Step Forth. We weren't getting our reviews and I contacted Google and it fixed. They fixed was they were literally blocking them, I guess because it was like a kind of like a shadow ban that I guess they saw too much garbage coming in, maybe a lot of spam, so they paused it. I'm not exactly sure, but it did just take an email and all of a sudden our reviews started appearing in. So, yeah, remind me after the show we'll have to do that for that client because that's something that has been nagging at.
- [39:49]
Scott Vanac
Me. Very good. We should probably. Maybe for the next show we'll share a link on the exact process on how to do that if you find reviews aren't showing up and how to contact Google to get that.
- [39:58]
Ross Dunn
Fixed. Yeah. All right. To round things off, a little rant.
- [40:03]
Scott Vanac
Here. I love your.
- [40:06]
Ross Dunn
Rants. This one's just so. All right. I've talked about how Google's local algorithm is just a dumpster fire. Well, it truly, truly is stuck in 1997. So 1997 is when I started the company. It was just a joy to do SEO. It's so easy, man. No one was really doing it. I've talked about this before, but I could make changes on a page. Go to Infoseek, which was the search engine I loved the most and was the one we used a lot. And I would go in there and I would submit the URL and then I would go to the search results, refresh it and see the change in results. That's how fast it was. It was insane. It was. The web was so small and it was dead easy to game. And that's where the point I'm getting at. It's just dumbfounding to me how bad Google is managing spam on local and even following its own rules. And Joy just put. Joey Hawkins put this out and made me. I actually said to her, I want to laugh, but this is just so annoying now. But she says, google don't Put keywords in your business profile name. Also Google. This is Google apparently saying we'll use this factor so much that we'll even rank a closed listing because it has a keyword as the business name. And then she showed an example here where it's just such obvious spam and it's ranking number one. It is closed. It's permanently, the company doesn't exist anymore and it's ranking number one because it's got keywords in the title. Oh heavens. Well what is.
- [41:45]
Scott Vanac
Just, I don't know what your problem is. Like what do you think should rank something that doesn't have keywords in the title? Like, come.
- [41:53]
Ross Dunn
On. Well something legit like oh my God. Yeah, this is the case. It was someone did a search for wrongful death lawyer near me and boom, this and it takes up most of this page. You know it's a full size local pack just devoted to this one business. Says life and accidental death claim lawyers. That's the name of the business of course and says permanently closed in red below it. And it's showing up number one. Like at that point I just feel, I feel like they're just make, trying to make us look stupid because I'm trying to follow the rules so that our clients are in a good place and we managed to get results, thank goodness. But there are competitive markets like lawyers where hell man, if you don't, if you don't go black hat, I don't even know if you'd succeed. And I, I know Joey does quite a bit of that stuff these days and I can only imagine it's, it's, it's almost tarnishing. I, I don't like to use black hat tactics. I think that's black hat, it's not your true business name but you're putting that in there to get a better ranking. That's you know, trying to manipulate Google. And yet this has been happening for over, is it almost two decades? I mean how long has local been around? It's probably getting there probably is two decades. It's not gotten any better. It's just.
- [43:26]
Scott Vanac
Unbelievable. One, the worst part is this is an issue especially with the way AI is now that is for Google incredibly easy to filter out and fix. This wouldn't be hard for them. Yeah, be.
- [43:38]
Ross Dunn
Easy. Although mind.
- [43:43]
Scott Vanac
Blowing. Maybe this is the only wrongful death lawyer in the world. Maybe there is only one. So they have to show it because there's only.
- [43:50]
Ross Dunn
One. Yeah, it's the only one near me. Yeah, there you.
- [43:55]
Scott Vanac
Go. That's.
- [43:56]
Ross Dunn
Right. Well you know, guys, thank you for listening to the show. I. We, you know, we don't have the greatest metrics in terms of knowing how many people listen, but, uh, we just know some people do. And we appreciate you. Uh, we're coming up in new Year. We're coming up to the holidays. We wish you the very best no matter what you're celebrating, if you're not just cranking out those overtime hours. Good for you. Um, there's lots of opportunity for that over the holidays and, well, we wish you the very best and look forward to talking to you again in the new year. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Scott? No, just to put you on the.
- [44:36]
Scott Vanac
Spot. Yeah. I don't know. No, I would just say the same thing you said. Happy holidays, Happy New Year, that kind of.
- [44:44]
Ross Dunn
Stuff. Sounds good. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and my company, Senior SEO Scott Vadack, thank you for joining us today. Have a great week, great holidays, and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR.
- [45:00]
Scott Vanac
Fm. Awesome. Thanks for listening.
- [45:03]
Ross Dunn
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